The US would have to spend $200bn on fuel cells by 2023 to support a transition to hydrogen-powered vehicles, according to a new report by the National Research Council.
The 250-page report, called Transitions to Alternative Transportation Technologies: A Focus on Hydrogen, estimates a bill of $55bn for the Government and $145bn from the private sector to support research and development, promotion of the technology, and vehicle manufacturing. Around $10bn of the total would have to be spent on hydrogen production alone, it added.
Annual government expenditure on hydrogen fuel cell development currently stands at $300m. It would have to hit 10 times that much by 2015 to get two million hydrogen fuel cell vehicles on US roads by 2023 the report argued.
Robert Remick, director of the hydrogen technologies and systems centre at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, said that he saw hope in the report. Nevertheless, fuel cells would have to become cheaper by a factor of between three and 10, he said. "We also need more storage," he added. "We have to get 300 miles out of a tank rather than the 180 we're getting now."
There are several ways to produce hydrogen for fuel cells. Electrolysis from water is the cleanest, but it is energy-intensive. Carbon sequestration could be also be used to make viable large-scale plants to produce hydrogen from coal.
However, experts expect distributed steam methane reformation (DSMR) will be the primary means of production through 2015. It still gives off CO2, but at less than half the rate of gasoline-powered vehicles, according to the report.
Roy Kim, a spokesman for the California Fuel Cell Partnership, said that the refuelling infrastructure required to support hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is beginning to emerge. The state also has 27 hydrogen refuelling stations today, and will shortly be opening three more, worth over $7m in total. The stations are servicing more than 200 test vehicles that have been put on Californian roads since 1999.
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