Technologies: Hydrogen Fuel Cells
Hydrogen fuel cells have been widely touted as the ideal, emissions free alternative to the internal combustion engine, and most likely to succeed it in mass production. It is on the grounds of such expectations that research and development in hydrogen increased substantially over the 1990's, most notably through the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles, which involved the "Big Three" American automakers in coordinated fuel cell research.
Initiated by Ballard Power Systems on the part of the auto consortium, together with the California Air Resources Board, and the California Fuel Cell Partnership, hydrogen transit buses were put into trial operation in three different locations in the 1990's: Chicago, Vancouver, and Georgetown University.
More recently, SunLine Transit Agency in Thousand Palms, California, completed a 13-month hydrogen bus study. Committed to developing hydrogen fuel cell technology, SunLine plans to begin testing another fuel cell bus in mid-2002. "Our desire," says SunLine's Richard Cromwell, "is to end up with a fuel cell fleet." The first U.S. transit agency to fully convert its fueling and infrastructure to CNG, SunLine sees its commitment to natural gas as "the bridge" to hydrogen. "With CNG you have a compressor on the bus, you just adjust the lines to use hydrogen as well as natural gas…it's one change."
If the process of splitting hydrogen from the other elements to which it is attached is done utilizing power drawn from hydro, wind, solar, or biomass sources, hydrogen has the potential to be both renewable and entirely free of emissions at the production and consumption ends of the life-cycle. SunLine Transit currently powers some of its hydrogen generation from a photovoltaic array, a truly zero-GHG method of making hydrogen.
SunLine expects that, in less sunny parts of the U.S., hydrogen will most likely be make from methane, in a process called natural gas steam reforming. Though hydrogen may be manufactured from many feedstocks, the existence of extensive natural gas pipelines and cheap natural gas would allow the manufacture of hydrogen to take place in decentralized fashion at the site of refueling. Steam reforming at the station releases virtually all the carbon in CH4 as CO2. However, the extremely high efficiency of a hydrogen fuel cell is such that much lower GHG emissions per mile of travel can be attained.
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