May 26 2009

Hydrogen: Hope or Hype?

Posted by: Jonathan Marshall

Backed by the California Air Resources Board and several industry associations, the 2009 Hydrogen Road Tour begins today in San Diego, taking several hydrogen-powered vehicles to 28 cities along the West Coast over nine days.

The goal: to prevent the current wave of enthusiasm for battery electric vehicles from drowning interest in cars powered by fuel cells, which create electricity from hydrogen or hydrogen-rich compounds like methanol.

Hydrogen-power advocates were put on the defensive earlier this month when the Department of Energy cut funding for research programs using vehicle fuel-cell technology.

In response, Jeff Serfass, president of the National Hydrogen Association, pointed to the Hydrogen Road Tour as evidence that "hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are not a science experiment. These are real vehicles with real marketability and real benefits. So far, these facts have escaped the notice of the Secretary of Energy's attention, given the request to eliminate the federal hydrogen vehicle program."  

Joining the tour will be cars from Daimler, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai-Kia, Nissan, Toyota and Volkswagen, as well as some transit buses.

One catch is that the vehicles will all need to be refueled by special mobile suppliers, since only a relative handful of hydrogen refueling stations exist around the country.

In an interview with Technology Review, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said the lack of refueling infrastructure is only one of several reasons why he is so skeptical about the promise of hydrogen as a vehicle fuel, despite the Bush administration's $1.2 billion Hydrogen Fuel Initiative:

[R]ight now, the way we get hydrogen primarily is from reforming [natural] gas. That's not an ideal source of hydrogen. You're giving away some of the energy content of natural gas, which is a very valuable fuel. So that's one problem. The other problem is, if it's for transportation, we don't have a good storage mechanism yet. . . . We haven't figured out how to store it with high density. What else? The fuel cells aren't there yet, and the distribution infrastructure isn't there yet. So you have four things that have to happen all at once. And so it always looked like it was going to be [a technology for] the distant future. In order to get significant deployment, you need four significant technological breakthroughs. That makes it unlikely.

Another critic, former Department of Energy official Joseph Romm, said:

Electric cars - and plug-in hybrid cars - have an enormous advantage over hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles in utilising low-carbon electricity. That is because of the inherent inefficiency of the entire hydrogen fuelling process, from generating the hydrogen with that electricity to transporting this diffuse gas long distances, getting the hydrogen in the car, and then running it through a fuel cell - all for the purpose of converting the hydrogen back into electricity to drive the same exact electric motor you'll find in an electric car.

Fuel cells have great promise in other applications, such as emergency backup power and in residential and commercial markets, where the heat they produce can be used along with their electric output. One key difference is that fuel cells can be competitive in stationary applications at a price 10 to 20 times higher than in vehicles.

Don't expect to find fuel-cell vehicles in auto showrooms anytime soon, even if you could find a way to refuel them. Last fall, General Motors unveiled its Equinox hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, but admitted it cost $1.5 million to produce and would take at least a decade to become commercially available.

Honda's FCX Clarity gets 280 miles on a tank and the equivalent of 74 miles to the gallon. But Honda's president said it costs several hundred thousand dollars to produce, and promised only that the cost would drop below $100,000 sometime in the next decade.

Questions about the commercial prospects of fuel-cell vehicles haven't dampened the enthusiasm of California officials. According to one recent report, vehicle license fees will pump $40 million into state support for hydrogen technology:

Shell Oil, for example, will receive nearly $2 million in state funds to help build a hydrogen pump at a gas station near a swank Newport Beach country club and high end shopping mall. The pump will service a few dozen cars. State officials and hydrogen backers say it is a small but key step forward in solving the nation's energy and environmental woes. An additional $5 million in tax dollars will help build hydrogen fueling pumps near UCLA's campus, San Francisco Airport, and at the foot of wealthy southern California coastal communities.

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