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Vehicles herald new age

Date published: 3/16/2003

NOWMASS, Colo.-- President Bush's State of the Union address called for appropriating $1.2 billion over the next five years to develop hydrogen-powered fuel cells to power cars, trucks, homes, and businesses. Combined with the administration's FreedomCAR Initiative proposed last year, this amounts to $1.7 billion in federal money for emerging fuel-cell technologies.

Done right, this is a good idea. Hydrogen fuel cells are a safe, clean, and economically promising way to maintain our mobile lifestyle, slow climate change, cut the public-health costs of air pollution, cope with the ultimate depletion of petroleum, and achieve the security of energy independence.

Hydrogen vehicles are driven by electric motors powered by a fuel cell, a sort of battery that chemically combines hydrogen and oxygen atoms to make electricity, pure hot water, and nothing else.

In 2001, the Federal Highway Administration says 138 million cars were driven 1.6 trillion miles and 84 million light trucks and SUVs were driven 0.9 trillion miles. The average personal vehicle releases about one pound of carbon dioxide per mile. Vehicles emit about one-fifth of total U.S. carbon dioxide--believed to be the main contributor to climate change--and much unhealthful air pollution.

In 2001, Americans also paid $95 billion to import oil for our 97 percent oil-fueled transportation system, plus about $50 billion in taxes for the peacetime readiness costs of military forces earmarked to intervene in the Persian Gulf.

The best immediate response is the hybrid-electric cars already on the market. These and other conventional technologies can save half our vehicular fuel at a profit. We'll then save the other half with a hydrogen transition that can work even better and cost less.

It's not a pipe dream: The needed technology for safely making, storing, and using hydrogen already exists. Uncompromised, cost-competitive hydrogen cars have been designed (see hypercar.com). But we can't deploy them without widely available hydrogen refueling infrastructure, which we can't finance without lots of customers for hydrogen.

The Rocky Mountain Institute published in 1999 a five-step market-based solution to this chicken-and-egg problem (rmi.org/images/other/HC-StrategyHCTrans.pdf).

First, stationary fuel cells power, heat, and cool certain buildings, using hydrogen extracted from natural gas (a more efficient way to use the gas).

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Date published: 3/16/2003