H2 Minus $ is an Equation Hydrogen Car Backers Say is Wrong Answer for Proposed Energy Department Budget

By John O'Dell, Senior Editor

Like every other alternative fuel, hydrogen has its fans and foes, its pluses and minuses, its ups and, recently, its downs.

After being the favored ground transportation fuel of the future for most of the last eight years as the Bush administration pushed development of hydrogen fuel cells for automotive use, nature's most abundant - albeit hard to isolate - element has been cast aside by the Obama administration.

The new president's Nobel-winning energy secretary, Steven Chu, has proposed in his 2010 departmental budget to eliminate funding for automotive hydrogen programs - that's $100 million - and instead to focus hydrogen research on fuel cells to generate power for homes, businesses and other stationary power users.

For transportation, his choice of fuel research programs to back is no surprise, he's long been a supporter of biofuels and electric cars.

That's got the hydrogen car crowd - and we confess to a great fondness for fuel cell vehicles ourselves - up in arms and questioning the validity of Chu's apparent decision to "pick winners" by concentrating DOE research finding on biofuels and battery-electric, or plug-in, cars while announcing that his team doesn't see any short-term chance for hydrogen to emerge as a widely available and used fuel.

But Chu, powerful as he is sitting atop the nation's official energy policy agency and operating with the endorsement and backing of the president, isn't all-powerful. He has to answer to Congress, and Congress is subject to lobbying.

So the pressure politics have begun.

Short-Sighted?

With DOE budget hearings about to start, the chairman of the Senate's energy and Water Appropriations Committee - the committee that sits in judgment over the energy Department budget - has come out swinging.

A fan of hydrogen, Sen. Byron Dorgan recently called the DOE's budget recommendation to eliminate automotive hydrogen research funding "a very short-sighted recommendation." Hydrogen and fuel cells "are part of this country's future," said the North Dakota Democrat.

Backing Dorgan in support of restoring at lest some hydrogen programs funding for automotive research are automakers with huge investments in the technology.

They include Toyota and Honda, no slouches when it comes to making informed choices about technologies, as well as Daimler and our own General Motors Corp.

(We say "our own" because as part of the taxpaying public, we now share ownership of the faltering car company with the rest of America.)

Unlikely Allies

GM, in case you've been living in a cave or up in space for the past few weeks, is in bankruptcy now and the government, as its majority owner, has a rather big stake in the company's survival and future success.

Granted, GM hasn't been all that great at picking the proper trends and technologies as it looked to the future.

But this time the General is on the same team as Toyota and Honda rather than turning up its nose and sniffing that the Japanese car companies don't know what they are talking about.

Chu said he can' support pouring more funding into automotive hydrogen research right now because he and other DOE scientists and policy makers "ask ourselves, 'is it likely in the next 10 or 15, 20 years that we will convert to a hydrogen car economy?' The answer, we felt, was 'no."

The big obstacles, Chu has said, are the hundreds of billions of dollars be believes it would cost to install an adequate hydrogen fuel infrastructure throughout the nation; the present high cost of fuel cells, the inefficiencies in pulling hydrogen out of natural gas - today's primary hydrogen feedstock - or of reforming in from water (the H in H2O is hydrogen) and the complexity and cost of developing adequate transportation and storage systems for the volatile gas.

Nothing's Easy

Some of those same arguments could be used against his chosen alternatives of biofuels and electric drive systems.

It takes tremendous amounts of electricity and water to operate a biofuels refinery; biofuels and electricity each need expensive new infrastructure to be usable widely as transportation fuel; and if not produced from clean sources such as solar or hydro power, electricity is far from being a clean, energy-efficient fuel.

Dorgan, the Senate's energy committee leader, agrees with Chu's objection that hydrogen isn't a short-term solution to our national energy problems.

"It is a longer-term future [solution] but it is very important that we finish what we have started, he told Environment & Energy News in a recent interview. "We have got a lot of money invested in research projects."

Powerful Friends

He's not riding alone onto the battlefield: Others lobbying congress for restoration of automotive fuel cell research funding include the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, DuPont, 3M Co., Siemens AG and a number of fuel cell and hydrogen production companies as well as a few major health and clean-air groups including the Union of Concerned Scientists and the American Lung Association.

There's one other concerned proponent, the California Air Resources Board, a group whose activities in cleaning the air and forcing the auto industry to improve both fuel economy and emissions performance have been applauded by Obama - Chu's boss - both on he campaign trail and in the white House.

In a May 29 letter to Chu, E&E News reports, CARB Chairwoman Mary Nichols argued that the obstacles to hydrogen development that led the energy secretary to abandon it can be readily overcome through continued R&D and a coordinated infrastructure development program.

She acknowledged that high cost of producing prototype fuel cell systems and vehicles, but said that costs will come down with volume and that already fuel-cell electric vehicles "are fast approaching cost-competitiveness with advanced hybrid vehicles and are expected to be cheaper than plug-in hybrid electric vehicles when produced in volume."

Too Soon to Stop Looking

We're not taking sides - at this stage of the game we like battery-electric and hybrid cars and trucks just as much as we like hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles and clean biofuels.

We're car people and we even like fuel-swilling, CO2-spouting, rubber-burning race cars. We believe there's a place at the table for all types of vehicles and powertrains and fuels, at least until we run out of oil and permanently eliminate petroleum-based fuels from our national diet.

And we know there are many difficult and costly obstacles to overcome on the road to finding clan, sustainable replacements for gasoline and diesel fuel.

But the need to find those replacements - and the plural is the correct form, there will be more than one new fuel - is critical, our economic future, energy security and environment depend on it.

For those reasons alone, we can't afford to rule out hydrogen yet, or stop developing technologies that use it to power vehicles, any more than we can afford to unplug research into advanced batteries or abandon development of fuels made from wood chips and cow manure.

Posted by

John O'Dell June 12, 2009, 5:15 AM

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Biofuels, Daimler, Ford, Fuel Cell, General Motors, Honda, Hybrid, Hydrogen, Opinion, Plug-ins and Electric, Toyota

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DOE Budget, Fuel Cells, Hyrdogen Research Cuts

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