Hydrogen fuel cell vehicle development still in the slow lane
By Jim Downing, Sacramento Bee
March 11, 2008
When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger launched the state's Hydrogen Highway in 2004, he said Californians were about to invent the future.
We're still working on it.
Boosted by $1.2 billion in federal money over the past five years, automakers have been making strides with hydrogen fuel cells. Building filling stations for those vehicles, however, is another matter what a top Bush administration transportation official refers to as the equivalent of a moon shot.
So on Monday, about 40 automotive and air quality experts from around the country sat down at the California Fuel Cell Partnership headquarters in West Sacramento to brainstorm how to foster a national hydrogen-fueling network. The partnership is a collaboration of 32 organizations, including automakers, government agencies and energy and oil companies. It was created in 1999, and the West Sacramento headquarters opened in November 2000.
"The research is largely complete. What we need to do is focus on the infrastructure piece," said Paul Brubaker, who heads the Research and Innovative Technology Administration for the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Hydrogen is attractive as an auto fuel because it promises both the pump-and-go convenience of gasoline and no emissions of either greenhouse gases or smog-forming pollutants.
In a fuel-cell vehicle, hydrogen combines with oxygen, yielding a current that drives an electric motor. The tailpipe spews nothing but water vapor and heat.
"Zero-carbon" hydrogen can be made by splitting water molecules using electricity generated from renewable sources, such as wind turbines and solar panels. But because that process currently is quite expensive, most hydrogen gas is instead produced from natural gas through a process that does release greenhouse gases.
As the fuel-cell prototypes zipping quietly around the West Sacramento streets Monday showed, hydrogen vehicles are well on their way to being ready for the street.
"The performance of hydrogen fuel cell cars is not that much of a concern. They have enough get-up-and-go for most drivers," said Len Brewster, a Detroit-based auto industry analyst. "The problem is going to be setting up the infrastructure to keep these cars fueled and running."
Absent a network of filling stations, automakers say, they won't be able to scale up production of fuel-cell vehicles to the levels needed to drive costs down.
Existing prototypes are either one-of-a-kind or manufactured in small lots, making them extremely expensive. Several companies estimate that competitively priced fuel-cell models could be ready for the market by 2017 but again, only if customers have a way to fill up.
Federal energy officials and auto industry analysts have estimated that it would cost $10 billion to $15 billion to establish a refueling infrastructure in the nation's top 100 major metropolitan areas. Other estimates, which include costs of building large-scale hydrogen production, distribution and storage systems, are much higher.
California's Hydrogen Highway is meant as a first step to a network of hydrogen filling stations. After Schwarzenegger made hydrogen fuel a centerpiece of his environmental agenda in his first year in office, regulators drew up a plan that called for the state to spend as much as $11 million annually on vehicle incentives and cost-sharing grants to yield a network of 100 hydrogen filling stations by 2010.
As of January, however, only 24 hydrogen filling stations were operating around the state, according to Fuel Cell Partnership data.
Gennet Paauwe, spokeswoman for the California Air Resources Board, which is administering the Hydrogen Highway program, said her agency expects to fund 10 more stations through 2010. She said delays in fuel-cell technology advances and limited numbers of vehicles on the road have slowed the program. Somewhat more than 200 hydrogen-powered vehicles now travel California.
"We're not going to open stations if there aren't vehicles to fill," Paauwe said.
Two filling stations operate in the Sacramento region one at the fuel cell partnership headquarters, and another at the University of California, Davis. The Sacramento Municipal Utility District plans next month to open a third, which will produce hydrogen gas using electricity generated by on-site solar panels.
During a discussion Monday afternoon with Brubaker, participants offered up a variety of suggestions on how to move forward.
Most called for increased federal funding for research, fuel-cell fleets and filling stations and patience.
"People need to understand that this is a matter of decades. Several decades," said Joan Ogden, co-director of the Hydrogen Pathways Program at UC Davis.
Passenger cars could well turn out to be a poor application of fuel-cell technology, said Dan Kammen, who directs the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.
Kammen said hydrogen might at first be practical only for, say, locomotives and ships, which fill their huge tanks at centralized depots, not thousands of neighborhood stations.
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