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April 25

Air Products wants to supply California drivers with hydrogen

In 1943, visibility on the streets of Los Angeles dropped to about three blocks as a layer of filth descended from the sky, attacking the eyes, lungs and stomachs of the city's inhabitants.

The culprit: smog.

In 1952, California Institute of Technology biochemistry professor Arie Haagen-Smit discovered how smog forms when nitrogen oxides from vehicle tailpipes and hydrocarbons from oil refineries react with sunlight in a photochemical stew to create ozone.

Since Haagen-Smit's scientific breakthrough, California has been the nation's legal and atmospheric testing ground for air pollution control. The resulting standards have set the course for lower and lower vehicle and plant emissions across the United States.

Now Air Products, a Fortune 500 company headquartered in Trexlertown, is helping California develop its next wave of smog-clearing controls — hydrogen-powered vehicles. Company officials say they believe hydrogen fuel cell batteries will eventually revolutionize the nation's auto manufacturing industry and then transform the nation's energy policy.

"It's about energy sustainability, the environment and efficiency," said Ed Kiczek, Air Products' global business director for Hydrogen Energy Systems.

Air Products' effort is centered on the California Air Resources Board's push to force the auto industry develop zero-emissions vehicles. That can be done with hydrogen fuel cells that emit nothing but water vapor from tailpipes. Air Products is one of several companies building the infrastructure on California's so-called "hydrogen highway" that will allow consumers drive into a fueling station to top off hydrogen-fueled vehicles, which can go up to 400 miles on a full tank.

Gloria Bergquist, spokeswoman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, said the 12 companies her group represents are committed to creating multiple product lines that run on a variety of sources: clean-burning diesel, ethanol, electrical-standard gasoline hybrids and hydrogen. She likened it to a roulette wheel because manufacturers never know what technology is going to take off. The jackpot would be hydrogen, she said.

"Hydrogen has always been the Holy Grail because they are zero-emissions vehicles," Bergquist said. "That has always been the primary goal and hybrids are really seen as a bridge to reach hydrogen."

Hydrogen is the simplest, lightest and most abundant element on Earth. But it's only found in combination with other elements, such as oxygen, which bonds with hydrogen to create water. To use hydrogen as a gaseous fuel, it has to be separated with its bonding element.

The cheapest way to make hydrogen is to extract it from natural gas. A more expensive way is to pull apart water in a process called electrolysis.

Both methods emit greenhouse gases in the production phase, but not in the usage phase when water vapor comes out of a moving vehicle, said Scott Samuelsen, a mechanical, aerospace and environmental engineering professor who directs the National Fuel Cell Research Center at the University of California, Irvine.

Air Products does not design the vehicles or the fuel cells that combine hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity that power the engine, wheels and gadgets. Air Products would supply the hydrogen to a network of emerging fueling stations to keep the cars running.

California car lots could stock hydrogen-fueled cars by 2015. Such a new market would bolster the company's bottom line because for half a century the company has been supplying hydrogen to refineries to purify gas products. It also has found other niche markets for hydrogen fuel cells such as forklifts for warehouses, generators for cell phone towers, unmanned drones for the U.S. military and submarines for the navies of five nations.

To tap into California's burgeoning hydrogen economy, Air Products is relying on a threefold business model that requires some public money.

First, the company works with private owners to convert a standard gasoline pump at a state-approved location to a hydrogen pump. Second, hydrogen-fueling stations are built at standard gas stations or landfills.(Last summer, Air Products used a $2.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to turn man-made greenhouse methane gas into usable hydrogen at the Orange County Sanitation District in Fountain Valley, Calif.)

Third, and perhaps the most critical to a long-term nationwide usage of hydrogen-fueled cars, Air Products is helping develop interstate pipelines. Such an endeavor occurred in May 2011 when Air Products helped Toyota and Shell open a pipeline-fed hydrogen station in the Los Angeles area.

Samuelsen said Air Products' model makes economical, logistical and municipal zoning sense if the state is to succeed in getting the public to rely on hydrogen cars the way they have gasoline or diesel-powered vehicles. He said the to produce hydrogen fuel cells has been dropping after 25 years of research by car manufacturers.

"Without the infrastructure, the car will be a failure," said Samuelsen.

Bergquist agreed. She said the car industry goes through a chicken-and-egg routine that stalls the development of new technologies. What comes first, she asked, the vehicles or the fuel? When it comes to hydrogen, she said, the infrastructure is critical.

Kiczek said if the nation was committed to an interstate hydrogen pipeline network, it would mean morejobs in construction and in the natural gas industry, since hydrogen is extracted from natural gas. In 2003, the infrastructure got a jump-start when then-President George W. Bush announced a $1.2 billion hydrogen fuel initiative to help reduce America's dependence on foreign oil.

A year later, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called for a network of hydrogen fueling stations on highways like Interstate 5, which runs the length of the state.

Air Resources Board spokesman Dimitri Stanich said Schwarzenegger's plan has changed to more closely match people's driving habits. Residents do not tend to drive long distances on the highways, he said. They stay in a general geographic area. That's why the fueling stations are being installed in clusters around major cities in the Los Angeles area in the south and the Bay area in the north , Stanich said.

The hydrogen push has slowed under the Obama administration, which has pushed hybrid and electric cars over hydrogen.

Samuelsen said with less federal support there is little financial incentive to help private industry develop the infrastructure needed to make hydrogen a reality.

Department of Energy spokesman Bill Gibbons said the Obama administration remains committed to hydrogen and fuel cells as part of its "portfolio of advanced technologies." The federal agency's investments have resulted in more than 300 hydrogen-related patents that have brought 30 new products to market. At the same time, Gibbons said, fuel cell durability has doubled, and since 2008, the cost of fuel cells has fallen 30 percent.

California needs a minimum of 68 hydrogen fueling stations to ensure customers can refuel, Samuelsen said.

The state has 23 of the nation's 56 hydrogen fueling stations, according to the Department of Energy. Pennsylvania has one, at Air Products' campus, where a prototype Chevy Equinox and a small bus are refueled.

By comparison, there are 6,033 commercial electrical charging stations in the country, including 1,541 in California and 38 here, federal figures show.

Despite the drop in federal funding, Kiczek said, Air Products plans to follow car manufactures' lead as it pursues the technology for the masses.

"That's why California is interested," Kiczek said. "If you have zero-emissions vehicles all that smog over the LA Basin goes away."

And if history is a guide, the nation will follow.


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