With vehicles like the Chevrolet Volt extended-range electric vehicle, scheduled to go on sale later this year, and a lineup of full-size hybrid pickups and SUVs that can get 21 mpg in the city, General Motors is carving out a leadership role in the campaign to reduce our country’s dependence on foreign sources of oil. But GM refuses to be limited to just today’s technologies. That’s why the company also continues to put significant resources into developing hydrogen fuel cells as a viable alternative to current fuel-saving efforts.
This includes a brand-new partnership with The Gas Company (TGC), Hawaii’s No. 1 provider of gas energy. Currently, the synthetic natural gas TGC provides customers on the island of Oahu is more than 5 percent hydrogen. But leveraging a proprietary process to separate the hydrogen, the company’s 1,000 miles of pipeline and the GM partnership, TGC will be able to easily route the hydrogen to local filling stations.
On Oahu, this will help overcome one of the biggest obstacles to the widespread use of fuel-cell vehicles, the lack of an infrastructure from which to actually fuel them.
“This is the type of enabler that a hydrogen transportation infrastructure needs because it addresses both the source of the hydrogen and a feasible way to deliver it for fuel cell vehicle use,” said Charles Freese, executive director of GM Global Fuel Cell Activities. “The Hawaii infrastructure could eventually support tens of thousands of fuel cell vehicles.”
And it’s just the latest move in GM’s ongoing multi-billion-dollar research into fuel-cell vehicles. The automaker’s “Project Driveway” campaign has already allowed thousands of people to rack up millions of miles in a GM fleet of fuel-cell powered Chevy Equinox crossovers, and the results from this program are being used to develop a production-intent fuel-cell system that could be ready for the mainstream market by as soon as 2015.
That may seem like a ways into the future, but, as one of the new project’s supporters, U.S. Senator Dan Inouye, D-Hawaii, reminds people, “It is an important step forward in the establishment of a hydrogen transportation infrastructure upon which new fleets can be tested and utilized. Every step to reduce our dependency on foreign oil is a step forward.”
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