Congressman Sanders Fuels Vermont's First Hydrogen Car

CONGRESSMAN SANDERS FUELS VERMONT'S FIRST HYDROGEN CAR

Today is a very important day because it shows us that, if we as a nation get our act together, what the future might be in terms of transportation and energy. Today shows us that we can as a nation move forward toward breaking our dependency on Mid East oil and polluting fossil fuels, that we can begin the process of reversing global warming and move this country into the era of clean sustainable energy and, in the process, create millions of good paying jobs.

I am delighted to be joined here today by representatives of EVermont, a non-profit organizaton 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 several years now to make this project possible through a $955 thousand dollar grant that we secured from the 2004 Energy and Water Appropriations bill. Today marks the official opening of this hydrogen fueling station, the first of its kind in the Northeast. The system here extracts hydrogen from water, compresses it, stores it right here on site, and then dispenses it into the hydrogen-fueled hybrid automobile that I arrived in. What is absolutely extraordinary is that this car will drive the roads of Vermont and look and perform like any other car - except for one huge factor. This car does not have a gas tank, does not run on gas and its only emission is water vapor.

This project will test a typical Toyota Prius hybrid that has been retrofitted to run on hydrogen instead of gasoline in cold weather climates and hilly terrain, hopefully advancing the day when all vehicles across our country and the world run on entirely clean fuels with no polluting emissions. An extraordinary beauty of this project is that it is part of a much larger process to move us away from a fossil fuel-based economy and toward a clean new economy based on sustainable energy. This project is especially important because it demonstrates the viability of "green" hydrogen production - where hydrogen is derived from a clean resource (water) using renewable energy (wind). With the only emission being pure water, it is a concrete example that a completely clean fuel cycle is possible.

Of course, a lot happened to bring this project together, including the construction and installation of this state-of-the-art fueling station and the conversion of the car to run on hydrogen in California. Although I'll let others talk about the technical aspects of this project, what will happen here on this site in a nutshell is that an electrolyzer will be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, the hydrogen will be compressed and stored in high-pressure tanks, the hydrogen will then be dispensed into the converted hybrid Toyota Prius, which will burn the hydrogen the same way a regular car burns gasoline - except that water is the main byproduct instead of CO2.

This is only one of many technologies in development that promise to deliver us from our chronic reliance on fossil fuels. These new technologies will not only move us away from dirty energy and the terrible harm they do to our ecosystems and atmosphere, but they could create an explosion of new and good-paying jobs in Vermont and all across America.

http://bernie.house.gov/documents/document.asp?issueNum=4941