Fill 'er up -- at home, With Hydrogen

June 4, 2002

Reuteurs: Your home could be the service station of the future.

Within 10 years, the filling station could face competition from the natural gas, electricity and even the water supplied to homes, General Motors Corp officials say.

Cleaner, more energy-efficient fuel cell cars and trucks, expected to begin arriving in dealerships in the next decade, could be powered by hydrogen derived from a variety of sources, giving the oil industry some competition for the first time.

"Quite frankly, the transportation sector, to a large extent, is held hostage to petroleum. That's been the lone source of energy for the transportation sector for a century," said GM Vice President Larry Burns, head of its research and development.

"Your home could be your source of energy, your source of power, for your fuel cell vehicle."

Fuel cells use an electrochemical process to create electricity by mixing hydrogen with the oxygen in the air around us.

They offer the promise of removing the car from the environmental debate because they emit little more than water and heat, reducing the greenhouse gases and smog-forming pollutants that internal combustion engines produce.

The trick to powering a fuel cell is a source of hydrogen -- one of the most abundant elements in the universe but unavailable in a pure form.

"That's kind of the $40,000 question: Where are you going to make your hydrogen from?" said Jim Kliesch, co-author of an environmental guide to cars and trucks.

One potential answer to the "infrastructure question," as those in the industry call the search for a source of hydrogen, lies in the fuel cell itself.

Run backwards and plugged into an electrical outlet, the fuel cell aboard a car or truck could act as an electrolyzer to create hydrogen from water or natural gas, Burns said.

Such technology is already in use on submarines, which create oxygen for their crews to breathe from sea water, with hydrogen released back into the ocean.

"The first thing you do at night when electric rates are low is you plug the electricity into the vehicle and a water hose, you run it backward through the electrolyze, create the hydrogen for your morning trip," Burns said.

"Other times you could come home with hydrogen in your vehicle and use your vehicle as a back-up source of electricity for your home."

Fuel cell cars could help spur demand for more renewable sources of energy, such as solar, wind and hydroelectric power.

Hydrogen could be created at the source of the renewable energy, such as solar power in the desert, and then piped or trucked to filling stations in city centers, Burns said.

DaimlerChrysler AG is taking the clean car literally. Its Natrium fuel cell minivan, a test vehicle up and running since March, stores hydrogen in a mixture of sodium boro-hydride, a chemical cousin of laundry soap.

Unlike gasoline and other fossil fuels, sodium boro-hydride contains no carbon, the dirty culprit in greenhouse gases and smog, DaimlerChrysler said.

A tank of sodium boro-hydride solution about the size of a regular gas tank can power the concept vehicle about 300 miles.

Borax, the essential element in sodium boro-hydride, is readily available in North America, but Chrysler hasn't solved yet how the large quantities required could be transported in a cost-effective way from borax mines to filling stations.

On another front, DaimlerChrysler and Ford Motor Co. have worked with Canadian fuel cell developer Ballard Power Systems Inc. to create a fuel cell vehicle that runs on hydrogen made from methanol, which can be created from coal, natural gas or renewable sources such as wood.

"If you're just going to create it (hydrogen) from other sources of oil, then that's not going to solve our problem. We need to create it in a different way or find a way to sequester hydrogen," said Susan Cischke, Ford vice president in charge of environmental and safety issues.

"If we want to look at ways to not be so dependent on foreign oil, certainly alternative fuels are a big part of that."

To be sure, the 180,000 gasoline stations in the United States won't be going away. For one thing, fuel cell vehicles will need to fill up when on long trips away from home.

And GM is working with oil companies such as ChevronTexaco Corp. and Exxon Mobil Corp. on fuel cell research. GM has developed a gasoline reformer, which converts gasoline in a car into hydrogen to run fuel cells.

The reformers could be placed at the gas station and pure hydrogen could be pumped into the car's tank.

"They're not going to sit back and let this happen to them," Burns said of the oil companies. "So what we're hoping that we can do is create a good dynamic between electricity, natural gas and petroleum as sources of energy for transportation."