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GM, Toyota Fuel-Cell Plans Clash With U.S. Battery Car Push Coca-Cola Consolidated to Install

Hydrogen is a universal fuel that will play a major role in our clean, sustainable energy
future. Here are some ways hydrogen is already becoming a practical reality in our everyday lives...

Hydrogen SUV in the Hands of Regular Drivers

By David Biello, Scientific American, 20 March 2008 (reprinted with
permission)
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?
id=pollution-free-hydrogen-vehicle-hits-driveway

Like many of her neighbors, Maria Recchia-O'Neill has a sport

utility vehicle sitting in her driveway in Rye Brook, just north of
New York City. She drives it to work and around town to run
errands. But although her vehicle looks like any other SUV, her
Chevrolet Equinox gets excellent gas mileage—and it doesn't emit
any pollutants or climate change–promoting carbon dioxide. That is
because it is a hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicle—one of 40 such
automobiles that U.S. carmaker General Motors provided for motorists to road test.

"My average right now is 44.4 miles [71.5 kilometers] per kilogram [of compressed hydrogen gas],
which is supposed to be the equivalent of a gallon of gasoline," Recchia-O'Neill says. In only two
weeks of driving, the district coordinator of science for the Port Chester, N.Y., public school system
has driven at least 600 miles (965 kilometers) on the car and her fuel cell Equinox has gotten as
much as 191 miles (307 kilometers) on its three full tanks (each holding slightly more than four
Join our mailing list kilograms, or 8.8 pounds, of compressed hydrogen gas). "I feel like I'm making history," she says.
"It's an exhilarating ride because it's different."

Recchia-O'Neill is not the first American to drive a hydrogen vehicle, nor is her suburban family the
first to enjoy it. That honor goes to the Spallino family of Redondo Beach, Calif., who got their
Honda FCX sedan for test driving in 2005. Nor is the Chevrolet Equinox the first fuel cell vehicle
General Motors (GM) has ever produced: The 1966 Electrovan, an unwieldy and prohibitively
expensive fuel cell van that never made it out of the lab, was the first of about 40 or so hydrogen-
fueled vehicles that have been built by the U.S. carmaker. She is not even the only one in
Westchester County driving a GM fuel cell Equinox.

But Recchia-O'Neill is certainly at the forefront of a transformation of the U.S.—and global—auto

market from standard gasoline-fueled internal combustion engines to greener vehicles. From
so-called flexible fuel cars (that transition from ethanol to gasoline without a hitch) to gasoline–
electric hybrids, new types of cars and trucks are finding their way onto the road.

Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are vying with next-generation

hybrid car technology (which can be plugged in to recharge its
battery rather than relying on the gasoline engine) to be the
electric car of the future. "We've got a real fun race going on
here between plugging in vehicles and storing electricity in the
battery versus pumping hydrogen into a tank and creating
electricity from a fuel cell," says Larry Burns, GM's vice
president of research and development. "We are going to need
every Btu [British thermal unit] of energy that can be created
from every pathway."

The Chevrolet Equinox starts with a chirping sound, as gas injectors pump hydrogen into its
handmade fuel cell stack. Like all electric cars, acceleration is instant, uninterrupted—and silent.
"The young guys ask, 'Can't this make some kind of growling sound?'" Recchia-O'Neill says of her
son's college roommates. Even turning the car off is different. "The shutdown is the best part.
Everybody likes to watch it purge with the water vapor coming out and a futuristic kind of sound."

The whoosh of compressors as the vehicle shuts down—a sound that Recchia-O'Neill says makes
"you feel like you're in a spaceship"—is the key to driving it in frigid weather. Producing electricity

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in a hydrogen fuel cell has one by-product: water. And water can freeze at winter temperatures
common in New York State. So GM has designed its Generation IV fuel cell assembly to eliminate all
water from the stack when it stops operating. "It started up no problem in cold weather," Recchia-
O'Neill says, even in a snowstorm and on days the temperature dropped below freezing.

Save for the quirky noises—or the lack thereof—the fuel cell light truck does not look or perform any
differently than regular ones. The fuel cell version of the Equinox outweighs its standard cousin by
more than 500 pounds (225 kilograms) thanks to its heavy nickel–metal hydride battery pack, GM
says, but press down on the accelerator and the Equinox can run with the rest of the road traffic. "I
will pass tractor–trailers," Recchia-O'Neill says. "I can dodge the taxicabs. It responds well. I feel
like I'm a match for anyone on a busy road."

Honda, GM and other major carmakers, including BMW, Toyota, Ford and Daimler, are all currently
testing model hydrogen cars and trucks. Recchia-O'Neill became one of GM's hydrogen truck test
drivers by accident when she visited the auto giant's Web site, which called for volunteers to
participate in Project Driveway, an effort designed to have consumers put the Equinox through its
paces. She is one of 11 "real customers" (as opposed to celebrities, politicians or the like) now
taking the car for a trial run; GM plans to eventually have 100 such test vehicles on the road. As
part of this effort, GM has also teamed with Virgin Atlantic airlines to provide pick-up and drop-off
services in fuel cell cars to first class passengers at Los Angeles International Airport starting next
month.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has already certified hydrogen vehicles as zero-emission
vehicles—they only produce water. And the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology has
certified them safe to operate and refuel.

But two major roadblocks remain: The Equinox costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to make and
it can be hard to find hydrogen fuel. The first will only be solved when companies begin to mass
produce such vehicles, according to GM's Burns, which could happen as soon as 2012 when a law is
set to take effect in California requiring that a portion of new cars emit no pollution. "It has one
tenth the moving parts, and the geometry of an assembly line is easier than for an [internal
combustion engine]," he adds. "This technology has low-cost potential."

As for the fuel, more than 45 million metric tons (45 billion kilograms) of the lightweight gas is
produced every year as part of making fertilizer, chemicals and the gasoline used to power cars
today. In fact, fully 25 percent of global hydrogen production is made by oil companies themselves
at refineries to improve the quality of crude oil. "Why not just put the hydrogen in a fuel cell instead
of putting it into petroleum? It's economical to do it at a refinery today," Burns says. The oil
business makes enough hydrogen to fuel more than 30 million hydrogen vehicles, he notes, adding,
"the petroleum industry will provide us with the hydrogen infrastructure." Already, GM has
partnered with Dutch oil giant Shell to open hydrogen fueling stations.

Critics note, however, that hydrogen is simply an energy carrier—and not a particularly good one,
effectively delivering less than 25 percent of the electricity required to produce it from water as
energy to move wheels. Today's lithium ion batteries can return roughly 75 percent of the electricity
put into them as motive force. Even GM's vice chairman of global product development, Bob Lutz,
said recently that if energy storage in lithium ion batteries improves, it might not make sense to
employ hydrogen instead of electricity directly.

But fuel cell advocates point out that given the space available in a car frame and the laws of
thermodynamics, today's batteries can only provide a limited driving range—40 miles (65
kilometers) for GM's own Chevrolet Volt—before requiring a recharge, such as by the gasoline motor
in a full hybrid like the Toyota Prius. Current hybrids without this feature already cost several
thousand dollars more than their conventional counterparts and converting them to plug-ins would
cost at least $10,000 more. The feasibility—and cost—of future plug-in hybrids will depend on
advancements in battery technology.

Hydrogen production may also prove to be a better way of storing the energy from intermittent but
renewable power sources, such as wind farm generation or solar photovoltaic panels on a future
garage rooftop. Iceland and other countries are already testing such closed loop systems. And
hydrogen can be produced from a wide array of processes, ranging from water electrolysis to the
fermenting of biofuels like ethanol.

For now, Shell has two hydrogen refueling stations in the New York City area—one in Ardsley and
the other newly opened in White Plains, both in Westchester County—and a third is planned at John
F. Kennedy International Airport. The National Hydrogen Association counts 122 at present in the
U.S. and Canada—most clustered around major cities, such as Los Angeles, San Francisco and

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Washington, D.C. The association estimates that an adequate hydrogen refueling infrastructure of
12,000 stations—less than one tenth of the roughly 170,000 gasoline stations in the U.S.—could be
built for no more than $15 billion.

Recchia-O'Neill says she can pump enough compressed hydrogen into the Equinox's three
carbon–fiber storage tanks in six minutes when the hydrogen gauge tells here she is "running on
fumes—literally."

The next generation of GM's handmade fuel cell stack was showcased in the luxury crossover
Cadillac Provoq at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this past January. By doubling the
power density of the fuel cell stack, GM engineers halved its size as well as halved the amount of
expensive materials, such as platinum catalysts, that such fuel cells require. "That's the key to
getting the cost reductions we're seeking," Burns says.

For now, Recchia-O'Neill will be one of the few to drive a prototype car of the future—and even she
will only have it for three months total. But for those three months she'll need to set aside more
time to go to the supermarket. "If I go grocery shopping, people stand around it," she says. "We go
down the street and people look at you because they don't even know the car is running. … This is a
real car for regular people, we're just waiting for the infrastructure to catch up."

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