GM and Honda announce fuel cell partnership

General Motors and Honda have announced a partnership to work on a common hydrogen fuel cell system. The pair is the latest to announce such a deal, in the wake of similar announcements by Toyota/BMW and Daimler/Ford/Nissan-Renault.

The deal will see the two sharing research resources, including engineering staff, and aligning their components and materials. They share the advantage of comparatively advanced individual fuel cell programs.

Honda has run leasing programs on 85 FCX vehicles since 2002; GM has run consumer and fleet programs using 119 fuel-cell powered Chevrolet Equinoxes XUVs in Los Angeles, New York and Washington DC since 2007.

Between them, they’ve accrued millions of miles’ worth of real-world evaluation data to contribute to the joint program.

With the twin threats of peak oil and the inevitable tightening of emissions standards over the next decade and beyond, a commercially viable hydrogen fuel cell sits among the auto industry holy grails. It’s one of those wonder-techs that not long ago pundits and vested interests were predicting would make the market much faster than it has.

But like so much else in electric car world, the going has proved slow.

Fuel cells generate electricity from a chemical reaction between hydrogen stored in an on-board tank and atmospheric oxygen. The energy goes into a battery used to power an an electric drivetrain.

Unlike normal EVs, the technology has the ability to generate sufficient electrical output to overcome range issues without recharging – and all it emits is water vapour.

It has major advantages over the two technologies it overlaps. Conventional plug-in hybrid range-extender systems, as found in Holden’s Volt, use electric drive but deploy a petrol engine to keep the battery topped up. That means they emit CO2 and all manner of other combustion nasties, albeit in smaller quantities than most.

The other way of using hydrogen as vehicle fuel simply substitutes it for petrol in a modified internal combustion engine, for example in BMW’s Hydrogen 7.

While hydrogen is very volatile, it also has an low energy density less than a third that of petrol, meaning the BMW V12 consumes 50L/100km. It’s also difficult to store – the first incarnation of the Hydrogen 7 used a fuel tank weighing more than 200kg to carry less than 10kg of gas.

“Among all zero CO2 emission technologies, fuel-cell electric vehicles have a definitive advantage with range and refuelling time that is as good as conventional gasoline cars,” said Honda President Takanobu Ito in the joint statement announcing the deal.

The main barriers facing fuel cell technologies lie in their cost. The individual cells making up the reactor stacks use pricey platinum.

Hydrogen’s volatility and handling difficulty, next to the imperatives of weight saving in vehicles, mean the best storage solution lies in carbon-fibre, which is still costly to produce, although it’s becoming less so.

The most visible issue, however, lies in the cost of public fuelling infrastructure. It’s not that easy to refuel on the roads of Europe and the US – Los Angeles currently has nine public and 14 private stations, with 19 “in development”.

Part of the appeal of coalitions such as this lies in the extra lobbying muscle the give the players. GM and Honda have said they will be pressing for the expansion of hydrogen fuelling networks across the US and elsewhere as they ready their technologies for market.

The timing appears right. The Obama administration, initially resistant to fostering the fuel cell solution, appears to be coming round.

In May, the Department of Energy launched H2USA, a public-private partnership aimed at “advancing hydrogen infrastructure to support more transportation energy options for US consumers, including fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs)”.

Back in 2009, Forbes reports, then Energy Secretary Steven Chu raised concerns about the methods used to build reserves of hydrogen, particularly by extracting it from natural gas, which he saw as wasteful.

Four years on, however, he’s picked up the H2USA songsheet.

“I think in the last year or two, I have been saying this is an important technology and we want to continue to support the research. Fuel cells can be incredibly reliable. There are many fuel cells in buses that have been running in buses for ten years, rock solid.”

Now, he added, “our target is a $20K personal vehicle that can compete with a 45- or even 50-mile-per-gallon internal combustion car.”

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