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Was George W Bush's championing of hydrogen fuell cells or "freedom fuel", earlier this year merely a piece of political rhetoric or is the US about to get serious about fuels cell development. Nick Flaherty reports.
It is not often that technology gets a mention in the State of the Union address by a US president. The last time was probably the start of the Apollo project and the race to the Moon. So President George W Bush picking out hydrogen fuel cells for special mention in his February address with the promise of $1.7bn for development projects for so-called 'freedom fuel' was potentially very exciting.
But how serious is this? President Bush comes from a long history of links with the oil industry in Texas and the political rhetoric of 'freedom fuel' fits in with the political profile of the 'freedom' war in Iraq.
Fuel cells offer higher energy densities than existing battery technologies by using hydrogen, either in the form of methanol or impregnated in a polymer and oxygen, with end products of water and electricity. A 'reformer can be used to create the hydrogen from another source, which can even be oil or petrol.
The cells can be 'open', topped up with the source of hydrogen to continue producing the electricity or 'closed', providing power until the hydrogen source is exhausted.
But the focus is on fuel cells for transportation to provide the US freedom from oil or so the rhetoric goes. The comparison with the Apollo programme is not necessarily over the top. To use fuel cells in cars would need a source of hydrogen freely available to top up the vehicles in the same way that we use petrol pumps today and changing all that infrastructure is a challenge of similar proportions.
One Democratic senator is proposing a $6.5bn programme over the next ten years. And other US legislators are putting forward the H2GROW Act that includes tax credits on buying fuel cell vehicles and for building the infrastructure for re-fuelling them.
The bill also mandates that hydrogen-powered vehicles must comprise a minimum percentage of federal fleets from 5% for fleets of 100 vehicles or more in 2006 up to 50% for fleets of 50 vehicles or more...