Speeding Up Interest in Fuel Cell Technology
Six vehicles propelled by hydrogen fuel cells will drive this week from Sacramento to Los Angeles to demonstrate that a new transportation system is coming to free us from dependence on Saudi Arabia.
Yes, we’ve been on that road before. In the last decade, with a push from California’s call for zero-emissions vehicles, the electric car was supposed to revolutionize our lives. It didn’t happen. Gasoline-electric hybrids are starting to sell, though you shouldn’t expect to see one next to you at every stoplight anytime soon. If ever.
But the fuel cell is different: This time, automakers, looking to sell cars to the billions of people who still get around by bicycle or bus, are leading the charge. And the oil companies are right behind them.
Toyota Motor Corp., General Motors Corp., Honda Motor Co. and the rest are investing billions in fuel cells -- on-board power plants that produce power from hydrogen electrons and emit only tidy H2O from the exhaust pipe, making them appealing to developing countries worried about the environmental effect of their citizens’ finally entering the automobile age.
Oil companies such as ChevronTexaco Corp. and Shell are spending research and development dollars too, seeing themselves as the providers of hydrogen fuel and operators of hydrogen service stations.
The auto industry is making a big show of testing fuel cells in rallies, such as this week’s run that will see cars from DaimlerChrysler, Ford Motor Co., Honda, Hyundai Motor Co., Nissan Motor Co. and Toyota barrel through the Central Valley, with stops at Fresno and Bakersfield, to end up at the Los Angeles Zoo and then the Petersen Automotive Museum on Friday evening.
Carmakers want to accelerate interest. “The fuel cell is the auto industry’s Holy Grail,” says Dan Sperling, director of the Institute for Transportation Studies at UC Davis.
Growing Support
Political backing is powerful. President Bush, once an oilman in Texas, pledged $1.2 billion for research. There also is demand: Toyota is leasing 20 of its experimental hydrogen fuel cell cars to Japanese government agencies and U.S. universities, at a tab of $123,000 per car per year.
“We didn’t think that many cars would be on the road until 2006,” says Alan Niedzwiecki, president of Irvine-based Quantum Fuel Systems Technologies Worldwide.
A vast industry already works in hydrogen. New companies are revving up, such as Quantum -- 20% owned by General Motors -- which has about $30 million in annual revenue from the hydrogen fuel gas tanks it makes.
And the environmentalists? They think in grand terms. Author Jeremy Rifkin gets almost hyperbolic in his book “The Hydrogen Economy,” saying it will “fundamentally change our financial markets, political and social institutions.”
Rifkin’s vision is decentralization. Loaded with fuel cells, a parked car can generate 90 kilowatts of electricity to power a small house or store. A home can have its own stationary fuel cell for electricity, dispensing with the need for giant utilities and, basically, turning part of the economy upside down.
It could all be highways in the sky, of course. Hydrogen gas is hard to handle, and compressing it to fit into, say, a box placed under the chassis at the center of the vehicle, will require further development from industry. The distance fuel cell cars can go without refueling -- about 150 miles -- must be doubled for practical use. Then there’s what people think when they hear the H-word.
“Education will be needed to overcome public fears about hydrogen, the H-bomb and all,” says Alan Lloyd, head of the California Fuel Cell Partnership, a consortium of companies and government agencies.
Production Concerns
Just making large amounts of hydrogen properly is a challenge. The Bush administration has a program to gasify coal to generate hydrogen -- a process that would produce massive amounts of carbon dioxide. The global warming CO2 would have to be sequestered, as spent nuclear fuel is now buried.
But environmental experts aren’t complaining. If sequestration works, writes leading environmentalist Amory Lovins in
E/The Environmental Magazine, coal gasification “could provide an even larger option for making climate-safe hydrogen.”
The fact is, a stark global necessity is pushing hydrogen and fuel cells: the prospect that more people in China, India and other populous countries are getting behind the wheel. Only 12% of the world’s people possess cars and trucks. There has to be a way to make motorists of the remaining 88% without burning up the atmosphere.
Hydrogen fuel cells are going to be that way. Scott Samuelsen, director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center at
UC Irvine, which is developing hydrogen refueling centers, says it will start to happen within the next five years, when there will be three fueling centers in Orange County. He adds for perspective: “I recall reading history that in 1920 there were only a few gasoline stations in the United States.”
The 1920s saw an automotive transformation of society. This decade will see the beginning of the end of our dependence on petroleum.
James Flanigan can be reached at jim.flanigan@latimes.com.
