Department of Energy Hydrogen Program Readies Technologies for Automakers

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Hydrogen Program describes its mission as the effort to research, develop, and validate the technologies for fuel cells and the production, delivery, and storage of hydrogen. It is seen as the path to one possible future—the hydrogen economy. It is part of the process of moving the foundation of society’s energy needs away from a hydrocarbon economy to one based on hydrogen as a clean, abundant, reliable, and affordable energy carrier.

JoAnn Milliken, DOE Hydrogen Program Manager, says that the goal at DOE is to partner with industry to determine hydrogen-technology requirements and to get those technologies ready so that automakers can commercialize fuel cell vehicles. Critical-path technologies include those that will reduce the cost of fuel cells, improve their durability, and develop onboard hydrogen storage systems sufficient for a 300-mile range without negative impacts on passenger and cargo space. Another critical-path area for the program is the underlying research and coordination of the development of safety codes and standards that will be critical for deployment of the technologies at the time of commercialization.

Hydrogen can be made using several sources, some of which are renewable and some not. The Hydrogen Program’s critical-path technology is hydrogen production from natural gas. It is the most economical way to make hydrogen today. “It’s not the optimum pathway,” Milliken says. “We do recognize that it is a CO2-emitting route. We don’t see it as a long-term pathway because of that and because we don’t want to compete with natural gas that’s used for stationary power generation.” However, hydrogen from natural gas is a CO2-reducing pathway. “If you look at the well-to-wheels analysis,” she says, “the CO2 emissions from a fuel-cell vehicle operating on hydrogen from natural gas are significantly less than conventional technologies—46% less than conventional gasoline vehicles and 33% less than gasoline hybrids.”

In the long term, the DOE’s goal is to develop other pathways from renewable sources that will be zero or near zero in CO2 emissions. In the near term, grid-assisted electrolysis is not a true renewable pathway unless the grid electricity used to power the hydrogen production electolyzer is generated by wind, solar, or geothermal energy. Coal-based hydrogen production performed with carbon sequestration is a nonrenewable, zero-CO2 pathway; and nuclear-based hydrogen production is also a zero-CO2 technology. Further into the future, DOE development will include pathways from photoelctrochemical and biological methods of making hydrogen.

Hydrogen delivery is another area of the program’s focus. “We’ve done considerable analysis on delivery,” Milliken says. “Our approach and one recommended by the National Academy of Sciences is to provide distributed hydrogen in the early market, making the hydrogen onsite at refueling stations.” This approach would involve minimal delivery costs because facilities would reform natural gas or reform bio-derived liquids as a renewable distributed route or have small-scale electrolyzers at those facilities. Delivery would mean the transfer of the hydrogen from the reformer to the vehicle through the pump, and other factors would include compression, possibly liquefaction, dispensing, and offboard storage of hydrogen at the refueling site. Milliken notes “as supply and demand increase, based on distributed hydrogen production infrastructure, then industry will be in a better position to invest in centralized production and delivery infrastructure. That’s when we really need delivery technologies.” Currently, hydrogen delivery can be very expensive depending on the method, pipeline delivery being the least costly. “We are doing some pipeline research, looking at hydrogen embrittlement and how that might affect pipelines and the pipeline materials we choose for the long term. Compression technologies will help as well for long-term delivery goals.”

The Hydrogen Program continues to work toward its key technology milestones for 2015 with the goal of preparing hydrogen as the 21st century clean-energy choice. Once the technology is developed, the industry can examine the business cases to determine if and how quickly they can commercialize. “A lot is going to depend on the market dynamics at the time,” says Milliken. “But we already make 9 million tons of hydrogen per year today in the United States for industrial purposes. It’s just a matter of translating that to the capability of hydrogen’s use as a fuel. That 9 million tons is enough to fuel 37 million fuel-cell vehicles.”

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