After a Detour, GM Joins Fuel Cell Program
Nearly 18 months after the California Fuel Cell Partnership opened its doors in West Sacramento, General Motors Corp. has moved into its offices and brought its first fuel cell vehicle to the party.
The delay by the world’s largest auto maker in joining the other members of the partnership hasn’t helped it with environmentalists, who see GM as a foe of the so-called green car movement.
The company, after all, has filed state and federal lawsuits in California to block implementation of the state’s Zero Emission Vehicle Mandate. GM says it dislikes being forced by government agencies to produce any type of vehicle and that the battery-powered electric cars that are the only vehicles that now meet the terms of the ZEV Mandate are uneconomical.
GM says its participation in the fuel cell partnership shows it isn’t anti-environment, despite the lawsuits.
“We’re serious abut getting fuel cell vehicles on the road,” GM spokesman Donn Walker said. “We see the handwriting on the wall. This isn’t just a sop to environmentalists.”
Fuel cell vehicles differ from other electric cars in that they don’t need batteries or recharging because they produce the electricity on board the vehicle. The fuel cell generates current from hydrogen that is either produced on board the vehicle from other fuels, such as methane or gasoline, or is pumped aboard and stored in tanks--just as gasoline is stored in tanks in traditional vehicles.
GM, which delivered its 2-year-old HydroGen1 fuel cell vehicle to the partnership last week, says it is the first of several advanced vehicles the company will demonstrate in California this year.
Another is the fuel cell-powered Chevrolet S-10 compact pickup the company was scheduled to unveil in New York this morning. It uses gasoline as the source of its hydrogen--something else environmentalists dislike--while the HydroGen1 uses liquid hydrogen pumped directly from a storage tank.
GM has been pushing hard for development of a system to extract hydrogen from gasoline, arguing that it would be far easier and faster to get fuel cells into wide use if the nation’s gasoline delivery system could be used. Extracting the hydrogen could be done either at a fixed site, such as a gas station, or on board the vehicle itself.
The problem environmentalists have with GM’s gasoline processor is that it isn’t a zero-emission system at either end. Gasoline is a hydrocarbon, and heating hydrocarbon fuels to the point they break down and release their hydrogen content still creates emissions. Also, using gasoline as the principal source of hydrogen for fuel cells requires continued production and refining of crude oil.
GM says the system eliminates “virtually all regulated emissions” at the tailpipe and improves fuel economy by 50% over that of a comparable vehicle with a standard internal-combustion engine.
Both sides agree that, so far, there’s no such thing as a completely emission-free vehicle because production of the hydrogen--like production of gasoline or even electricity for plug-in battery cars--still creates some air pollution at the processing site.
The debate over fuel types is just one obstacle in the drive to get fuel cell cars into retail dealerships. There still is a lot of work to do on the fuel cells themselves to get them ready for automotive use, and that’s what the California Fuel Cell Partnership is all about.
It is not a development effort--fuel cell technology has been around for almost a century--but rather a testing program in which auto makers can work separately or jointly, as they see fit, to figure out how to make fuel cells ramp up to operating temperatures faster and operate reliably and at full efficiency in a broad range of climates.
About the same time GM was pulling the HydroGen1 into the garage in West Sacramento, the partnership was holding opening ceremonies for its new methanol fueling station. Methanol, primarily produced from natural gas but also from resources such as municipal waste or sewage sludge, is the second of three planned fuels for the fuel cell vehicle demonstrations taking place through 2003. Direct hydrogen was the first, and gasoline will be the third.
The initial methanol-fed fuel cell vehicle provided by a partnership member is DaimlerChrysler’s Necar 5, based on the company’s European A-Class subcompact. At present, the eight auto maker members of the partnership are testing 16 fuel cell vehicles.
