Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants a
”
hydrogen highway
”
in California, with fuel celled cars and trucks running around
this state and refueling as easily as gasoline-driven vehicles can
now.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants a “hydrogen highway” in California, with fuel celled cars and trucks running around this state and refueling as easily as gasoline-driven vehicles can now.
President Bush since 2003 has wanted to spend $1.7 billion developing hydrogen as America’s next energy source.
But with only about 100 hydrogen-powered cars on California’s roads today, nothing much has happened yet. This may be because the technology so far seems to be at a clumsy stage: Even when Schwarzenegger drove the first (and only) General Motors “Hydrogen Hummer” into a brand new hydrogen fueling station near Los Angeles International Airport last winter, there was no hydrogen at hand, just an empty hose no better than a movie prop.
Environmentalists love the idea of hydrogen fuel cells, which emit nothing but heat and water as byproducts of their activity.
But they also complain that the process of producing hydrogen from air or water can be dirty, requiring electricity from power plants often fueled by oil or other fossil fuels. Hydrogen fuel cells also are frightfully expensive today, in part because they are not mass produced and they are large and clunky.
In a way, this technology is where mobile telephones were 20 years ago, when car phones usually required a large apparatus stored in the trunk and most potential consumers thought the idea impractical.
It’s not impractical any more, and that’s in large part due to a company based in Finland. Nokia cellphones are now commonplace and the company is a household word, even sponsoring a major college football bowl game.
So it might be with a new Finnish startup company called Hydrocell Ltd.
This firm makes unique, patented hydrogen fuel cells housed in shiny metal cylinders about the size of the batons used in track-and-field relay races.
Two of them attached to a small battery and an electric motor can power a bicycle at about 10 to 15 miles per hour. One four-pound cell can power a mobile telephone or a laptop computer. Four cells can move a motor scooter at 20 to 30 mph and 20 to 30 can power a car at 50 mph, depending on the size of the car.
Putting together that kind of fuel cell array would be expensive today, when Hydrocell makes the cells by hand and charges $900 apiece for them because each unit takes 20 hours to produce.
So they’re not in wide use today even in Finland, the most common use there being to power computers and other electronic equipment aboard sailboats which have no other power source when owners don’t want to use outboard motors or gasoline-powered generators.
Hydrocell predicts that if and when its cells go into mass production, they’ll sell for about $50 each, meaning the full array that might replace the engine of a car would cost slightly more than $1,000, far less than any new automotive engine brings today.
The hydrogen supply for these cells is produced electrically using solar panels.
“You could do the same with a home,” says Seppo Rosvall, Hydrocell’s product manager. “You could produce enough hydrogen with electricity from solar panels to power an entire house and your car. Of course, to drive long distances, there would have to be refueling stations.”
So we’re back to Schwarzenegger’s hydrogen highway, and his tentative plan to open more than a dozen refueling stations around the state. So far, there are four. And so far, government agencies operate most fuel cell cars.
No one doubts much of the hydrogen for these cars – and for industrial fuel cell use – would have to be produced with electricity from power plants, as backyard production could never satisfy the needs of all California drivers and large businesses.
But the electricity needed to produce hydrogen doesn’t have to come from local power plants. It can be produced hundreds of miles away.
“So you can have pollution free cities if you go to fuel cells,” says Rosvall. “And you will stop having to pay the Arabs for oil because you will burn so much less oil and natural gas to produce the power than you do now in cars and power plants.
“The best thing about this is that hydrogen is an unlimited resource. Also you can link as many cells as you like, even 100 or more, and the more you have, the more power you will have.”
The power is stored in ordinary 12-volt car batteries.
It’s a system with vast potential, far more flexible and much less expensive than the fuel cells companies like DaimlerChrysler and General Motors plan to install in the small fleets they’re now building with federal grant money.
The bottom line: If the Finns could lead the way to worldwide and ubiquitous cellphone use, it’s probably wise to take seriously their efforts here.
For more information on Finnish fuel cells, visit www.hydrocell.fi.
Elias is author of the current book The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It, now in its updated third edition. His email address is
td*****@ao*.com
