Out of the blocks: fuel cell vehicles hit the development trail as they take the next step towards commercialization

Automotive Industries, May, 2003 by John Peter

Fuel cells have passed their lab tests and are finding their way into the real world. Small fleets of fuel cell powered vehicles are working their way into one or more of several demonstration programs around the globe. Programs like the California Fuel Cell Partnership, formed in April 1999, and the Japan Hydrogen & Fuel Cell Demonstration Program (which opened March 11th of this year), have been designed to educate the public on the viability of fuel cell vehicles as an alternative to the internal combustion engine. For the eight OEMs and the two major fuel cell manufacturers, they are also the next step on the road to developing a reliable and affordable fuel cell-powered automobile.

Two members of the fleet have already passed another milestone. Honda's FCX has been certified by the California Air Resources Board and U.S. EPA for daily commercial use and the first of five cars was delivered last December to the city of Los Angeles to be added to the motor pool. The Toyota FCHV received the same honors from Japan's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and was available for lease on December 2, 2002.

"The technology is to the point where it's performing and in vehicles today that are essentially non-compromising, except from a price and lifetime standpoint," says Michael Rosenberg, director of corporate relations for Ballard.

Rosenberg says that getting the cars into the hands of customers is a vital step in the development process. It not only builds reliability, but helps the OEMs understand their product including does it meet the customers needs, wants and desires?

"Customers tend to do a lot more with their cars than engineers do," he adds. "And that information comes back into your development program."

Development will also help reduce cost. Jim Bolch, vice president, operations for UTO fuel cells, says that real world research will help in simplifying the design.

"By definition the products are probably a little more complicated than they need to be," Bolch adds. "As you understand more about the product you start to integrate multiple parts into a single part." Development will also allow for technological innovations, like the reduction of membrane thickness and the amount of platinum loading on the membranes."

But both Ballard's Rosenberg and UTC's Bolch agree that cost will come down rapidly as volume goes up.

"Going from dozens to millions," says Bolch, "does a lot to offset the cost."

He adds that parody right now is with the internal combustion engine.

"The numbers UTO typically hears from the OEMs is somewhere between $35 and $50 a kilowatt," says Bolch. "That would bring it into parody with an Internal combustion engine. That's the holy grail."

"We view the ICE as our most significant competitor," says Rosenberg. "It's got 100 years of development on it and they're continuing to improve it. So we have to have a product that meets all of the performance criteria that the ICE does today and we have to do it at a price that's competitive today."

Rosenberg adds that if the goal is to eventually replace the ICE, then the industry will need to be able to make 52 million fuel cells a year.

"A lot of fuel cell companies today are still manufacturing their fuel cells in very small volumes and virtually by hand," Rosenberg says.

Ballard realized that if they are going to get costs down to be competitive with today's internal combustion engines, they would have to be able to manufacture fuel cells in very high volumes. Ballard decided back in 1997 to take the necessary steps to develop the processes needed to move to volume manufacturing. Working with partners DaimlerChrysler and Ford, they benchmarked more than 200 different processes--everything from cookie manufacturing to plywood and wallpaper manufacturing, searching for the best way to mass produce fuel cells. The company has set up a small manufacturing operation in its Vancouver, Canada, headquarters that manufactures a commercial 1.5Kw fuel cell-powered portable generator.

Early on graphite bi-polar plates were machined by hand, engraving the pattern with a drill. It took a couple of hours to do each individual plate and there are hundreds in each automotive fuel cell. Ballard is working with Graphtech on a process that presses the plates from a moldable graphite fiber, a process that takes minutes, not hours.

Belch says that the manufacturing rule-of-thumb with a mature product is about 80 percent material costs, 20 percent labor and overhead.

"If you look at the models of what fuel cell material costs ought to be in volume production," he adds, "that's out of line, because most components in a fuel cell are not really very expensive by nature with the exception of precious metal in the membranes and work is being done to reduce the amount of precious metal."

Both Ballard and UTC see themselves as Tier 1 fuel cell suppliers to the auto industry.

UTC has a number of different arrangements with different companies in terms of the amount of manufacturing content they will provide.