September 2004

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WASHINGTON, DC - In hindsight, it seems like a foregone conclusion: Based on the recommendations of a review panel, the U.S. Energy Department decided last month to halt all work on on-board fuel processor research and development for fuel cell vehicles that had looked at the idea of extracting hydrogen from gasoline.

DoE has been investigating the concept for about a decade as one option to bridge the transition to a hydrogen economy because of the difficulty of storing hydrogen on board of a vehicle. But faced with persistent technical problems and uncertainties whether on-board fuel processing would meet the administration’s FreedomCAR technical criteria in time to support the 2015 commercialization decision for fuel cell vehicles, DoE last year set a deadline for a Go/No Go decision for onboard processing for June.

On the face of it, the concept - using a hydrocarbon fuel as a hydrogen carrier when the basic rationale for a hydrogen economy is to get away from fossil fuels in the first place - seemed slightly oxymoronic. But proponents argued the ease and familiarity of using gasoline in cars and trucks and extracting the hydrogen via a tiny chemical plant under the hood made a lot of logistical sense, at least until better hydrogen storage technologies were available.

Major carmakers, oil companies and small development companies experimented with the idea for a number of years, among them DaimlerChrysler (H&FCL Sept. 98), General Motors together with Exxon (Sept. 00), and Toyota (Nov. 01). GM converted a pickup truck to the technology (Sept. 01), and academics championed the idea at conferences (H&FCL July 97).

But the idea pretty much went by the wayside in the last couple of years, highlighted most recently by the decision by Shell and UTC Fuel Cells to dissolve their joint subsidiary, Hydrogen Source (H&FCL July 04).

In pulling the plug on the department’s program, DoE said two important technical targets were key to the decision process: startup time of less than one minute at an ambient temperature of 20 deg. C, and start up energy of less than 2 MJ for a 50 kW system.

In its announcement, the department said the decision is based on several key conclusions:

- Current fuel processing technologies do not meet the technical and economic targets;

-There is no clear path forward to meet the more difficult criteria necessary for full implementation/integration in fuel cell vehicles;

- There is no interest on part of the U.S. auto industry;

- Competing technologies are available today, and only marginal improvement is expected in efficiency and emissions between a gasoline, hybrid-electric vehicle and a fuel cell vehicle operating on gasoline that is reformed on-board the vehicle.

The 7-page report is available on DoE’s EEERE website at: http://www.eere.energy.gov/hydrogenandfuelcells/pdfs/
committee_report.pdf.