The road to the commercialization of fuel cell vehicles has taken an interesting turn.
On Tuesday, February 10, 2004, Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham and Texas Governor Rick Perry threw the switch on the first of some 400 to 500 General Motor's PEM automotive fuel cell power modules that will serve as stationary power plants, making electricity for Dow Chemical's Freeport, Texas, manufacturing facility.
This initial stack, mounted inside of a 40-ft. trailer and monitored remotely from GM's Honeoye Falls, N.Y., fuel cell research and development center, will serve as the test module, making sure that the units will run properly on the hydrogen produced by Dow. If all goes as planned, this 75 kW unit will be replaced this summer with another trailer housing the first industrial scale unit, made up of 14 modules capable of generating 1 MW of electricity. The final goal is to have 400 to 500 power modules generating 35 MW of electricity--enough to power 25,000 homes, yet still only two percent of the total electricity used by the Dow facility.
The trailer is parked in the facilities power station that currently uses cogeneration to produce all of the steam and electricity for Dow's largest facility
You might ask yourself what would bring the world's largest auto manufacturer and the world's largest chemical producer together to advance fuel cell technology. The answer to that question is a commercially viable agreement that was made in hydrogen heaven.
Hydrogen is a byproduct of several of Dow's manufacturing operations and up until now, the 'fuel' in fuel cell was piped to the power station and used to heat boilers for making steam, sold off to companies like Air Products for resale to industry or vented into the atmosphere. Now some of that hydrogen will be used to run the GM fuel cells.
"We started talking to Dow in late 2002," says Timothy E. Vail, director fuel cell commercialization, GM fuel cell activity, "and it's kind of an interesting mix. Dow needed to get more value from its hydrogen strength and we needed a place to put our technology."
Vail says that GM weighed the pros and cons and found that Dow was a good fit.
"From our standpoint the Dow transaction is a positive economic transaction for us ... pure profit," Vail says. "If you take the cost of the unit and the money we're getting from Dow, (the profit) is marginal. But if you think of all the cost we avoid, building vehicles, running on test stands, scrapping equipment, it's a hugely profitable deal for us. It's the same for Dow. If you take its electricity and gas costs, plus the emissions benefits, what they're doing with this byproduct fuel becomes an economic transaction for them as well."
While the first unit is a test unit, Vail says that once the industrial-strength hardware is installed this summer, it's really past the test stage.
"This agreement is a true commercial arrangement," Vail says. "We're moving forward to install megawatts of power and you don't do that on a test basis, you're doing that for economic reasons."
Vail says that the Dow venture well help to advance GM's fuel cell program in a couple of areas. Dow has been dealing with hydrogen for decades and has shared that expertise with GM, which Vail says, has advanced the fuel cell program immeasurably.
And for a fraction of the cost of building 400 to 500 fuel cell-powered vehicles, GM can run the same number of units in a real-world environment which, in turn, will build the supply base and develop expertise in manufacturing and production engineering, ultimately bringing costs down to the commercialization goal of $50 a kilowatt by 2010.
"It's just incredibly expensive to build and maintain a fuel cell automobile," Vail says. "If you want it for PR purposes, that's great, but if you really want to deliver in 2010, you cannot be relying on vehicles for your early volume, you'll go broke. You'll spend all of your money on your vehicles and not your R&D program."
Dow has its own reasons for finding alternative energy sources. Dow uses natural gas to manufacture all of the electricity needed to produce heat and power for the Texas facility and is tied to a highly, controlled natural gas market. Tommy Block, vice president of Dow's operations in Texas says that the site's natural gas bill in 2003 was $1 million dollars a day higher than the 2001 bill.
"We have to find ways to cut a million dollars in cost every day just to stay even with where we were in 2001," says Block.
Since hydrogen is a byproduct of Dow's manufacturing operations, that furl is virtually flee and that makes had cells look real good from an economical standpoint.
