One of the big issues facing hydrogen is just where we're supposed to fill the cars that might run on the stuff. A Connecticut company is answering that question on the East Coast with plans for a "hydrogen highway" that will extend from Portland, Maine, to southern Florida.

California historically has been a hotbed of hydrogen research and development, but SunHydro wants to put the East Coast on the H2 map with 11 solar refueling stations. The self-contained stations use electrolysis technology from Proton Energy that takes electricity generated from solar power and splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. The process results in considerably fewer emissions than the traditional methods of shipping hydrogen to fueling stations by truck or reforming it from natural gas.

"Our goal is to make it possible for hydrogen car to drive from Maine to Miami strictly on sun and water," company president Michael Grey said.

For all the attention on electric cars these days, several automakers continue developing hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Honda is especially enamored with the technology. General Motors put the Chevrolet Equinox fuel cell vehicle in a few dozen driveways. Nissan is leasing a XTrail FCV truck to Coca-Cola. And Mercedes Benz will offer the F-Cell to "selected customers" in Europe and the United States this spring. Mazda and Volkswagen are among the technology's proponents as well.

So, beyond giving the few hydrogen cars on the road a place to fuel up, the stations could help solve the the "chicken and egg" problem where the lack of fueling infrastructure begot a lack of cars and vice-versa.

"Having talked to several of the auto manufacturers, the indication that we've received is that there has to be a network of stations on the east coast for them to bring the cars here," Grey said. "They want to bring the cars here, but there’s nowhere to fuel them."

That quandary is familiar to Paul Williamson of the University of Montana College of Technology. "There's no sense having hydrogen cars if there's no place to refuel them," Williamson said. "Most of the development is happening in California. Why? Because they have refueling stations."

Williamson, whose family owned a service station when he was younger, likens the adoption of hydrogen technology to the early days of diesel. "We put in a pump behind our service station to begin with, and we had some cars and trucks here and there," he said.

Similarly, SunHydro's stations will appeal to early adopters and will be able to fill 10 to 15 vehicles per day to start. That isn't much, but you've got to start somewhere. The first stations will be located in Portland, Maine; Braintree, Massachusetts; Wallingford, Connecticut; South Hackensack, New Jersey; Claymont, Delaware; Richmond, Virginia; Charlotte, North Carolina; Atlanta and Savannah, Georgia; and Orlando and Miami, Florida. If all goes well, Grey said the company hopes to expand westward.

"We’ve just decided that somebody needed to start this process," Grey said. "You have a lot of the big companies talk about it, but nobody's stepped up to the plate and made it happen."

The company says using solar power to split water makes the capital requirements and maintenance costs cheaper than other hydrogen technologies. "From an efficiency standpoint, using the sun to make hydrogen is probably the most efficient method out there," Mark Schiller, Vice President of Business Development at Proton, said.

The stations cost as much as $3 million to install and rely on private funding to make it happen (Tom Sullivan, founder of the Lumber Liquidators flooring supply chain, paid $10.2 million for Proton in August). Williamson says that's the cost of doing business for a future-oriented company.

"You've got to have some visionary risk taking if you want to be a company of the future," he said. "Otherwise, you'll fall by the wayside."

Photo of a Mercedes-Benz F-Cell: Daimler

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