March 21, 2000
Environmentalists Warn Fuel-Cell Halo May Tarnish
Reuters
Allan Dowd
VANCOUVER (Reuters) - Fuel-cell cars could lose their green
environmental halo if the companies developing them choose the wrong
way to power the new technology, an environmental report warned
Tuesday.
Fuel cells convert hydrogen into electricity with heat and water as the
only emissions. But the green benefit is undone if the hydrogen is
produced in an environmentally-damaging way, said the study by two
Canadian environmental groups.
What we found out is that fuel cells can be clean and fuel cells can be
dirty," said David Hocking, a spokesman for the David Suzuki
Foundation, which collaborated on the study with the Pembina Institute
for Appropriate Development.
The prospect of the fuel cell technology has caught the fancy of
investors since the beginning of the year, pushing up the stock of
companies such as Ballard Power Systems Inc. (NasdaqNM:BLDP - news),
Plug Power Inc. (NasdaqNM:PLUG - news) and Avista Corp. (NYSE:AVA -
news), which are developing fuel-cell technologies. Vancouver-based
Ballard may be at the most advanced stage and is working on programs
with Ford Motor Co. (NYSE:F - news) and DaimlerChrysler AG (NYSE:DAJ -
news).
Commercial production of fuel-cell-powered cars is still at least two
years away, and the issue of how hydrogen will be supplied to the
vehicles has yet to be resolved by the fuel cell makers and the energy
and auto industries.
The environmentalists compared several methods proposed to derive
hydrogen from fossil fuel sources, and concluded the best method for
the environment used centralized reformation plants to produce hydrogen
from natural gas.
Cars would then fill up their fuel tanks with hydrogen much as they now
do with gasoline.
Using gasoline to supply hydrogen through conversion systems included in
the cars would do little to reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions
already produced by automobiles, the report warned.
If we power these vehicles with dirty hydrogen, we will entrench the
role of vehicles as the biggest and fast-growing contributor to global
warming," said Rob Macintosh, of the Pembina Institute, an
Alberta-based research group.
The study, which looked at publicly available information, said that it
would be ideal to have the hydrogen derived from renewable resources,
but that this was not an immediately practical option.
The environmental groups said fuel cell makers have a long-term
financial interest in ensuring that fuel cell-powered products are as
environmentally friendly as consumers believe they will be.
