Fuel Cell Powered Cars
Three years ago, the Obama administration abandoned another of its predecessor's
central tenets—that the future of vehicle propulsion was zero-emission hydrogen
fuel cells. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, backed by Obama, instead launched an
aggressive program to develop a new generation of high-performance batteries,
the factories in which to manufacture them, and the vehicles they would power.
Lithium-ion technology and electrified cars offered the best chance of achieving
three key policy objectives, the administration asserted: get the country off of
oil, reduce emissions of CO2, and invigorate a new age of American
manufacturing.
But electric vehicles are off to a sluggish start in the United States and
around the world. Battery costs seem likely to be high for the foreseeable
future, and consumers are not buying electrified cars at the rates originally
foreseen. Major oil companies are getting the impression that they can relax:
The gasoline age will still be with us for at least another two decades, they
believe, perhaps even longer.
No one can say whose bet will prove a winner Obama's or the oil companies'. Yet
it is fair to ask: Would the president have been wiser to hedge his gamble by
sustaining the George W. Bush-era hydrogen fuel-cell program while also pursuing
electrification? The answer is found in a habit of some of the biggest
risk-takers of all venture capitalists, who tend to spread their wagers around
rather than hoping a single flash of intuition will pay off. Now it seems that
the Obama administration may be reconsidering its distribution of chips and that
change can’t come soon enough. Just as Washington has incubated the battery and
electric car industries, it ought to play a larger, proactive role in fuel
cells, which solve some of the main problems hobbling batteries (though they
have their own challenges).
Fuel cells are technically similar to batteries. Both contain three main parts
two electrodes separated by a liquid, called electrolyte. But while batteries
store electricity made elsewhere, fuel cells create their own from a variety of
substances, including hydrogen, which carmakers currently favor.
Industry and Department of Energy officials say that Chu seems to have softened
his early rejection of hydrogen fuel cells. John Hofmeister, the former
president of Shell USA and the incoming chairman of the Energy Department's
technical advisory committee on fuel cell vehicles, said Chu made supportive
remarks about the potential for hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles while speaking at a
recent, closed event.
If Chu has changed his early hostility toward hydrogen fuel cells, he does so as
a handful of major carmakers are readying models for as early as 2015. Toyota,
Honda, Mercedes-Benz, and Daimler have announced plans for hydrogen fuel-cell
propelled vehicles. General Motors says that as soon as 2016 it may release its
own hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle, but it’s watching for the launch of supporting
infrastructure primarily new refueling stations.
Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Cars
The lack of fueling stations is a major obstacle to the rollout of hydrogen
fuel-cell vehicles. A mature fleet will require 11,000 stations coast to coast
at a cost of $20 billion to $25 billion, according to General Motors. Unless
forced by Washington, oil companies, which generally do not produce hydrogen,
have no motivation to add rival hydrogen fueling to their gasoline stations. So
the industry’s calculus is that by and large hydrogen must be sold at new,
dedicated fueling stations.
electricity and propel a vehicle, fuel cells currently use platinum as a
catalyst—and platinum, of course, is not cheap. John Voelcker, who runs the
website Green Car Reports, told me that so much electricity is required to break
down the chemical bonds in natural gas to create hydrogen that it is often more
efficient simply to use the electricity directly in a vehicle such as a
battery-propelled electric car.
Yet there are also two big pluses: Hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles can be refueled
in as few as three minutes, then travel for 250 or 300 miles straight.
Electrified cars, on the other hand, require about eight hours for complete
recharging. Depending on the vehicle, they can go only 40 to 100 miles on pure
battery, creating the dreaded “range anxiety.”
When the first cars come out, they will cost more than electrics, whose price
tag is currently substantially greater than gasoline-fueled engines. To help
give consumers the confidence to take the hydrogen plunge, there will have to be
a coordinated rollout of refueling stations, said Charles Freese, who runs the
Detroit-based fuel-cell unit for General Motors. That is where public policy
comes in: Government, fuel providers, infrastructure contractors, and the
carmakers will have to work together to get the stations up and running. The
cost of operating each station drops with every car it services. But there’s a
“chicken or the egg dilemma," he says. "You need to have a number of stations in
place so the customers have easy access to the fuel and have to have a minimum
number of vehicles that start to deploy in [the] same time window so [you] can
keep the throughput of fuel up at the station."
Fuel-cell vehicles will start out not with mass deployment, but in targeted
regions especially islands. The first places in the United States will be Los
Angeles and Hawaii, Freese thinks Los Angeles because there are high population
concentrations that can be served by just 50 or 55 refueling stations; Hawaii
because driving patterns are predictable: along set coastal routes and around
self-contained islands, so drivers can’t go too far afield and find themselves
stranded without fuel. GM and the U.S. Army launched a test fleet of 16 hydrogen
fuel-cell cars in Hawaii earlier this year.
In California, the state government is already behind the allocation of funds
for building hydrogen fueling stations. Twenty-six are either in place or
funded. An industry-government collaboration called the California Fuel Cell
Partnership has established equipment standards and permitting processes, and
organized the training of emergency personnel in the case of an accident. In
Hawaii, GM is teamed up with 13 companies, government agencies and university
bodies in order to organize the rollout of infrastructure there.
Abroad, the initial rollouts will be in Germany, Japan, and South Korea (the
last being essentially an island, since no one can drive through North Korea).
Private supporters of fuel cells appear to be hedging their own bets. After the
Obama administration withdrew support, companies pulled back their initial
efforts in some markets. Hofmeister noted that Shell has closed hydrogen
refueling stations it established during the Bush era in New York, Washington,
D.C., and elsewhere. But companies have also built up investment in what they
regard as more promising areas particularly those countries offering government
funding. Shell, for instance, has added investment in Germany and Japan, which
have poured hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds into the
construction of hydrogen fuel cell infrastructure. "Government," said Hofmeister,
"has to be in there in being the fixer, the solution, and not the obstacle, and
maybe that will be happening."
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