Alternative fuel infrastructures appear in the US

Fast food giant McDonald's and energy giant Shell have given consumers an early push into 21st century motoring with the installation of EV charging and hydrogen refuel points respectively.

McDonald's has installed a ChargePoint EV charging post at its Cary, North Carolina outlet. This is not, however, an early enactment of new policy from a corporation ever eager to put paid to decades of environmental vandalism accusations. Rather, it's the initiative of the independent Cary franchisee, part of a multifaceted bid to make his store as environmentally friendly and as near to carbon neutral as he can.

Nevertheless, it can't do any harm in providing early impetus to the rollout of a network of what analysts estimate will be a million charging stations across the US by 2015. Every such thing helps speed progress towards consumer acceptance of alternative fuels by reducing the potential market inertia created while consumers and providers wait for each other to get ready before they move. (The nub of the problem: consumers won't buy EVs until sufficient charging infrastructure is available to enable day-to-day use, while energy providers simultaneously baulk at investing in something with a likely lag in returns.)

But with EVs expected to reach the market in noticeable numbers from 2011, ChargePoint and others are biting the bullet and rolling out grid-connected access point networks.

Incidentally, this is not the dawn of a new era for McDonald's.  Autoblog reports that a surge in the popularity of EVs in the late 1990s saw an outlet in Phoenix, Arizona install a charging post.

The company is also gearing up to roll out a network of charging points at its stores in Sweden.

Shell, meanwhile, has opened its second hydrogen outlet in the New York metro area, at a service station near JFK airport in New York. The first opened a year ago in White Plains; another one goes live in the Bronx this month.

The growing 'cluster' of outlets in New York has pundits scratching their heads over what the company is doing, given Shell's official line on its future fuel product strategy, which skews towards biofuel and hydrogen over EVs.

Royal Dutch Shell's former CEO Jeroen van der Veer -- successor Peter Voser's tenure took effect July 1 -- told the Associated Press as recently as May that plug-ins take too much in the way of supporting infrastructure to be viable.

That's all well and good, but the pundits are particularly wondering why the company appears to be giving hydrogen precedence over biofuels. Questions have been raised about what the company is doing, given the dramatic cuts to the Department of Energy's hydrogen vehicle funding budget with the arrival of the Obama administration.

Shell's hydrogen stations are part of collaborative projects with auto makers, local authorities and academic institutions. In the US, for example, they form part of Project Driveway, run in conjunction with the New York and New Jersey Port Authority, the Department of Energy and GM.

Project Driveway is designed to gather feedback from consumers in New York City, Los Angeles and Washington DC, the result of two-month stints with a fleet of hydrogen fuel-cell powered Chevrolet Equinoxes (pictured here with Chevrolet General Manager Ed Peper introducing Project Driveway). Chevrolet unveiled the fuel cell Equinox at the end of 2007 (more here).

Shell takes part in other such projects with filling stations in Tokyo, Reykjavik and Shanghai.

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