Ceilidh

Michael Zey
futurist3000@aol.com

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Authors:                  Jeffrey Ball

Pagination:               B.1

ISSN:                     00999660



ADVOCATES OF a hydrogen-powered future -- when cars run on nonpolluting
fuel cells -- liken their vision to shooting for the moon. Now some environmentalists
and auto makers are talking up a less ambitious, and less clean, half-step:
cars that burn hydrogen in fairly conventional internal-combustion engines.

Fuel cells are widely seen as the ultimate clean-car technology because
they convert hydrogen into electricity to power electric motors, and emit
nothing but clean water. But realizing that goal is a long way off. This
month, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report calling a Bush
administration plan to spend $1.7 billion on hydrogen research over five
years "unrealistically aggressive," saying a full transformation by the
U.S. to hydrogen from gasoline could take until 2050.

Concerns over that long timetable have split the auto industry. Some car
makers, prompted in part by California clean-air regulators, want to convert
some of today's engines so they can burn hydrogen instead of gasoline.
Germany's Bayerische Motoren Werke AG says it plans within two or three
years to roll out several hundred of its top-of- the-line 7-series sedans
with modified engines that burn both hydrogen and gasoline. Ford Motor
Co. is considering building a demonstration fleet of cars that use hydrogen
in internal-combustion engines. These car makers say this half-step would
get hydrogen-powered vehicles on the road sooner and ease the transition
to the cleaner fuel, in part by prompting the oil industry to sell hydrogen
at gas stations.

Others, principally General Motors Corp., say the industry should wait
until fuel cells are ready. Armed with a new study by a federal laboratory,
GM argues that burning hydrogen in converted auto engines actually could
be worse for the environment than today's vehicles, in part due to the
pollution caused by making the hydrogen fuel.

The soon-to-be-released study by Argonne National Laboratory -- bankrolled
by GM and some major oil companies -- finds that cracking hydrogen molecules
from natural gas, and then compressing the gaseous hydrogen so it can fit
into a tank on a vehicle, actually emits larger quantities of two problematic
air pollutants than refining gasoline does: soot particles, which have
been linked to respiratory disease, and nitrogen oxide, which helps form
smog.

Then there's the pollution created when the hydrogen is burned in an internal-combustion
engine. Based on GM's projections of emission levels from a full-size pickup,
the study concludes the truck would cough out about the same amount of
nitrogen oxide and soot whether it's burning hydrogen or gasoline.

The upshot: At least until hydrogen can be produced cleanly from renewable
energy sources such as the sun or wind -- a process that today is hugely
expensive -- hydrogen-burning cars will be a dirtier option than gasoline-burning
cars.

Michael Wang, an Argonne scientist who worked on the study, says he did
a double take when he saw the results. "I had to go back, step by step,
and check my sources," he says.

GM says it hopes to be selling "commercially viable" fuel-cell vehicles
by 2010, that it and isn't working on hydrogen-burning internal-combustion
vehicles in the meantime.

Many environmentalists have criticized talk of hydrogen-powered cars as
a smokescreen by industry to avoid building vehicles that go farther on
a gallon of gasoline. Some cite the Argonne study as fresh evidence for
such concern. "The Argonne scientists are warning us as plainly as they
can not to confuse real solutions with wishful thinking," says Jay Gourley
of the Public Education Center, a Washington-based environmental advocacy
group.

The staunchest proponents of burning hydrogen in modified engines are in
California, the environmental bellwether. Regulators there have amended
a state rule requiring the auto industry to build some "zero- emission"
vehicles to give the industry partial credit for cars that burn hydrogen
in internal-combustion engines. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has announced
plans to build a network of hydrogen- fueling stations -- and to convert
one of his own gas-guzzling Hummers to hydrogen.

Modifying a car to burn hydrogen involves several steps. One is to add
a special fuel tank and fuel hose that can withstand the high pressure
at which hydrogen must be stored. Another is to redesign the component
that mixes fuel and air and sends it into the engine's cylinders.

Officials at BMW and Ford, as well as at the California Air Resources Board,
the state's clean-air cop, downplay the Argonne study. They concede that
burning hydrogen in an internal-combustion engine is far less efficient
at producing power than running the hydrogen through a fuel cell. But they
say the auto industry could make hydrogen-burning cars a lot cleaner than
GM assumes. And they suggest the conclusions of the GM-funded study are
predictable given GM's distaste for any hydrogen technology short of the
fuel cell.

Jerry Martin, a spokesman for the California air board, says vehicles with
internal-combustion engines that burn hydrogen won't get any credit under
the state's zero-emission-vehicle rule unless they achieve extremely low
emissions -- levels below what the Argonne study assumed was feasible for
GM's full-size pickup.

Christoph Huss, BMW's senior vice president for science and traffic policy,
says his company thinks hitting the California clear-air target is feasible
with its hydrogen-fueled 7-series sedans. BMW, in fact, regards internal-combustion
engines as the most viable format for hydrogen cars "for the next 20 years,"
he says. "Maybe BMW is the single company that has done these R&D [research
and development] programs," he adds.

At Ford, Gerhard Schmidt, vice president for research and advanced engineering,
expresses similar doubts about the Argonne findings. "These studies have
a lot of assumptions -- especially when people are not running hydrogen
internal-combustion engines like we're doing," he says.

As for the pollution that comes from producing hydrogen fuel from natural
gas, even critics of the Argonne study acknowledge it's a problem. But
they say that, to build an economic case for producing truly clean hydrogen
from renewable sources, it's a price worth paying.

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