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Fuel cell cars on the way, but slowly

NABERN, Germany: Just imagine filling up your car at the windmill down the road.

That’s what Andreas Truckenbrodt dreams of, but DaimlerChrysler AG’s director of fuel cell and alternative powertrain vehicles knows there are still hurdles to clear before zero-emission cars become kings of the road.

“The consensus in the industry now is that we will see the first commercial (fuel cell) vehicles on the street from around 2010,” he told Reuters in an interview this week. “There won’t be many, and it will take significantly longer until we see a lot of fuel cell vehicles. I am sure that in our lifetime we will not see fuel cell vehicles exclusively.”

Truckenbrodt — a self-described car guy who helped develop the SLR super sports car that Daimler builds with McLaren before he switched to fuel cells — presented a vision of new-age cars and trucks blending into the scene, not exploding to life.

“We expect that we will see a variety of internal combustion engines — petrol and diesel — hybrids, natural gas, alternative energy and fuel cells for a relatively long time as each has advantages for specific applications.” he said.

“In the short term, optimising the conventional internal combustion engine certainly offers a lot of potential for both petrol and diesel. The hybrid is a mid-term strategy for certain applications and a bridge to the ultimate solution, fuel cells.”

But there are still technical obstacles to overcome and the issue of setting up infrastructure to tap the unlimited supply of hydrogen and wean the world from its dependence on crude oil.

Technical issues include extending fuel cells’ reliability and durability; ensuring that they start at sub-freezing temperatures; reducing costs, and storing enough hydrogen in a small enough space to be workable. “I firmly believe that none of these points is a show-stopper,” Truckenbrodt said, but the technology still needs time, money and practical experience to attain its potential.

Bringing down prices: There is practically no political opposition to embracing fuel cells, which use the chemical reaction between hydrogen and air to generate electricity and emit only water vapour.

That paves the way for a potentially huge market that carmakers and technology firms are chasing at top speed.

DaimlerChrysler, which rolled out its first fuel cell delivery van a decade ago, has already invested around a billion euros in the campaign even though Truckenbrodt said it was impossible to forecast when the business would turn a profit.

Prices for the vehicles have to fall dramatically before they can compete for customers. That means manufacturers have to boost volumes, simplify the technology and cut material costs.

“The volume issue is certainly a tough one, but we see here and at others carmakers that the number of units is gradually rising from generation to generation,” Truckenbrodt said, which also helps bring down prices for materials.

But even a leader like Daimler will have only some 100 fuel cell test cars on the street by year’s end, plus dozens of buses and some delivery vans being tried out around the world.

“Longevity and reliability is for me nearly the number one technical issue we have to improve,” he said. Reliability should eventually be good because, unlike standard engines, there are no moving parts in the stack of fuel cells that powers vehicles. But the membrane that separates the hydrogen from oxygen dries out over time and tends to rip, ruining its efficiency. Daimler is working on this with membrane manufacturers.

In the race to bring out commerically viable fuel cell vehicles, Daimler is competing against other carmakers, hybrid technology that combines electric motors with standard motors, and the still-dominant internal combustion engine itself.

“Clearly we measure ourselves against the internal combustion engine. We don’t say that the consumer is prepared to pay double for fuel cells because it is an expensive technology,” he said.

Daimler also cooperates with rivals on items such as codes and standards to ensure that even simple things like the size of nozzles at filling stations is uniform.

Building the hydrogen society: Energy companies will also play a crucial role in promoting hydrogen as they prepare for the day the oil runs out. “We say that we will take care of providing the cars but we won’t take our money to build filling stations and create the hydrogen infrastructure,” Truckenbrodt said.

The filling station of the future will look very much like ones today, but offer hydrogen pumps next to those for petrol and diesel. The issue is where the hydrogen will come from.

Truckenbrodt noted it would be easy to hook up filling stations to the underground hydrogen pipelines that already serve chemical companies in some areas of Europe. “But what I also find really interesting is decentralised local production,” he said, noting this could be a compact and affordable way to convert natural gas into hydrogen.

Using natural gas to unleash hydrogen would still release carbon dioxide into the environment, so the long-term goal is to use regenerative energy sources like solar, hydro/geothermic, wind, or biomass to split off hydrogen from water.

Splitting off hydrogen is no problem, but storing enough of it in a small space is one of the great issues to be resolved. Daimler’s current A-class prototype can carry around 1.5 kg of hydrogen, enough to go 160 km, which is not really satisfactory.

But fuel cell performance is advancing by leaps and bounds, he said, unlike the tortuous pace at which engineers eke out progress in standard internal combustion engines. reuters

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