Pollution-Free Hydrogen SUV Hits the Driveway

Like many of her neighbors, Maria Recchia-O'Neill has a sport utility vehicle sitting in her driveway in Rye Brook, just north of New York City. She drives it to work and around town to run errands. But although her vehicle looks like any other SUV, her Chevrolet Equinox gets excellent gas mileage—and it doesn't emit any pollutants or climate change–promoting carbon dioxide. That is because it is a hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicle—one of 40 such automobiles that U.S. carmaker General Motors provided for motorists to road test.

"My average right now is 44.4 miles [71.5 kilometers] per kilogram [of compressed hydrogen gas], which is supposed to be the equivalent of a gallon of gasoline," Recchia-O'Neill says. In only two weeks of driving, the district coordinator of science for the Port Chester, N.Y., public school system has driven at least 600 miles (965 kilometers) on the car and her fuel cell Equinox has gotten as much as 191 miles (307 kilometers) on its three full tanks (each holding slightly more than four kilograms, or 8.8 pounds, of compressed hydrogen gas). "I feel like I'm making history," she says. "It's an exhilarating ride because it's different."

Pollution-free? Really?

Critics note, however, that hydrogen is simply an energy carrier—and not a particularly good one, effectively delivering less than 25 percent of the electricity required to produce it from water as energy to move wheels. Today's lithium ion batteries can return roughly 75 percent of the electricity put into them as motive force. Even GM's vice chairman of global product development, Bob Lutz, said recently that if energy storage in lithium ion batteries improves, it might not make sense to employ hydrogen instead of electricity directly.

And I be one of those critics.

Hydrogen powered cars are not the answer, you need electricity to get the hydrogen. And though people envision the hydrogen coming from wind or soler power but in reality it would come power plants many of which are coal powered. Only when the majority of power comes from soler, wind and nuclear power plants will this actually be pollution free.