Fuel Cells Begin to Play Major Role in State, Country
By Bill Yelenak
WASHINGTON – As the war in Iraq continues to highlight the United States’ dependence on foreign oil, many scientists are turning their attention to something discovered 164 years ago: fuel cells powered by hydrogen.
The potent cells already power a New York City police station and a skyscraper. They have been placed in buses. They have gone to the moon.
The cells, said U.S. Rep. John Larson (D-1), “hold the greatest potential and the greatest opportunity for us both to embrace the most abundant element in the universe in hydrogen and also to wean ourselves off of our near-addiction to petroleum.”
Fuel cells produce electricity by creating a chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen. Cars powered by fuel cells would emit only water vapor.
United Technologies Corporation Fuel Cells, of South Windsor, the leading fuel cell manufacturer in the United States, makes the PC25 fuel cell power plant, which converts natural gas and other fuels into hydrogen before they enter the fuel cell, according to UTC spokesman Peter Dalpe.
Larson, who has proposed legislation that would step up research on fuel cells and hydrogen gas, said the United States produces far less oil than it uses. The U.S. Department of Energy reported that in 2001, the United States consumed 26 percent of the world’s oil and produced only 9 percent.
President George W. Bush’s proposal to drill for oil on protected land in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska wouldn’t change that equation, said Larson, who opposes the Alaskan drilling.
Despite his support for drilling in ANWR, Bush also is pushing to increase research into fuel cells. Bush has proposed spending $720 million in new money over the next five years to conduct research on hydrogen fuel cells.
Although fuel cells were invented in 1839, they did not have a practical application until the Apollo space missions of the 1960s. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s – after the Gulf War — that the automotive industry really began looking into the technology.
TO THE MOON AND BACK
UTC, a power company, began working with fuel cells in the 1960s, when it figured out how to send them into space on the Apollo missions, according to Dalpe. He credited fuel cells with making possible the first moon landing in 1969, explaining that they helped power the Apollo XI spacecraft as it exited and re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere.
“We started with the space missions, and the reason the space missions needed a fuel cell was they needed to provide electrical power on-board the spacecraft,” Dalpe said. “You need to do that as you’re going through the atmosphere and as you’re coming back.”
Dalpe said it would have been impossible to reach the moon at the time using batteries, the existing technology, because they are too large and heavy.
“We wouldn’t have made it up to the moon without fuel cells,” Dalpe said. “And of course, you’re sending up hydrogen and oxygen with this thing, so hey – what better to run it off of?”
The Apollo missions, Dalpe said, were “where the fuel cell industry started.”
DOWN TO EARTH
Despite the fuel cell’s success in space, it wasn’t until the 1990s that major advances were made.
Companies such as UTC and the Canadian-based Ballard Power Systems had researched the fuel cells and were ready to put them on fleet-based vehicles, such as buses, to eliminate those vehicles’ reliance on gasoline.
SunLine Transit Agency, a California-based bus company, originally considered putting fuel cells on buses in 1992. But it discovered that with the immense size of the fuel cells, placing them in a stack on a vehicle would take up “36 seats of a 40-seat bus,” according to Bill Clapper, the executive director of the SunLine Services Group, which operates the bus company.
However, in August 1992, the company turned instead to compressed natural gas, which, it concluded, was cost-effective and environmentally sound.
SunLine has continued to test the newer fuel-cell technology, Clapper said. For 13 months beginning in 2000, the company tested one fuel-cell powered bus for a private shuttle service. SunLine was able to use it on buses after fuel cell companies discovered advancements allowing fuel cell stacks to be as small as 1 foot wide and 3 feet long.
Each fuel cell is about the size of a license plate and with the current design for cars and buses, there are about 250 of them in a stack. That entire stack, Dalpe said, can fit under the back seat.
More recently, SunLine tested a hybrid bus, running off of a battery and a UTC fuel cell stack, on one of its regular routes. The six-month demonstration was halted when the bus needed routine maintenance. But, clearly, it was popular with riders.
“We started getting calls into our customer service line wanting to know when the fuel-cell bus was going to be back online because they liked its quietness,” Clapper said.
Clapper said he thought the fuel cell stacks would become prevalent in buses, which operate in fleets, before they would in cars. People who drive cars would have more difficulty finding hydrogen stations to refuel, he explained.
While the bus was a short-term success, Clapper said the technology needed to be improved before it could be used all the time. One problem is each cell’s duration, he said.
Clapper said SunLine runs each of its buses about 6,900 hours a year. Since the current life of a fuel cell is just 4,000 hours, each stack would have to be replaced nearly twice a year, he said.
“The reliability and the durability are the issues in the transportation mode,” Clapper said. “It’s much easier in a stationary mode for fuel cells, because you don’t have the shake, rattle and roll environment that affects all the vehicles out there.”
STAYING STILL, BUT MOVING FORWARD
Looming 48 stories over Times Square, the Conde Nast building boasts a stationary fuel cell. Fuel cells also are used to power several of New York City’s wastewater treatment plants and a police station in Central Park.
Dalpe, the UTC spokesman, said it would have cost the city $1.3 million to rip up part of the park to install electrical equipment to power the police station. Instead, the police department bought one of UTC’s PC25s – at the going rate of $900,000 – and now the entire station runs free of the city’s power grid.
“If the lights go off in the city, they don’t go off in this police station,” Dalpe said. “Here you are, right in the middle of our largest city, this real application of a fuel cell.”
At the Conde Nast building, two of UTC’s units – which are the size of a small truck – add to the power flowing into the building from the city’s electrical grid. They also produce a significant amount of heat.
The Connecticut Juvenile Training School, a correctional school for teens, has the largest fuel cell installation in the world.
If the entire town of Middletown goes dark during a power outage, the lights, video surveillance cameras and security stations of the training school will keep on working. Six 200-kilowatt fuel cells, which work along with the electric grid and other generators, provide the facility with 1.2-megawatts of power.
However, it will be trumped next year by a 1.4-megawatt system being placed in Long Island for telephone company Verizon. The seven 200-kilowatt fuel cells will work with each other to give power to a call-routing center that gives local phone service to approximately 40,000 customers. Verizon will use generators, batteries and the electrical grid to back up the fuel cells.
PC25s have also been used in high schools, including South Windsor High School. The school added a fuel cell to its existing power system, according to Al Mothersele, chairman of the applied technology department.
Mothersele said the device made sense because “it would provide power in the event of an emergency, like a blizzard or something like that.”
He added that the school now uses about half of the electric power that it used before, significantly reducing its draw off the power grid.
The fuel-cell system has not been fully tested, since the school has not had a power outage since it was installed last October, Mothersele said. But it could provide an important safety net because the high school serves as a regional emergency shelter, he said.
“It’s really a seamless technology,” Mothersele said. “It’s just out there doing its thing, and we reap the benefits.”
DRIVING AROUND TOWN
The big new test for fuel cells will take place in cars.
The first fuel cell vehicle to be certified as a zero emissions vehicle (ZEV) by both the Environmental Protection Agency and the California Air Resources Board is the Honda FCX, powered by fuel cells produced by Ballard, based in British Columbia.
There is only one on the road. And behind the wheel is Brian Williams, Los Angeles’ deputy mayor for transportation. Williams said the FCX is very much like a regular gasoline-powered car.
“Other than the fact that it is probably the most environmentally sound vehicle anyone is driving, there isn’t a whole lot of difference,” Williams said.
Other car companies are rushing to compete with Honda. Dalpe said UTC is working with BMW, Hyundai and Nissan to provide various forms of fuel-cell technology for their cars. He said BMW wants to install a hydrogen combustion engine to power its car and use a fuel cell to power the electrical instruments.
“They put a 5-kilowatt fuel cell in the trunk,” Dalpe said. “All the gizmos of modern BMW Series 7 vehicles run off the fuel cell. You can have the engine off with everything on.”
Nissan has developed the X-TRAIL, which uses both a fuel cell stack and a battery, and is licensing UTC’s patent on the fuel cell technology.
WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS
Rep. Larson is optimistic that fuel cells soon will help the United States reduce its reliance on oil.
“I think that this is doable within a ten-year period,” he said. “It will take Americans stepping up, but imagine the amount of money that will flow into Wall Street if all of a sudden municipalities and states are requesting of General Motors and others that they want vehicles that are powered by fuel cells.”
Dalpe agreed, saying the technology could make cars powered by fuel cells available to buyers in seven to 12 years.
Andy Boyd, a spokesman for Honda, said the FCX is still in testing, and its ultimate price is uncertain.
“It’s all new technology, it’s all mass produced. Any time you’re in that stage of technological development, cost has to be very high,” Boyd said. “We’re optimistic that, over time, those costs can come down.”
While Dalpe and Larson were hopeful the fuel cell cars could be on the market in the next few years, others, such as Clapper of the SunLine bus company, said placing the cells into vehicles might not be a viable method of power for some time. He said there needed to be more improvements to make fuel cells a good economic choice for large fleets.
Christopher Phelps, an advocate for the Connecticut Public Interest Research Group (ConnPIRG), said there were other roadblocks. He said he is concerned about how hydrogen is refined. If it is obtained from fossil fuels, it would create pollution, Phelps said.
However, he said there were plenty of other ways to refine the world’s most abundant gas than getting it from fossil fuels. Using solar or wind power to generate hydrogen, he said, would make fuel cells the most environmentally friendly way of powering cars or buildings.
Fuel cells will undergo years of testing before they become commonplace. But Los Angeles’ Williams said he’s eagerly awaiting the day the technology o reaches its full potential and believed hydrogen-powered cars would create a new way of life.
“There’s been a huge investment by both private and governmental entities toward this new technology,” Williams said. “I really do think this car is at the cusp of the revolution in our automotive industry and in our power industry right now.”
“Personally, I intend to buy one once I can get one that’s a little bigger for me and my family,” he said. “I’d absolutely be in the front of the line, ready to purchase one.”
Bill Yelenak, a Boston University student, works at the Boston University Washington News Service in Washington, D.C. His telephone number is 202-756-2860 ext: 114 and his email is byelenak@newbritainherald.com.
Published in The New Britain Herald, in Connecticut.
