Nearly $7 million in federal financial support is headed to five California developers working on hydrogen fuel cells, which emit only water vapor as a byproduct. Foremost among the recipients are Ardica, in San Francisco; HRL Laboratories, in Malibu; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in the East Bay; Materia, in Pasadena; and the Livermore branch of Sandia National Laboratories.

In a press release, the DOE calls the fuel cell effort “critical to the widespread commercialization of hydrogen and fuel cell technologies.” 

Hydrogen technology remains limited in its applications to automobiles, as a result of its weight, size, cost and range constraints. Nevertheless, hydrogen fuel cells are back in vogue after being eclipsed by the trend in favor of electric vehicles. 

In general, the market challenges facing electric cars are even more substantial than those surrounding fuel-cell vehicles. That’s the case even though electric cars have been on the market for more than a century. Multiple auto manufacturers have labored to broaden their appeal. Government funds have been used to incentive their use.

But whereas experts recently estimated 5 to 10 percent of the market would be penetrated by electric vehicles worldwide, today optimistic estimates don’t exceed 1 percent, according to an investors’ report by Morgan Stanley Research cited by the Los Angeles Times.

No easy solutions

As supporters and critics of electric cars both know, the vehicles suffer from a short range augmented only by repeated fuel-ups at relatively rare recharge stations. Perhaps even more important, electric vehicles have failed to meet the performance and aesthetic expectations of most American consumers. Although sales are rising, they’re still so low that manufacturers and dealerships are cooling to the cars. Time magazine reports that a combination of high production costs and relatively low gasoline costs are souring analysts, dealers and customers on electric vehicles.

For automakers, that raises the stakes when it comes to hydrogen cells. Toyota, for instance, is staking a fuel-cell push on California’s so-called hydrogen highway — an undertaking began under then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger that’s on track to cost the Golden State some $150 million.

Toyota’s turn to hydrogen is part of a swift pivot away from electric. Its partnership with Tesla is being brought to an end, thanks to paltry consumer interest in an electric RAV4 model. There’s just one problem: the infrastructure for fuel cell cars is only part of the equation for hydrogen success. The other part is the hydrogen itself.

Pure hydrogen, it turns out, is hard to come by. “Despite being the most common element in the universe,” observes one report, “pure hydrogen is not particularly easy to come by on Earth. The most common method of producing hydrogen involves stripping it off hydrocarbons like methane and gasoline through a process called steam reforming. That doesn’t do much to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, but other methods like bioreactors and water electrolysis are far from efficient enough for industrial scale production.”

A regulatory push

For alternative-energy skeptics, there’s a certain irony in environmental regulations pushing automakers toward a solution that keeps American drivers fossil-fuel reliant. As PBS reports, solar or wind power could theoretically be used to produce hydrogen for fuel cells — but that’s not part of current technology.

It’s all enough to leave some asking why automakers would even bother. After all, environmentalists who favor electric vehicles are criticizing Toyota, Hyundai and others for working on hydrogen fuel cells at all. “Many of them even call the new technology a waste of time, requiring a whole new network of expensive fueling stations,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle. “Fuel-cell cars, as a result, will jump into the market without a safety net.”

Car manufacturers are jumping in large part because they’re being pushed by state and federal initiatives. Along with seven partner states, California has pledged to ensure that 3.3 million electric or fuel cell vehicles are in use by 2025. That’s a stretch, not least because 15 percent of those cars are intended to be zero-emissions vehicles, and not just hybrids.

By Joseph Perkins

If you build it, they will come.

That was the cockeyed reasoning behind a state grant program to encourage construction of hydrogen fueling stations long before hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are actually motoring along the Golden State’s freeways and roads.

The California Energy Commission recently suspended the five-year-old program. The agency’s official explanation was that it intends to “revise solicitation protocols.”

The program was created by a state law that aims to build momentum for the so-called California Hydrogen Highway Network, which was initiated by a 2004 executive order signed by former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Nunez and Schwarzenegger bought into the premise of renewable energy advocates that, with hydrogen fueling stations dotting the California landscape, the state’s motorists would willingly abandon their dirty, gasoline-powered vehicles for cleaner, environmentally-friendlier cars and trucks powered by hydrogen fuel cells.

But five years and $25 million later, the program has encouraged construction of few hydrogen fueling stations.

That is attributable in no small part to the fact that there is almost no demand for such stations. And that’s because there currently are almost no cars or trucks on California roads powered by hydrogen fuel cells.

And there won’t be any until at least 2017, when automakers are expected to bring their first hydrogen fuel cell cars to showrooms. But as experience has taught with electric cars, projected delivery dates are almost always overly optimistic.

Waste and abuse of grant money

So where has the state vehicle license fee money gone that was supposed to build so many hydrogen fueling stations?

Into the bank accounts of such out-of-state corporations as Pennsylvania-based Air Products & Chemicals, and the Germany-based Linde Group, which are members of a coterie, the California Fuel Cell Partnership, along with eight automakers.

All the grant money derived from vehicle license fees paid by California motorists went exclusively to members of the partnership.

The perverse thing is, while the state energy commission says it is “cancelling its grant solicitation for hydrogen fueling stations,” it has not altogether abandoned the ill-conceived program strange bedfellows Nunez and Schwarzenegger created.

“A robust hydrogen fuel station infrastructure is necessary,” explained a commission statement, “to support automakers’ rollout of fuel cell vehicles to comply with the state Air Resources Board’s Zero Emission Vehicle program.

Well, the issue is not about hydrogen fuel station infrastructure. It’s about the state government using public funds to pay for creation of that infrastructure.

Indeed, it’s patently unfair to require 99.9 percent of California motorists to subsidize infrastructure that will be used by the .1 percent that own hydrogen fuel cell cars. Let those motorists driving on hydrogen pay for their own infrastructure.

If the demand for hydrogen fuel cell cars grows to the level expected by the state energy commission and hoped for by automakers planning to unveil such vehicles five years from now, it will be unnecessary to proffer grants to corporations like Air Products = Chemical and the Linde Group to build hydrogen fueling stations.

The promise of profits will encourage those and other corporations to build the stations on their own nickels and dimes.