Fuel cells start to look real

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by Steve Ashley

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It is looking more and more as if the fuel-cell-powered car - the long-awaited "clean personal transportation of the future" - is moving from laboratory vision to technical reality, if not yet market actuality.

Though any death-knell for the internal-combustion (IC) engine is decades off, the world's automakers seem to believe that the low-emissions, high-efficiency fuel cell will eventually deliver the power and performance that drivers expect. Despite difficult technical and market challenges to overcome, the latest crop of fuel-cell-powered concept cars appears to exhibit many of the basic features required for eventual success. Not surprisingly, high costs will remain the biggest single impediment to commercial viability for years to come.

Despite the current high costs, steady and tangible progress in fuel-cell technology in recent years seems to have convinced many in the automotive and energy industries that the dependable IC engine will eventually be overtaken by a clean alternative power system. The prospect of ever tighter regulatory limits on exhaust emissions has led many car manufacturers to invest heavily in fuel cells to ensure they are participants, if and when the expected market transition occurs.

DaimlerChrysler, Ford, and their fuel-cell-stack development partner, Ballard Power Systems - the two automakers together own a third of Ballard and collaborate in a precompetitive development venture called XCELLSiS - have spent nearly a billion dollars so far on fuel-cell technology. Their current effort to mass produce fuel-cell cars and light-duty trucks over the next four years will cost billions more.

General Motors is making similar hefty investments in automotive fuel cells, while Japan's Toyota, Honda, Nissan, and Mitsubishi reportedly laid out close to a billion dollars on the new technology during the past decade. With an estimated $6-8 billion having already been sunk into the fuel-cell industry, including both stationary and portable power types as well as transportation versions (according to analysts at Citibank), automakers are working to take fuel cells off the lab bench and move them onto the showroom floor.

Hybrid-electric vehicles
Another reason fuel-cell technology is favored is because it may be able to liberate electric cars from the electrochemical battery. While batteries are the cleanest automotive energy source, the technology is still highly problematic. And however responsive battery-powered electric cars are, their limited range and slow charging constrains them to a niche market segment, as GM's EV-1, Honda's EV-Plus, and other abortive electric car models have shown. Despite decades of research and investment, electrochemical batteries simply haven't attained the power densities needed for effective automotive propulsion power.

One way to extend the range of the electric car is to carry fuel and a small IC engine onboard to generate electricity to power the electric drivetrain. "Hybrids convert the problem of energy storage in a battery to one concerning the storage of fuel," explained Scott Staley, Chief Engineer for Fuel-cell Systems Engineering at Th!nk Technologies, Ford's electric-car enterprise. This hybrid-electric approach is employed in the recently introduced Toyota Prius and Honda Insight, which combine modest-size, high-efficiency combustion engines with batteries that supplement engine power during acceleration and hill-climbing, and recover energy from the brakes during stopping. Besides continuing to emit some pollutants, the combined electric and mechanical drives tend to make them complex and costly. Thus, automakers must subsidize current hybrid car models heavily to make them affordable.

Nevertheless, because hybrid vehicles use proven technology that has yet to be fully optimized and refined, many experts believe they will provide strong competition to fuel-cell-powered vehicles well into the future. A recent study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers concluded that hybrid-electric vehicles will be more common than fuel-cell-powered cars two decades from now. Indeed, the influential California Air Resources Board (CARB) recently reorganized its credit structure to emphasize hybrid-electrics as well as fuel-cell vehicles, while de-emphasizing battery-powered electric cars and trucks.

Whether fuel-cell-powered or any next-generation vehicles attain commercial success depends on three factors: technical feasibility (it must work), an appropriate fueling infrastructure (it must keep working), and customer acceptance (someone must buy it). Whereas the majority of today's efforts center on developing technical feasibility, in reality, all three factors are interrelated and interdependent. While the latter two issues remain unclear, it is evident that the three key elements must be developed in parallel.

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