NEW YORK - President George W. Bush's new plan to boost the use of hydrogen fuel cell cars is a small step toward investing billions and making the huge societal change from gasoline stations to hydrogen stations, a leading fuel cell developer said. The Bush plan announced last month, the Freedom CAR (Cooperative Automotive Research) program, has been criticized for not yet creating solid spending or performance goals, but proponents say it does include plans to start building an infrastructure of hydrogen filling stations, which many see as a big hurdle.
"Most importantly Freedom CAR includes the infrastructure system," said Robert Stempel, formerly the chief executive at General Motors and now Chairman and Executive Director of Energy Conversion Devices , a fuel cell developer.
Freedom CAR, a joint venture between the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and Detroit's Big Three automakers, aims to bring hydrogen fuel cell cars into the mainstream by the end of the decade.
It replaces the Bill Clinton-era multibillion-dollar Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (PNGV), which aimed to put 80 mile-per-gallon (mpg) cars on the road by the end of the decade.
While government and business have yet to hash out how much money will be devoted to Freedom CAR, the DOE announced earlier this month it has set aside $150 million for Freedom CAR in the 2003 budget.
But the changeover to so called hydrogen age will be a bit more costly. In fact, Argonne Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy research lab operated by the University of Chicago, recently estimated that a network of national hydrogen filling stations allowing fuel cell cars drivers convenient fuel access will cost between $100 billion to $600 billion, depending on hydrogen demand.
"If we're going to have hydrogen powered fuel cells, we need to buy hydrogen at convenient places," said Stempel, whose company is 20 percent owned by the oil company Chevron Texaco Corp. "One of the reasons the automobile works today is because we can get fuel for it at literally every corner," he said.
But not everyone think the plan goes far enough.
"There's something in our industry called the chicken and egg dilemma, and that is, you can't get the vehicles on the road without the infrastructure, but no one's going to build the infrastructure without the vehicles," said James Winebrake, Science and Technology professor at James Madison University in Virginia.
"The government hopes that Freedom Car will get the vehicles to the point that people will buy them and from there infrastructure will develop," said Winebrake.
"I saw the same logic fall apart with natural gas vehicles, and other alternative fuel vehicles. Without large government incentives for infrastructure development, hydrogen will not get off the ground," he added.:
