Counterpoint: Fuel Cell Vehicles

March 2, 2003 – Vol.7 No.49

COUNTERPOINT: FUEL CELL VEHICLES.

Are hydrogen fuel cell vehicles the only option to dramatically reduce emissions and dependency on imported oil? The answer may be in the source of the hydrogen. From natural gas or from renewable sources?

According to some, hybrid vehicle technology that would equal hydrogen-from-natural-gas fuel cell vehicles in terms of improved fuel efficiency and reduced emission could be on the showroom floor sooner than 2020, the year the Bush Administration suggests fuel cell vehicles should be generally available to consumers.

A report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Laboratory for Energy and the Environment claims that even with aggressive research a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle would not be better by 2020 in terms of overall greenhouse gas emission reductions and energy consumption than a hybrid vehicle with a diesel engine as the primary power plant - a diesel hybrid. Gasoline hybrids, too, would have a third better fuel economy and a third fewer emissions by then.

(It should be noted that diesel hybrid family sedans that achieved nearly 80 miles per gallon were developed in the 1990’s as part of the Clinton Administration’s Partnership for New Generation Vehicle program (PNGV), but the Big Three automakers declined to bring them onto the production line.)

The Energy Savings Trust in the U.K. issued a report in January with similar concerns as the MIT study. In the report - Fuelling Road Transport, Implications for Energy Policy, the Trust notes that, for now, the transport sector should concentrate on fossil fuel vehicles that get much improved fuel economy, rather than fuel cell vehicles operating on hydrogen extracted from natural gas. The Trust says it would make more sense to burn natural gas in combustion engines than use it for fuel cells. However, over the longer term renewable sources such as woody biomass could be used to make methanol or ethanol, which could be used to extract hydrogen. And possibly, hydrogen could be extracted directly from the biomass resource.

The Trust doesn’t recommend using renewables such as wind, wave or solar to generate hydrogen.Those renewables would be best used to beef-up the power grid with greenhouse gas free electricity.

And from industry, the Chairman and CEO of Austrian-based AVL Gmbh Helmut List says that hydrogen fuel cells are the most likely candidate for sustainable mobility in the future, but for now the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) might be on the cusp of another major change. Diesels in particular could yield major improvements in fuel economy, up to 70 percent, by 2020. Among its projects the company is developing an ultra-light-weight diesel engine utilizing a magnesium engine block

For the MIT report visit http://lfee.mit.edu/ , the EST at http://www.est.org.uk/ and AVL at http://www.avl.com/ .