Hydrogen Road Tour Comes to Seattle

I was starting to wonder if hydrogen cars actually do exist since I'd never seen one in the wild. Yesterday, my question was answered thanks to the Seattle stop of the Hydrogen Road Tour. The tour--a 28-city, nine-day tour from San Diego to Vancouver, B.C.--is a project of the California Fuel Cell Partnership (CAFCP), which brings car manufacturers, fuel providers and government together to make hydrogen a reality for average consumers, according to Chris White, its communications director.[gallery link="file"]

The drive of this year's tour is to demonstrate how close to market hydrogen cars are now. As close as they may be, and admittedly these models looked and apparently drive like any car you see on the road today, there is still a severe lack of infrastructure for delivering the hydrogen to drivers. CAFCP wants to make sure that hydrogen stations line Interstate-5 from Mexico up to Canada as a part of the three-state Green Freeway Intiative, White says. Without that kind of infrastructure, the 12-car tour is forced to bring its own hydrogen supply along in a tanker. Not a terribly clean-fuel solution.

There are a number of obstacles still standing in the way of this plan that CAFCP is working on. So far, only California has moved to make hydrogen a transportation fuel, which means it is the only state that can tax it like it does with gas; it is the only state that can inspect it and ensure its quality and it is the only state where hydrogen can be delivered via the types of pumps all drives know.

The good news about hydrogen fueling points is that, "They don't have to be like gas stations," White says. Instead of building out a delivery infrastructure, she says CAFCP envsions fueling points that manufacture hydrogen on site using natural gas or renewables as the energy input. Even when using natural gas to create the hydrogen, she says,  it takes 55 percent less energy than gas to drive and releases 45 percent less greenhouse gas emissions.

The tour arrived here in Seattle on the same day that General Motors declared bankruptcy, which made GM's representative on the tour the most popular interview of the day. Whether or not plans for the Chevy Volt and hydrogen cars will continue unabated at GM are still in doubt. Dawn McKensize, assistant manager of product communications, says that GM's bankruptcy will not derail its plan for cleaner cars. She insists that the Volt and its hydrogen-powered Equinox, are "a huge part of the re-invention of GM." The Volt, she assured me, is still on track to be released by the end of 2010, bankruptcy or no. The federal government, which will own as much as 70 percent of GM for the near future, is not likely to cut funding to projects like Equinox because of the massive investment the company has already made and the need for it to come to fruition, according to her. "If we need new emission standards, we're going to need fuel cells," she says.

But getting there, like the Hydrogen Road Tour itself, is going to be a long haul.