CARB asks DOE to restore hydrogen vehicle funds
Hydrogen cars in Vancouver - click above for high-res image gallery
The U.S. Department of Energy under President Obama hasn't been kind to hydrogen vehicles in 2009. In early May, the DOE eliminated funding for research into H2-powered vehicles. Since then, the hydrogen vehicle industry has taken stock of the situation, promoted itself and is now ready to fight back. Support is coming from, unsurprisingly, the California Air Resources Board (CARB), which is going to bat for hydrogen cars in a big way. CARB Chairman Mary Nichols has spoken with the DOE's Steven Chu about reinstating the funds and wants involved players to continue the "dialog and investigation," according to Green Car Congress. An important part of the debate is what Chu called the "Four Miracles" that need to be overcome before hydrogen cars are viable. Big advances need to be made in:
- fuel cell durability/cost
- hydrogen production
- hydrogen storage
- hydrogen infrastructure
[Source: Green Car Congress]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
DaveD 4:24PM (6/19/2009)
Damn, this is starting to really make me mad. If Mary, and CARB, are so damn neutral, then why do they keep doing things for hydrogen that they never even considered for BEVs or anything else?
Somebody get her stupid ass out of there.
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bob 2:23PM (6/20/2009)
Electric cars have been done, don't you remember the EV-1? They were crushed because most people would never buy one unless it was ridiculously cheap and therefore unprofitable to manufacture. Now that Government Motors will be subsidizing the project with our own tax money, somebody will have to drink the Kool-aid.....
The hydrogen funding should be restored! $100 mil. isn't a lot of money for the government to spend. (I think they just spent about $50 mil. on coupons for sheeple to get their digital converter boxes, no big deal)
DaveD 11:38PM (6/21/2009)
@bob,
So you think throwing money at a technology like hydrogen, after the tens of billions of $$$$$$ that has already been wasted on it, which is still 10 years away from producing affordable vehicles, and is many orders of magnitude too expensive, waste incredible amounts of money/energy to produce the hydrogen, has not infrastructure to support it, the H2 comes from petroleum and natural gas, and has no way of storing the hydrogen reasonably on a moving vehicle....if you think that is worth throwing more money at, I don't even know what to say to you.
Of course, electric vehicles are on the verge of being practical right now, with absolutely no funding from the gov't, CARB, or anyone else for the last 15 years. Yet you think it's better to throw more money after the H2 debacle? Wow dude. Either you are part of the hydrogen lobby or your common sense is shut down.
Hell, anything is better than the H2 scam. Ethanol, bio-diesel, more efficient diesels, kangaroo farts, whatever....at least pick something that makes more sense than hydrogen to waste money on.
Patrick 11:36AM (6/22/2009)
If you really care about replacing gasoline vehicles with something different, you need ALL options on the table. Not just the shortsighted, battery-only pathway, which has it's own challenges, but batteries AND fuel cells AND some biofuels and other solutions as well. It's the only way we're going to be able to address the transportation challenges comprehensively.
Right now, the only practical battery car you can make is a short-range, small car. And that will be fine for some people. But other people will want larger, long-range cars that fuel in a couple minutes and that's where alternative fuels come in.
This is why we need ALL options on the table. CARB isn't biased--they're looking out for an important technology that some lesser informed people are trying to take off the table. CARB knows that a single-solution plan doesn't make sense at this time and is taking the appropriate action to try to rectify the situation along with the automakers and entire industry. They support a portfolio approach including hydrogen, fuel cell, batteries and many other options.
Any smart person will support this diverse approach as well.
DaveD 11:57AM (6/22/2009)
@Patrick,
Your logic has one flaw: Hydrogen is so impractical as a system that it waste money that could be spent on something that will help the situation. The money that we've spent on hydrogen research could have easily advanced batteries, or cellulosic ethanol, or algae for bio-diesel, or butanol, or making all cars flex fuel so that we could use methanol.
You also make a false statement: CARB is not supporting multiple paths. They are pushing H2 and have spent the lion's share of their budget on that for over a decade. Don't lecture me on what is stupid.
You want to talk about a diverse "energy portfolio" to get us off foreign oil?...What blows my mind is that we have huge natural gas reserves in this country and the main source of methanol is reforming of natural gas. Yet nobody pushes for flex fuel vehicles and using methanol. Has anyone even noticed that the price of methanol is only about .70 a gallon? I think the problem here is that there are other sources of methanol and the oil/gas industry can't lock us in so they don't want that pathway explored and nobody champions it. What about methanol from multiple sources including bio-methanol or methane as well as the current natural gas?
My personal choice is BEV's as I see plenty of progress on batteries over the last few years even before there were any subsidies for it. Think of where battery tech/cost would be today if they had put all that money on batteries instead of H2 for the last 20 years!
Alan 4:47PM (6/19/2009)
Here we go again. Let them do it themselves, they've had plenty of help already!
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Dude 4:57PM (6/19/2009)
If FCs are so cheap then why are cars so expensive? If they are so close to comercialization then why do they need public funding? They've had lots of public funding and JV funding yet they are still 5 years in the future. They've always been 5 years in the future. We could have had hybrids 15 years ago in the US with Ni Mh but pie in the sky H hampered that. We finally have EVs and Li ion batteries will make it happend, no need to waste valuable resources on this.
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bob 1:41PM (6/22/2009)
Dude,
Fuel cells are better than batteries.
http://www.medistechnologies.com/Portals/Medistech/DataFiles/Documents/062209%20PortablePower.pdf
Chris M 6:36PM (6/22/2009)
bob, that link indicated fuel cell sales to the Military, where cost is no objection. Something tells me that they still aren't quite cheap enough for the general public. They are currently designed for low power applications like radios and computers, not cars.
Even more intriguing, poking about the Medis website revealed more details on their fuel cell.
http://www.medistechnologies.com/Default.aspx?SecId=34
The Medis fuel cell does NOT run on H2! No difficult to store hydrogen, just an easy to store and handle liquid fuel (borohydride solution). That gives them a big size and cost advantage over H2FC use, but I suspect Medis still need to bring the cost down considerably before even considering automotive applications.
gorr 5:06PM (6/19/2009)
I said to stop any subsidies to incompetants all over the world and in particular u.s.a.
If they don't want to build a water-powered car, then let them go their own way of researching things that already exist at their own expences. Just pay for real products offer and cut the tax too. The average worker already pay 4x for what he get. All these madmans are tax-money collectors, that's all. Stop any car expenditure toward the ones that don't offer for cash a green car. Keep your money for an old clunkers, it's the same thing as a new gm or toyota any models. It's not surprising hearing goverments and big-oil and actual car manufacturers wanted to steal the old clunkers with taxmoney again. They are so incompetants that they cannot envision selling products to consumers. Any incompetants will always hate the jews and talk about regulations, changes, projects, laws, studies, etc. It's because he or she don't know anything, have never work honestly for a customer and just protect himself against terrorists that walk in the dangeurous streets without arms and songs into his or her head. The main thing is that uncounciously these folks are trying to understand normal streets folks but need protection from the state because they just feel useless and testeless and they feel that nobody will ever want to give them money for their contribution or work.
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Chris M 5:07PM (6/19/2009)
CARB pretends to be "neutral", but the bias in favor of H2 fuel cells is undeniable. They set the rules to favor H2FC cars by giving special favored status to vehicles that could be "refueled" in 10 minutes or less - only to find rapid charging and battery swapping made some EVs eligible as well - and that most H2 refueling facilities took much longer than 10 minutes to refuel!
Then they set the rules to favor vehicles with longer driving ranges - only to find EVs matching, and in some cases exceeding, the range for H2FC cars.
Then of course there is the plug-in hybrids with both fast refilling and long driving ranges...
And now we find CARB lobbying for H2 in ways they never did for batteries.
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Chris M 8:17PM (6/19/2009)
Reading the Green Car Congress article, I noticed some wildly unrealistic numbers being quoted. A DOE cost analysis for an automotive fuel cell plus "balance of plant" was estimated at $75 per Kw at high volume production - but the actual current cost of actual fuel cells is $4,000 per Kw, and most of that cost is for materials, over half for the platinum! Mass production cannot bring the cost down below the cost of materials, so the "$75/Kw" figure is TOTALLY BOGUS! In short, the DOE bureucrats are simply making up figures to support continuing the H2 boondoggle. Curiously, the figures just happened to match the Governments target goals set up back in 2001 when the hydrogen hype got started. Hmm, they could never admit to falling behind schedule, even after repeated delays, so...
Of course, by using bogus figures, the H2 promoters could then come up with totally unrealistic figures for the cost of H2FC vehicles, making them magically "cheaper" than competing BEVs or plug-in hybrids and only slightly more expensive than regular hybrids.
So lets use that "magic of mass production" the same way the government H2 promoters do! The $75,000 Altairnano battery packs, if mass produced, would only cost $1,368.75. the GM Volt could be magically mass produced for a mere $821.25! The $30K replacement battery pack for the Tesla Roadster, if magically mass produced, would only cost $547.50 Hey, if the $103K Tesla Roadster were only "mass produced" in the same magical way as those H2 fuel cells, it would cost only $1,879.75!
Of course, when you realize how much they fudged the fuel cell cost figure, then all of the figures they used to promote H2 become highly suspect, including their estimates for infrastructure costs, and their estimated cost for rival technologies.
Gordio 5:11PM (6/19/2009)
Haaaaiiiiillll nooo
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Tim 5:16PM (6/19/2009)
Somebody has a craving for pork.
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Another Dave 5:28PM (6/19/2009)
Dear Mary,
I know there are a lot of special hydrogen interests that need government money in California, but that does not mean that you should ask for it! CARB is so politically biased towards hydrogen that it is almost criminal!
Hydrogen is not an efficient energy carrier and has many practical problems. All I see out of CARB is selective fact picking in support of the Hydrogen lobby.
I suspect that if the people of California voted on where they want the dollars to go, electric cars would win over fuel cells (Tesla, Aptrea, ....).
I agree everything should not be taken off the table, But that does not mean the Hydrogen lobby should be allowed to stuff itself at the expense of other alternates. Chu is only kicking the Hydrogen Hogs from the trough, so the other alternatives have a chance to grow.
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RAN 5:42PM (6/19/2009)
Does CARB really think they have even a shred of respectability left? Sheeeeeeeeeeesh!
I don't think Mary Nichols has a chance in Hell of out-debating Mr. Chu on *anything*, and certainly not on the "hydrogen issue" again.
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meme 5:56PM (6/19/2009)
Did you read their arguments on Green Car Congress? Oh my god; I've never seen such an extreme example of magical thinking. They're saying fuell cells will come down in price *100-fold*. They're saying that a 40-mile PHEV has only a 4% difference in GHGs (DOE says 27% on our current grid) from a regular gasoline car, and then contrasted it with hydrogen from coal.... with its CO2 being sequestered! PHEV gets no sequestration, coal gets sequestration, and shock of all shocks, the H2 vehicle wins! They talk about how your average EV owner will have to spend almost $900 adding in a 15A/120V socket to charge from. *Excuse me*? Does the average EV owner live in a barn? They compare hydrogen's cost per kWh to EVs, ignoring that hydrogen's real cost is per *kilowatt*, not per kilowatt hour.
Every last number they cite is so far off the planet that they need space suits.
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Mike!!ekiM 6:23PM (6/19/2009)
Political Corruption? Oil Money Turns Black into White!
jpm 6:01PM (6/19/2009)
Somebody fire this dumb bitch.
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jpm 6:08PM (6/19/2009)
I hope to god the next governor of CA appoints someone who's not in love with Hydrogen.
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