Focus Fuel Cell Vehicle featured at California Fuel Cell Partnership
When might we see a true Hydrogen Highway? That’s the question the head of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Research and Innovative Technology Administration and other experts were exploring this week. Paul Brubaker was visiting the California Fuel Cell Partnership in West Sacramento, California to meet with automotive and air quality experts to talk about building a national hydrogen-fueling network. While there, he toured the facilities, took a spin in the Focus FCV, filled up at a hydrogen station and debated the future of hydrogen technology.
“What makes hydrogen fuel cell technology so exciting is the emissions from a fuel cell stack are drips of clean water,” said Robert Riley, Ford Fleet Manager at the California Fuel Cell Partnership. “These are zero emissions vehicles with potential to make us less dependent on oil with less impact on the environment.”
The fuel cell system converts chemical energy into electric energy using hydrogen fuel and oxygen from the air. The electric energy then powers the vehicle’s electric drive motor, producing only water vapor and heat as byproducts.
Ford currently has 30 hydrogen powered Focus Fuel Cell vehicles in seven cities across the U.S., Canada and Germany. Those vehicles have now logged more than 720,000 miles, providing valuable data to Ford engineers on fuel cell technology. The FCVs are just one example of Ford’s commitment to advance the use and development of alternative fuel technologies.
The California Fuel Cell Partnership is a collaboration of 32 organizations, including automakers, government agencies, energy and oil companies. The experts who gathered in West Sacramento this week addressed the need for a hydrogen infrastructure across the country. Without a network of filling stations, it would be difficult for automakers to scale up production of fuel cell vehicles to the levels that would be needed to make them affordable. Participants called for more federal funding for research and infrastructure and noted commercialization is still likely a decade or more away.
