Hydrogen Fueling Station

Hydrogen Fueling Station
12/21/2005

I am very proud to announce today the launching of a landmark energy initiative in Vermont, for which my office secured a grant of nearly $1 million from the U.S. Department of Energy. This funding will help create a hydrogen fueling station system here in Burlington that will extract hydrogen from water, compress it and store it on site, and then dispense it into a hydrogen-fueled hybrid automobile that will drive the roads of Vermont without relying on any gas at all and with virtually no emissions. I am delighted to be joined here today by representatives of EVermont, a non-profit that works to make every aspect of Vermont's energy market more efficient and renewable, Northern Power Systems, and Proton Energy Systems. My office has worked with these organizations for a couple of years to make this exciting project possible.

This project will convert a typical Toyota Prius hybrid so that instead of running on batteries and gasoline it will run on batteries and hydrogen. This will be a car which, for all intent and purposes will function like any other car on the road, but it will use no gasoline.

The car is already undergoing conversion to run on hydrogen fuel. The fueling station is already assembled and is currently being tested at Proton's headquarters. The site, at the Burlington Public Works facility, is already permitted and the construction is 90% complete. Barring any glitches, the equipment should be up and running and the car should be driving the roads of Vermont by the spring!

If you talk to people at GM and other car manufacturers, they will tell you that "fuel cell" technology has a long way to go before it is ready for mass commercial production. In the meantime, use of hydrogen fuel in a traditional internal combustion engine, like we will be doing in this project, has the ability to nearly eliminate emissions from cars. The potential benefits for our nation's air quality cannot be overstated.

And we cannot overstate the significance of the problem or our need to break away from gasoline-fueled cars. Cars are America's biggest reason for oil dependence and they represent the single biggest piece of our global warming problem. They not only spew out a huge share of the nation's global warming gases, but they also emit other harmful pollution that makes air unsafe to breathe. If we are serious about breaking our dependency on fossil fuels; if we serious about addressing global warming; if we are serious about cutting back on the pollution harming communities all over the country, we have got to move away from gasoline-fueled cars and this project can be of real help in that direction.

Hydrogen has the highest energy content of any known fuel. When it is burned in an internal-combustion engine, as it will be in this project, hydrogen produces effectively zero emissions. Importantly, this project will also produce valuable research sought by the U.S. Department of Energy into the application of hydrogen technology in cold climates. This project will go along way toward advancing the potential of hydrogen-adapted, internal-combustion engines to serve as a critical bridge technology before hydrogen fuel-cells are readily available.

It's worth noting that this project will pursue hydrogen the right way. The hydrogen we use to fuel the cars of the future can be derived from any number of resources, some of which are clean (like water) and some of which are not (like coal, oil and natural gas). The good news is, hydrogen can easily be extracted from water using existing technology and the power used to extract it can come from renewable sources, such as solar and wind power. The project we launch today will play a key role in demonstrating the full potential of hydrogen because the hydrogen that goes into the car will come exclusively from water. Also, since the Burlington Electric Department is donating renewable energy credits specifically to this project, it will demonstrate that we already have the technology to extract this hydrogen from water using power generated from clean, renewable sources like wind and biomass - meaning we have the potential for an entirely clean fuel cycle in the future! This is a truly innovative project and I hope you will continue to follow its progress.

Thank you.

http://bernie.house.gov/documents/document.asp?issueNum=4718