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In my games, I use the following conversion:
1- Air classical element implies electricity damage. It's good against air creatures, and bad against earth creatures.
2- Fire classical element implies fire damage. It's good against water creatures, and bad against fire creatures.
3- Water classical element implies frost damage. It's good against fire creatures, and bad against water creatures.
4- Earth classical element implies sonic damage. It's good against earth creatures, and bad against air creatures.
I have acid listed as earth.
I replace the five listed "protection from energy" spells, and "resistance to energy", with the four elemental options- so in my games, casting Protection from Elements: Air, serves the same function as Protection from Energy: Air, with the exception that it also guards against unspecified "air attacks", which some custom monsters have.
This means that Earth protects against both Acid and Sonic, two power-gamer flavored types blocked by the same spell, so that serves as an important weakness.
I greatly dislike the "acid energy" aspect of spells. I leave the few in there that have it, because for the most part, they work just fine: Melf's Acid Arrow describes some acid that is actually conjured, that flies as an arrow. But Acidball, to me, is stupid- because it creates a 33.5 thousand cubic foot sphere of acid- but only for a SECOND. For consistency, you are floundering- is it energy that acts like acid? Some green vaguery? Fumes? Either way, acid seems strongly in the camp of something that should be conjured, not evoked, and I was greatly pleased when they included a blurb to the effect of "we know it's stupid, but we have spells that deal acid damage so we were stuck with it" in the rules compendium.
When dealing damage to objects, cold does 1/4 damage and is affected by hardness, fire and electricity do 1/2 damage and is affected by hardness, and sonic and acid both ignore hardness and deal full damage. I've never been fully clear on how damage is dealt to objects on creatures that fail their saving throws: it seems unlikely that the intended effect of the fireball on the two guys that failed is that they are standing there naked while their weapons fall down around them- but as silly as that sounds, the acidball would leave us FAR worse off. Normally I only sweat damage to unattended objects (including disarmed weapons), with the assumption that the creature "takes" the damage for their own shit, but I don't really know that it's a good way of dealing with stuff. Given the general fact that the players will all get involved in some fat aoe damage at *some* point, and at least ONE of them fails their save, it's brutal to have them go through their gear list to see what got shattered to death.
In any event, I recommend sonic, because it's not asinine like acid, and is mechanically pretty much identical. You wouldn't make the weapons an acidic burst for the earth guys, would you? I also shift around the resistances on a couple creatures- for instance, *some* devils, not all, are resistant to sonic instead of acid, or immune to sonic instead of having their two resistances to acid and cold. Same with demons and their traits. I treat these modifications as being "in the creature's entry", and therefore the templates still exist unchanged for all the spells that hook into them. I don't do this to make sonic BAD, and for the most part it doesn't come up, but I don't want a player to get Energy Substitution and then be like, okie-dokey, everything is sonic from this moment forward! My initial approach was to make sonic damage weaker- for instance, a sonicball (or thunderball, however you like) would be 10d6-5, and a cone of cacophony could get all the way up to 15d5+8 (my cone of colds do 1d4+1 per level, and then subtract half the number of dice, rounded down). That works fine too, but overall just switching around some energy types is better and makes players get used to not fighting shit exactly like it is in the book. I don't do retarded shit like, this devil is not immune to fire, or this demon secretly takes double damage from lightning instead of being immune, and I never screw with the dragons because you can give them feats and spells and "____ dragon" is more like a damned character class anyway.
The other advantage is that it reduces the amount of energy types to have resistance too. I don't allow the expanded energy treatments from Book of Vile Darkness or whatever either.
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