Filling up at Home

GM is working with partners it has yet to name on developing a home kit for hydrogen refueling. According to Brad F. Beauchamp, account executive for government and alternative fuel fleets for GM's Northeast region, the kit will be similar to one for natural gas refueling called "Phill." Phill is a home appliance station for compressing natural gas built by FuelMaker, a firm with which GM and Honda have partnered to help customers refill the automakers’ natural-gas-powered commercial vehicles.


Unlike gasoline pumps, which charge by the gallon, hydrogen pumps charge by the kilogram.

The natural-gas version of Phill has been available on the West Coast and parts of the Southeast for the last 18 months to two years, Beauchamp said, but it will become available nationwide this year. “You can put Phill on the wall of your garage,” he said. “You plumb it in like you would your dryer or your range.”

A hydrogen pump prototype + enlarge image  |  view slideshow >

The idea is to take the existing natural-gas infrastructure and reform it to isolate hydrogen and flow it into a storage unit or the car itself to charge fuel cells. Home kits could work via existing or refit gas lines that run into the home. “Eventually, we hope to end up with reformers onboard the vehicle to allow you to use multiple types of fuel to form hydrogen,” Beauchamp said. “But we’re not there yet.”

Hydrogen, the most abundant and simplest element, attaches easily to other elements like carbon and oxygen, the latter combination producing water. One must isolate it to use it for fuel. The primary source of isolating hydrogen has been to drop it out of natural gas, which is not, in the end, a very energy-conserving or eco-friendly process.

Hydrogen also tends to migrate through the O-rings and seals of the nation’s legacy natural-gas infrastructure, which is more than 100 years old in spots. “Could it handle it? Eventually, I think, just like anything, technology will allow it to happen,” Beauchamp said. “It’s been done. And we continue to look at and work on processes to make it viable.” Other solutions promoted as more eco-friendly methods of extracting hydrogen include methane-based isolation and nuclear applications.

The Saturn Vue Hybrid + click to enlarge | view slideshow >

Beauchamp says GM expects that it will probably be more than 10 to 12 years before enough hydrogen refueling infrastructure is online and a sufficient number of fuel-cell vehicles are offered to “marry the two up” to make a viable market. “But in the meantime, we’re going to get them in the hands of customers and have them tell us what they think,” he said.

The fleet of 100 Equinoxes would be the largest convoy of fuel-cell-powered autos ever made available to the general public, Beauchamp said. DaimlerChrysler claims to have put the most fuel-cell-run vehicles on the road so far — tallying more than 100 hydrogen/electric-powered Mercedes-Benz F-Cell passenger cars, Dodge Sprinter vans and Citaro public transit buses — in a leasing program aimed at commercial users worldwide.

Toyota and Honda claimed to have leased the first modern, consumer-focused fuel-cell vehicles. On Dec. 2, 2002, Toyota lent its fuel-cell hybrid vehicle, or FCHV, based on its Highlander SUV to two affiliated California universities — UC Davis and UC Irvine; while Honda leased its fuel-cell experimental vehicles, or FCXs, to the city of Los Angeles. Honda said in September that it plans to start selling limited numbers of the latest version of the FCX concept in the U.S. and Japan in 2008.

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Photo credit: Daniel Cavazos/ForbesAutos.com.