Hydrogen Fuel Cells – Stimulus pork or green technology

I am trying to determine if Hydrogen Fuel Cells is the next great green technology or just on life support with stimulus money. There is a lot of conflicting information, especially for motive applications (i.e. Lift trucks). As a backdrop, US Department of Energy Secretary Chu announced he was withdrawing fuel cell funding in July. He cited the lack of infrastructure and that the technology was at least 10-20 years from commercialization. Congress reinstated the funding. There have been some recent announcements of additional implementations. Whole Foods is planning on purchasing 61 lift trucks with hydrogen fuel cells for a distribution center in Landover, MD. But in the same week Jungheinrich (one of the largest manufacturers of lift trucks globally and the largest in Europe) said the technology was many years away and would not be deployed in Europe anytime soon.

So what is real and what is hype? At this point, 95% of all hydrogen is being produced from natural gas. To implement hydrogen fuel cells, you have to expend a tremendous amount of energy to pull hydrogen gas from natural gas (or even more energy to strip hydrogen from water using electrolysis). Further, you need to store it – either very cold as a liquid or pressured tank as a gas. Either way, not cheap. Only after these two issues are resolved, do you get into the “infrastructure issue” of having a distribution network available. At this point, you have a lot of trucks running from Houston and about three other locations in the USA (Linde and Praxair) to provide hydrogen for installed fuel cells. The issue is that most hydrogen is used for petroleum distillation and that is about the extent of the existing network. You can also install on-site generation using natural gas, but that is even less efficient in producing hydrogen than the large operations.

So, for hydrogen fuel cells to be the green technology of the future, the industry needs to solve the hydrogen generation issue (low cost and carbon neutral), hydrogen storage issue (especially for motive applications), and the hydrogen supply infrastructure issue. The grand plan is to use solar or wind energy to pull hydrogen from water – completely carbon neutral. While that can be done today, it just doesn’t make financial sense (the investment for the solar panels, electrolysis equipment, and hydrogen storage is way more expensive than just solar and buying batteries to store the energy from solar, let alone the just burning petroleum products).

So, is there any areas were hydrogen fuel cells make sense? Emergency power. This looks like the only viable area currently. Products are available commercially and companies are installing including hospitals, telecommunications, and military applications. But most of these projects have at least some government subsidy (but it is closer to financially viable compared to other applications).

I suggest that companies watch and learn. At this point, hydrogen is being kept afloat by stimulus money, but how many companies would invest if that money was not on the table? A few years ago, Walmart tried two pilots on fuel cells in lift trucks. I understand that they spent months working through the issues and evaluating. However, I have not seen any more announcement of expanding. To me, that is a sign that the technology is not ready for further application. I am not sure who I trust less – Congress or Walmart. But in this case, I side with Walmart.
For more information…(biased sources)
http://www.hydrogenassociation.org/
http://www.fuelcelltoday.com/