Posted by
Duane Truitt on Tuesday, May 20, 2008 5:04:31 PM
Chances are, you may not be aware that America's first commercially available fuel cell-powered automobile is hitting the market this summer. It's the Honda FCX "Clarity". You can read about it on Honda's website at http://automobiles.honda.com/fcx-clarity/.
Now, this does not mean you're likely to be driving one of these cars this summer. Honda is releasing only a limited number of these vehicles through a special comprehensive, subsidized lease program ... for $600 a month you get the vehicle, scheduled maintenance, and insurance. Great deal you say? Yes, of course, but that price comes nowhere close to covering Honda's actual production cost. However, Honda's presumed objective is to get these vehicles out on the road, owned and driven by actual customers, and generating news and buzz, so that the product, as well as the underlying technology, can be demonstrated and sold to the public and business community at large. Honda naturally hopes that by getting these vehicles on the road (in southern California only, initially), they can bootstrap a hydrogen fueling market that in turn leads to development of hydrogen fueling infrastructure, which will beget the sales of more fuel cell vehicles, which will ... and so on and so on.
After all, Honda is essentially trying to foment the same kind of transportation revolution that Henry Ford successfully brought to America 100 odd years ago, in concert with Standard Oil's development of a gasoline supply infrastructure. It's pretty daunting, when you think about it!
The road test reviews on the Honda Clarity are generally positive, with articles published by several major papers posted on the Honda website. In general, the drive tests showed the vehicle to be practical, attractive, and provided good performance with excellent fuel economy (although both Honda and the test drive pubs all strained to equilibrate hydrogen fuel economy to "miles per gallon" in gasoline, which I find to be kinda silly and unnecessary ... but hey, I'm an engineer, so I suppose this is where we'll be coming from until fuel cell cars become widespread and better understood).
The biggest drawback for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is current lack of refueling infrastructure in the United States - both in terms of production of the fuel itself, and a distribution network so that vehicles can move beyond a limited home turf. Today, most commercial hydrogen gas is produced from a chemical conversion process involving natural gas as feedstock. This is a fairly inefficient conversion, estimated to require an energy input of roughly 1.76 BTU input vs. 1 BTU energy output. Contrast this ratio to gasoline fuel (yes, it takes energy to find, extract, and process gasoline), which has a net energy input/output ratio of around 1.2 to 1.25. However, Honda claims "gas mileage" of 68 mpg (gasoline equivalent) for the Clarity, so that the net economy of the fuel/vehicle combination is still much better than for typical gas-powered cars, and is comparable to that of the best gas-electric hybrids like the Toyota Prius.
Of course, in addition to great fuel economy, a fuel cell vehicle emits no air pollutants ... none, zip, nada. The fuel cell reaction emits only pure water and oxygen. No carbon dioxide (for those who stress unnecessarily over global warming), no carbon monoxide, no volatile organic chemicals (VOC), no ozone, no particulates, no smoke, and no smell.
Long term, of course, the real driver for "clean" fuel technology will be to generate the hydrogen fuel electrostatically using clean, renewable energy sources. This is exactly how the Norwegians are doing it with their "Hydrogen Highway" program. In the Norwegian program, they're generating their hydrogen fuel using their existing abundant supply of hydropower electricity, as well as a system of distributed electrolysis generator refueling stations located along the Hydrogen Highway.
Here in the United States, our best near term bet for clean renewable electricity to generate mass quantities of hydrogen fuel is a combination of wind power, solar power, and nuclear power. Wind power capacity is increasing exponentially in the US - in fact, just today I saw an article about T. Boone Pickens investing billions in the largest wind energy farm in the United States in his home State of Texas - with a total of 4,000 megawatts capacity.
Now, many of the critics of wind power claim that wind-generated power is "useless" because it cannot be commanded arbitrarily to meet peak energy demands - like traditional thermal power plants - because it can only be generated when the wind blows. Of course, if you know anything about wind energy, it is in fact a form of solar energy, being driven by the sun, and therefore tends to blow hardest during the daytime which just happens to be the peak energy part of the 24-hour daily cycle. But in any event, we can easily use wind power whenever it is generated to power up hydrogen fuel plants, regardless of grid peak demand factors. All you need is water and wind to make all the hydrogen we'll need to power our new fleet of fuel cell cars.
And then of course, there is the ultimate holy grail of alternative energy: nuclear fusion ... with exciting advances being reported on the Bussard Fusion Reactor (more on that in another post), we literally have the potential in the next few years to permanently divorce ourselves from the use of petroleum fuels on the highways of America.
Take that, OPEC!