Ford’s Hydrogen Hybrid Engine Is a Clean Break From Tradition

When it comes to finding the ultimate low-emission fuel, nothing could seem more perfect than water: It’s replenishable, there’s plenty of it, and it’s easy to deliver.

In theory, what could be better? Technologically, however, it’s another story. How could water provide the energy needed to power a 4,000-pound car?

Ford Motor Co. thinks it has an answer: an internal-combustion engine that uses hydrogen extracted from water as the fuel it ignites to power the engine’s pistons.

The engine emits only trace hydrocarbons and vastly reduced amounts of nitrogen oxides. Ford engineers see it as a bridge between current gasoline engines and the zero-emission fuel cells that are considered the propulsion system of the future.

Ford unveiled what it calls its H2ICE engine last month. It operates much like a standard gasoline engine and is, in fact, a modified version of the Zetec 2.0-liter gasoline power plant from the company’s best-selling Focus compact car. Hydrogen gas is pumped into the engine and ignited, operating the pistons as in a conventional engine.

“The whole thing is a chicken-and-egg deal,” said Bill Stockhausen, Ford’s project leader for the H2ICE engine. “We have the chicken, but it’s up to the oil companies and Stuart Energy Co. to put in an infrastructure.”

Stuart Energy, of Canada, manufactures the electrolyzers that separate the hydrogen from water. The electrolyzer, about the size of a washing machine, uses electricity to split water into its component hydrogen and oxygen; the hydrogen is stored in super-high-pressure tanks made by Dynetek Industries Ltd., another Canadian company, on board the vehicle.

Ford is not the first to build passenger cars that burn hydrogen. Bayerische Motoren Werke has been working on hydrogen-combustion engines for years, and the German company is testing a handful of luxury 7-Series sedans whose V-12 engines it has outfitted as dual-fuel vehicles with gasoline-or-hydrogen internal-combustion engines.

But while BMW has put its hydrogen-combustion engine in a $93,000 sedan, Ford has put the H2ICE in a compact car (based on the now-discontinued Contour), which the company sees as a more logical platform for an energy-saving vehicle.

“If you want to have something that’s environmentally friendly, is efficient and puts out a minimum of greenhouse gases, [the 7-Series] doesn’t seem the right package for that,” Stockhausen said.

BMW, for its part, notes that a hydrogen-fueled internal-combustion engine produces only about two-thirds the power of a conventional gasoline engine. So by using a 12-cylinder engine--BMW’s largest--the 7-Series sedan puts out about the same power using hydrogen as it would if it had a conventional gasoline-powered V-8.

By having its engines run on either hydrogen or gasoline, the German auto maker also notes that it can put them on the market more readily than power plants that rely solely on hydrogen. BMW is showing a hydrogen-only engine in its Mini small car at the Frankfurt International Motor Show in Germany next week.

*

Ford recently let journalists drive the hydrogen car, which has two fuel tanks the size of large sleeping bags in its trunk. An upgraded storage system coming soon will increase the car’s range from 62 miles to at least 150 miles.

The car starts sluggishly and has a rough idle like a diesel-fueled car. Its horsepower, acceleration and torque decline about 30% to 35% at low speeds and as much as 50% at high speeds, Stockhausen said.

But it gets the equivalent of 33 miles per gallon of fuel in the city and 47 mpg in combined city and highway driving, about a third better than a conventional gasoline-fed Zetec engine, Stockhausen said.

Ford says it would take more than 300 H2ICE vehicles to emit the same amount of carbon dioxide as one gasoline-powered vehicle. Nitrogen oxides are reduced by 75% compared with conventional engines, and hydrocarbon and carbon monoxide emissions are one-tenth those required for vehicles to be certified as super-low-emission vehicles.

Because Ford’s H2ICE engine is similar to current internal-combustion models, it could be easily produced in large numbers, Stockhausen said.

The engines could encourage the growth of a hydrogen-fueling infrastructure that would be in place when more advanced--and more efficient--fuel cells become available. Fuel cells convert hydrogen to electricity, with the only byproduct being water if pure hydrogen--as opposed to a hydrocarbon such as gasoline or methanol--is used as a fuel.

Although most of the major manufacturers are pursuing fuel cells in some fashion, Ford is the only one thus far to commit to bringing a fuel-cell vehicle to market, saying it will produce a version on the Focus platform by 2004.

Whether hydrogen combustion engines will become a reality “depends on the business case,” Stockhausen said.

“People want to drive low-emission vehicles, but it depends on what they’re willing to pay,” he said.

At present, producing a hydrogen internal-combustion engine would be prohibitively expensive. But costs are expected to come down as the technology becomes more advanced.

*

Terril Yue Jones is The Times’ Detroit bureau chief. He can be reached at t.jones@latimes.com.