Copyright 2003 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. All rights reserved.
April 15, 2003
President Bush's latest hydrogen initiative, which he announced in his January 28 State of the Union address, was met at a recent hearing of the House Science Committee with a mixture of excitement and skepticism.
The president's proposal would fund research and development (R&D) supporting the use of hydrogen fuel cells, which may eventually replace gasoline-powered engines in cars. The program is designed to complement last year's FreedomCAR initiative by supporting the development of infrastructure to produce, store, and distribute hydrogen for use as a fuel to power vehicles. The president has requested a total of $1.5 billion over the next five years for the new initiative and FreedomCar, including $272 million in R&D funding for fiscal 2004, $68 million of which would be new funds.
"I ask you to take a crucial step and protect our environment in ways that generations before us could not have imagined," President Bush said in his State of the Union address. "In this century, the greatest environmental progress will come about not through endless lawsuits or command-and-control regulations, but through technology and innovation."
Hydrogen fuel cells can produce electricity by combining hydrogen and oxygen gases, a process whose only waste product is water. A hydrogen-powered car would thus be very clean and produce no smog-causing pollutants or greenhouse gases. Since they would not use gasoline, such cars could help reduce the nation's oil consumption and dependence on foreign sources of oil.
A shift to a so-called "hydrogen economy" would not automatically reduce the nation's total energy use or greenhouse emissions because the production of hydrogen fuel would require the use of other fuels, most likely including fossil fuels such as natural gas. However, because hydrogen can be produced from many different sources, fuel cell vehicles could rely at least to some extent on environmentally friendly energy technologies such as wind or solar power and carbon sequestration.
Hydrogen, produced mostly from natural gas, is widely used in the chemical and oil industries. Demonstration vehicles that run on hydrogen fuel cells have also been produced, and General Motors announced that it will put several fuel cell vehicles in use in the Washington, DC, area in May. By October, Shell has committed to equipping one of its Washington-area gas stations with a hydrogen pump to support these vehicles. GM has said that it expects to offer a hydrogen-powered car for commercial sale by 2010.
Technology is also available for storage of hydrogen either as a compressed gas or as a very cold (-253° Celsius) liquid, and high-pressure hydrogen pipelines are in use as well. However, the challenges of implementing these infrastructure technologies on the scale necessary for wide use in automobiles are daunting, as some members of the Science Committee pointed out at the March 5 hearing.
"The magic of the marketplace alone is not going to create a hydrogen economy, at least not anytime soon," said Rep. Sherwood L. Boehlert (R-NY), the Science Committee chairman. "In addition to the huge technical hurdles, switching to hydrogen may entail enormous costs. … Hydrogen will be a cost-competitive fuel in the coming decades only if one takes into account the social costs of current fuels, such as the pollution they generate and the dependence on foreign oil they promote."
Moreover, many members of the committee questioned the administration's decision to request cuts in other energy R&D programs. "Much of next year's proposed [hydrogen initiative] funding comes from cutting other renewable energy R&D programs," Rep. Boehlert said. "That's not acceptable."
But David K. Garman, the Department of Energy's assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy, disputed this charge, describing the department's other programs as "reasonably flat."
In response to a question from Rep. Nick Smith (R-MI), Larry Burns, GM's vice president for R&D and planning, said that focusing on hydrogen would not sacrifice other efforts, such as higher-efficiency hybrid and gasoline-powered vehicles. He said that GM has near-term fuel-efficiency initiatives, as well as its long-term hydrogen initiative. Hybrids, he said, are an important "intermediate" technology.
While many environmentalists welcome the advent of fuel cell technology, and the potential to produce hydrogen using renewable energy sources, others see the Bush proposal as an attempt to reduce pressure on the automotive industry to embrace the use of hybrid electric technology. Hybrid cards are already on the market and offer substantial fuel-efficiency improvements. While the administration hopes that automakers will produce cost-competitive hydrogen-powered cars by 2010, critics argue that they are not likely to come to market for a decade or more.
The Science Committee plans to address these issues as part of a comprehensive energy reform package that the House will likely take up in April. The Committee expects to mark up its portion of the bill, H.R. 238, later this month. ••• [an error occurred while processing this directive]
Copyright 2003 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. All rights reserved. |