

Hydrogen cars and their promise of a zero-emission, petroleum-free future are no longer the stuff of science fiction. Automakers have the technology largely nailed down and say vehicles like the Chevrolet Equinox FCEV and Honda FCX Clarity are poised to take us beyond gasoline. There's just one hitch.

Where do we get the hydrogen? There are 36 hydrogen fueling stations in the United States, and two thirds of them are in California. Increasing that number in any meaningful way remains the biggest - and most pressing - challenge keeping us from traveling the hydrogen highway.

"The reality is, we cannot wait," says Paul Brubaker, head of the Research and Innovative Technology Administration for the federal Department of Transportation. "We have to figure out what to do to reach critical mass and create the infrastructure to get these cars on the road sooner than later."

If Brubaker's got any thoughts on the matter, he kept them to himself during Hydrogen Drive 2008, where 40 or so experts from the government, the auto industry and academia said we need a Manhattan Project level of commitment - and spending - to improve the technology and develop the infrastructure.

How much money are we talking about?

The federal government has spent $1.2 billion on hydrogen in the five years since President Bush announced an initiative to develop a national hydrogen infrastructure. We'll need a whole lot more than that if we're to meet the president's goal of replacing fossil fuels by 2040.

Hydrogen advocates like the National Hydrogen Association say we could put 70 percent of all Americans within 2 miles of a hydrogen fueling station for $10 to $15 billion. They like to point out that's half the cost of the Trans Alaska Pipeline System (in today's dollars) and about what we're spending each month in Iraq.

That figure seems optimistic - perhaps wildly so. Royal Dutch Shell, which created the Shell Hydrogen subsidiary in 1999, says supplying 2 percent of America's cars with hydrogen by 2020 would cost "around $20

billion." Wired, in "How Hydrogen Can Save America," argues we can make the switch to a hydrogen economy for $100 billion. And a 2002 analysis by Argonne National Laboratory found "the hydrogen delivery infrastructure to serve 40 percent of the light-duty fleet is likely to cost over $500 billion."

That's a wide range of numbers, but they all show switching to hydrogen won't be cheap. "Until we put billions or even trillions of dollars into this, it just won't happen," says Paul Williamson of the University of Montana College of Technology. Others agree the tab will be high but say we won't need a nationwide infrastructure for decades, so let's start with major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles. The California Fuel Cell Partnership says 40 stations would put most L.A. residents within five minutes of a hydrogen source. "In the near-term, it can be accomplished for what we're spending on other priorities," said Joan Ogden of the UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has mapped out just that kind of approach with his "Hydrogen Highway" agenda. Four years ago, his administration proposed spending as much as $11 million a year to bring 100 hydrogen stations online by 2010. We have 25 so far, and a solar-powered facility that will use electrolysis to produce hydrogen opens next month in Sacramento (most stations use hydrogen produced by steam reformulation of natural gas). The California Air Resources Board expects to finance 10 more stations within the next two years. Progress has been slow, spokeswoman Gennet Paauwe told the Sacramento Bee, because advancements in fuel cell technology have been slow and there are only 200 or so fuel cell vehicles on the road in California.

"We're not going to open stations if there aren't vehicles to fill," she told the Bee.

But automakers say they can't make the technology commercially viable - they've still got to boost range, improve durability and bring down costs - until there's a fueling infrastructure broad enough to support the cars. It's a classic catch-22 - we can't get the stations until we get the cars, but we can't get the cars until we have the stations.