This weekend GM had a Ride and Drive event for their new Hydrogen Fuel Cell vehicle. I was invited because I signed up to be part of the test community for the Equinox Hydrogen Fuel Cell vehicle, Project Driveway. Overall I was very impressed by the technology. I have been a bit skeptical about the feasibility of hydrogen use for powering vehicles. However the presentation was pretty convincing. I’m not going to go into the details about the fuel cell technology, but basically each fuel cell has a center membrane that allows hydrogen to pass through and bond with oxygen to create water. The bond releases energy from the hydrogen and that is what powers the electric engine. My skepticism has been with the production, storage and distribution of hydrogen. GM has done a pretty good job with coming up with answers to address those concerns. Basically they say that hydrogen is used quite a bit already today in industrial settings. They say that the amount of hydrogen already used commercially each year could power 130 million of these vehicles for the entire year. They also mentioned that hydrogen is used heavily in gasoline refinement, so if we could cut down the production of gasoline we could use the hydrogen that would have been used for refinement, to power the vehicles. The main source they’re looking to use to create the hydrogen is Natural Gas, which the US produces, and they say that if the US could increase its production of natural gas by 2% then that would be enough to support hydrogen powered cars. GM has also done quite a bit of testing on the vehicle storage containers for the hydrogen to address the safety concerns. They had a slide that mentioned bonfire test, rifle shooting test, drop tests, crash tests, etc. so I’m pretty convinced that the storage containers will hold up. The other main issue is the distribution infrastructure. That they don’t currently have a plan for, but they did estimate that it would take about $20 billion to create one. So it was pretty much a day long event, so I’m not going to be able to list everything I learned here, but the technology does look very promising.
What they also talked about during this event, and what looks even more promising to me is the Chevy Volt. Which is going to be built on the E-Flex platform. E-Flex basically works like this: the car is driven by an electric motor that can run off an internal battery. The internal battery can be charged off the electric grid at your home and will power the vehicle for about 40 miles (initially). The platform also has a combustion engine that is used to charge up the battery, not to drive the vehicle. So as you drain your battery driving the engine is used to charge it back up. What makes this system E-Flex is that the combustion engine can be swapped out. So the first version will have a gasoline engine, then it will be swapped for an ethanol or biodiesel engine, then for a hydrogen fuel cell engine, and then whatever technology comes out in the future. I personally think this is a very good idea, and should be the direction we’re heading for vehicles.