Carmakers and Environmentalists Differ Over Fuel Cell Proposal

By DANNY HAKIM (NYT) 793 words

DETROIT, Jan. 29 -- President Bush's proposal to double federal spending on fuel cell research drew praise today from automakers and skepticism from environmentalists.

''Our scientists and engineers will overcome obstacles to taking these cars from laboratory to showroom so that the first car driven by a child born today could be powered by hydrogen and pollution-free,'' the president said in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night.

Automakers view the fuel cell as the technology that will eventually supplant the internal combustion engine and silence environmentalists concerned about smog and greenhouse gases. Fuel cells generate electricity from chemical reactions between hydrogen and air. Their only tailpipe emission is water vapor. But energy would be required to produce hydrogen to run tens of millions of cars, and greenhouse gas emissions might be the result, depending on how the hydrogen was produced.

''We think this is a great step in the right direction,'' said Christopher Preuss, a spokesman for General Motors. ''The president showing leadership in hydrogen is critical to making the jump. We're very pleased.''

G.M. has built the most Jetsons-like prototype fuel cell vehicle, called the Hy-Wire. All of its drive components are underfoot, there is no dashboard, and the driver uses handgrips instead of foot pedals. Toyota and Honda have already leased the first tiny test fleets of fuel cell vehicles to the University of California and the city of Los Angeles, respectively.

But automakers say the technology is not expected to be ready for broader sale before the end of the decade at the earliest, and many analysts believe that is optimistic. Besides the technological challenges that remain for fuel cells themselves -- particularly the challenge of finding a safer way to store hydrogen, which is now stored in highly pressurized tanks -- there is the daunting notion of outfitting the nation's filling stations with hydrogen instead of gasoline.

Environmentalists, though enthusiastic about fuel cells in the longer term, want to see more aggressive development of hybrid cars. Those vehicles achieve sharp increases in fuel economy by supplementing gasoline engines with electric motors. General Motors and the Ford Motor Company have said they plan to join Toyota and Honda in equipping some vehicles with the hybrid technology.

''The auto industry is using the promise of future fuel cells as a shield against using existing technology to dramatically cut our oil dependence, and pollution, today,'' said Daniel Becker, director of the Sierra Club's Global Warming and Energy Program.

Jason Mark, director of the clean vehicles program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said, ''With oil use increasing at alarming rates, President Bush should aggressively push conventional technologies that can deliver cost-effective savings today, as opposed to waiting two decades.''

In his speech, President Bush proposed $1.2 billion in additional financing for fuel cell research over five years. Peter Hoffmann, the editor of The Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Letter, said that total federal spending on fuel cells, including military spending, came to about $230 million a year now.

Mr. Hoffmann and others said that the first widespread, practical use of fuel cells was likely to be in consumer electronics. People with cellphones and laptop computers, they said, will be willing to pay extra to avoid the inconvenience of rundown batteries. Next would be technology for houses and commercial sites, which could make all the electricity they needed from fuel cells that drew hydrogen from natural gas.

Cars would be among the most complex applications because operating an ordinary sedan requires about 10 times as many kilowatts of power as a house. Carlos Ghosn, the chief executive of Nissan, quipped earlier this month that a fuel cell car today would have a sticker price of about $700,000.

Jeremy Rifkin, author of The Hydrogen Economy, a recent book extolling the prospects of hydrogen power, dismissed the president's proposal as ''a paltry gesture.

''What is required is a government-private partnership on a grand scale with a financial commitment at least equal to the monies currently being spent on homeland security and the preparation for war with Iraq,'' he said today.

The Bush administration has set in motion regulations to increase by 7 percent the fuel economy of light trucks -- sport utilities, pickups and minivans -- by the 2007 model year. Regulators are considering further action in later years to narrow the fuel-economy gap between light trucks and cars.

But the administration has also been criticized for a tax provision that would permit small business owners to deduct immediately the entire cost of most of the largest S.U.V.'s, including the BMW X5 and the Hummer H2. The administration has said it is reviewing the loophole.