Every once in a while I stumble across a rude reminder of just how precarious? perverse? stupefyingly weird? the road from laboratory to the mainstream commercial market can be for new technology. While looking for something in my countless gigs of downloaded reports and scientific papers, I ran across the February, 2002 document, Guidance for Transportation Technologies: Fuel Choice for Fuel Cell Vehicles [PDF], which has a real stunner of a chart on page 5, showing the projected rollout for vehicle fuel cells. It won’t fit here, so you’ll have to open it in a new window.
Hydrogen fuel cell commercial prototypes in 2004/2005, with commercial introductions in 2007/2009 and market penetration in 2010? And methanol and gasoline fuel cells on basically the same schedule?
Ouch.
My point is not to beat up the authors of this report, or even to slap around fuel cells, even though I still consider them to be a spectacularly bad idea for vehicles. I’m posting this as a rude reminder of the difficulty of making projections regarding the development and commercialization of new technology.
We’ve all seen technology take off like a rocket; I’ve been a computer hobbyist and professional in various forms since 1977, so I’ve had a front-row seat for that astonishing history, and even played my own tiny role in it as a software designer and programmer. And there are some instances where it’s pretty easy to predict success, like computer chips and Moore’s Law, or electric vehicles right now.
EVs are easy for a very simple reason: There’s only one thing standing between us and phenomenal growth of EVs, and that’s cheaper batteries. (Yes, there are other issues like customer acceptance of something that’s (gasp!) different, but I think those hurdles are insignificant and will more or less solve themselves once the price of batteries and therefore cars comes down.)
By the same token, hydrogen fuel cells make for a very dim picture, thanks to all the problems they present. Yes, we need a fueling infrastructure, as everyone points out. But we also need a hydrogen production infrastructure, and one that not only creates extremely pure hydrogen but also doesn’t create significant CO2 emissions, which means it has to either use electrolysis (which uses a buttload of electricity) or rely on CCS (which is still in the Magic Fairy Dust category). But we also need to drive the cost of fuel cells down dramatically, as well as find better ways to store the highly compressed hydrogen in vehicles. How anyone thought in 2002 that we could manage all that and begin to achieve “market penetration” by 2010 is beyond me.
And as for those jet packs we were supposed to have by now — who do I e-mail about that?
Those projections were crazy ridiculous considering how expensive fuel cells and their associated technologies were (heck, after a decade they’ve now got the price down into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per fuel cell vehicle instead of the millions back then) – I remember thinking this wasn’t realistic at the time, because the Fuel Cells were so expensive (its one thing to shoot for a 50% cost reduction in 5-7 years on a new technology, pretty crazy but happens sometimes. But to shoot for and expect a 98%+ cost reduction on a many decades old technology in 5 to 7 years (the amount of time it takes to create a new normal car) and be selling production vehicles based on that totally new technology (for cars) was obviously impossible – it was ridiculous). I don’t think the people at the Bush Administration were dumb enough to really think this was for real (other than their PR folks who probably were).
There was a reason the previous (very oil industry friendly) Administration, the auto manufacturers and most especially the oil companies were so (and to this day still are) enthusiastic about fool cell vehicles, which they shoved in front of the American people as they buried and shredded the EV’s they built for California).
Like the Administration’s efforts at CCS (which they killed just before the actual test plant was about to start testing) – these things were never meant to work, IMHO.
Fool Cells, as well as the previous Administrations CCS program, kept us running down the Oil / Coal track while appearing to be trying to get us off oil / CO2 (but keeping EV technology shoved off to the side, dead, which really did represent a future threat to the Oil industry). These unbelievable projections were part of that sales job on the American Public (who funded these billions of dollars a year programs) – to make the public think everything was taken care of (those great advertisements in the magazines, remember those?). It was perfect.
We are very lucky Rick Wagoner (former CEO of GM) decided to commit, very publicly, to bring a EV based vehicle (Volt) to market (totally opposite of the rest of the Industry & we’re lucky Nissan decided as well) – otherwise I’m convinced we’d just be looking at Tesla (& Fisker) at this point and hoping they stayed in business long enough for Tesla to get their model S (packed with laptop batteries) out in a few years & continued nonsense about Fuel Cells – i.e. it would be bleak.