A decade ago, President George W. Bush espoused the environmental promise of cars running on hydrogen, the universe’s most abundant element. “The first car driven by a child born today,” he said in his 2003 State of the Union speech, “could be powered by hydrogen, and pollution-free.”
Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who was President Obama’s first Secretary of Energy did not feel that the economy would convert to hydrogen-car over the next 10 or 15, 20 years. The administration slashed funding for hydrogen fuel cell research.
Attention shifted to battery electric vehicles, particularly those made by the headline-grabbing Tesla Motors.
The hydrogen car, it appeared, had died. And many did not mourn its passing, particularly those who regarded the auto companies’ interest in hydrogen technology as a stunt to signal that they cared about the environment while selling millions of highly profitable gas guzzlers.
Except the companies, including General Motors, Honda, Toyota, Daimler and Hyundai, persisted.
After many years and billions of dollars of research and development, hydrogen cars are headed to the showrooms.
Hyundai has been leasing the hydrogen-powered Tucson sport utility, which it describes as the world’s first mass-produced fuel cell car, since June, for a $2,999 down payment, and $499 a month. (That includes the hydrogen. A lease on a gas-powered Tucson is about half as much.)
Toyota is introducing a sedan called Mirai, which means “future” in Japanese. The Mirai will go on sale in California this year for $57,500 — cheaper than the Tesla Model S.
“It’s a no-brainer that I think the next evolution is to go to fuel-cell based technologies,” said Nihar Patel, the vice president for North American business strategy at Toyota, at a conference here last week.
California is spending millions of dollars to build hydrogen fueling stations, aiming to increase the network from nine today to 50 by the end of next year, mostly around Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. Japan and Germany, two other early markets for hydrogen cars, are building a similar number of stations.
“We really believe that we’re at a turning point here,” Mr. Patel said.
The combustion of one gallon of gasoline releases almost 20 pounds of carbon dioxide. In 2012, some 1.8 billion tons of carbon dioxide were discharged by cars and trucks in the United States, or more than a quarter of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions. Concerns about climate change are intensifying discussions about alternatives to gasoline and diesel engines.
Battery electric cars and fuel cell cars are, at their cores, both electric cars with the inherent advantages of electric motors — jack rabbit acceleration, near silence and zero tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases. The difference is where the electricity comes from.
Instead of storing their charge in batteries, the fuel cells in hydrogen cars are miniature power plants, generating a flow of electricity in the chemical reaction of combining hydrogen and oxygen into water. The oxygen comes from the air; the hydrogen, compressed at 10,000 pounds per square inch, is stored in tanks.
Continue reading the original story (New York Times)
