Exxon, GM Report Major Fuel-Cell Technology Gain

General Motors Corp. and Exxon Mobil Corp. announced Thursday what they termed a breakthrough in the race to develop nonpolluting fuel cells and predicted their use in hundreds of thousands of cars, trucks and buses within 10 years.

The companies--respectively the world’s largest auto maker and largest investor-owned oil company--say their technology is twice as efficient as conventional gasoline-powered engines and a clear advance over the announced systems of key rivals. The GM-Exxon Mobil system, which the firms expect to put in a test car within 18 months, extracts hydrogen from gasoline to run a fuel cell, which in turn produces electricity to propel the vehicle.

“Clean, efficient fuel-cell electric vehicles could be in consumers’ garages by the end of the decade,” said Larry Burns, GM’s vice president for research and development.

The system achieves about 40% peak efficiency, meaning it is able to use 40% of the energy available in gasoline. That is twice as efficient as today’s engines, Burns said.

The system is then able to utilize 80% of the extracted hydrogen, said William Innes, president of Exxon Mobil Research and Engineering Co., who presented the research with Burns at a University of Michigan automotive conference in this northern Michigan city.

Although the current generation of the system is not emissions-free, it nonetheless emits just half the carbon dioxide and significantly less carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides than current gasoline engines, he said.

Ideally, future versions of the system would produce electricity with heat and water as the only byproducts.

The advantage of extracting hydrogen from gasoline instead of from other fuels--such as ethanol, methanol and propane--is that there is already a nationwide infrastructure to deliver gasoline to consumers, Innes said.

“The autos win, the oils win, the consumers win, and the environment wins,” he said.

The current system is still relatively large, about 4 feet by 8 feet and 2 feet high. By the time a prototype is installed in a test car, it should be half that size, the companies said.

Burns said the system is 15% more efficient, as measured by kilowatts of energy produced per liter of fuel, than technology announced by Ballard Power Systems, the leading producer of fuel cells. Vancouver, Canada-based Ballard has formed a joint venture with GM rivals Ford Motor Co. and DaimlerChrysler to develop fuel cells for automotive applications.

Leadership in fuel-cell development is difficult to assess because of the infancy and complexity of the technology, according to industry experts.

“They claim that they’re ahead, but you’d need a PhD to figure out who’s really ahead,” said Joseph Phillippi, senior auto analyst at PaineWebber in New York. “We’re so far from finding a solution to this issue in terms of what we’re really going to have in the early or long term as a viable answer.”

Burns acknowledged that fuel- cell technology turns over rapidly, noting that a new-generation system is developed every three months. He predicted that vehicles powered by fuel cells--passenger cars, trucks and buses--on America’s roads will number in the hundreds of thousands by 2010.

Still, that’s a far cry from the millions of fuel-cell-powered cars predicted only a couple of years ago when the technology was first seriously explored as an alternative to internal-combustion engines. “When Ballard first burst on the scene,” Phillippi said, “people were saying 5% to 10% of the car park would be fuel cells by 2006. Then the technical reality set in as to what’s possible.”