Michael de Laine

By Michael de Laine, The Copenhagen Voice, 30 November 2009

Hydrogen-fuelled electric cars will help transport VIPs at the climate summit. Are they the future of personal road transport?

They’re very quiet, all they emit when running is water vapour, and some will transport the VIPs attending the UN climate conference, COP15, later this month.

But hydrogen-fuelled electric cars are still at the development stage, they are rather expensive to buy, and Denmark has only a couple of hydrogen filling stations, so running these easily driven vehicles means not straying too far from home.

But because they can be filled up with hydrogen that is separated from water using electricity supplied from wind turbines, they could be the future for personal road transport when fossil fuels are phased out in the coming decade or two.

The New Energy World Industry Grouping (NEW-IG), a non-profit association representing industry in the Fuel Cells and Hydrogen Joint Technology Initiative (FCH JTI), arranged a press trip to Malmö to join a parade of 15 hydrogen fuel cell vehicles to a seminar at the Danish parliament in Copenhagen.

Fifteen cars made by five manufacturers – ranging from Honda’s FCX Clarity over the A and B series from Mercedes-Benz to Fiat’s Panda, Opel’s Hydrogen4 and the Think/H2 Logic Hydrogen – were available for study and test-drives.

The meeting venue in Malmö was a hydrogen filling station that is also frequented by Swedish taxis. Run by the energy utility E.ON, this forms part of the Scandinavian Hydrogen Highway Partnership – also dubbed the Scandinavian hydrogen bridge that will run from Bergen via Stavanger and Oslo to Gothenburg and Malmö to Denmark, and then on to Germany.

As part of its endeavour to make the Scandinavian region one of the first in Europe where hydrogen is commercially available, the partnership aims at having 35 hydrogen stations servicing 100 buses, 500 cars and 500 other speciality vehicles in 2015.

A similar project in Germany, the Clean Energy Partnership (CEP), operates one of the world’s largest demonstration projects for hydrogen technology in Berlin. Vehicles ran over 400,000 km on hydrogen in the first phase of the project – between 2002 and 2008. One of the cars represented here in Denmark, Opel’s HydroGen4, the fourth generation of GM/Opel fuel cell vehicles, has performed well in the German capital.

Between December 2008 and August 2009, ten of Opel’s vehicles drove 50,000 kilometres as part of a test of the vehicles in everyday use.
The carmaker said the fuel cell vehicles have proved that they can match the tough conditions faced in everyday operation, with the test partners reporting that hydrogen can be used as a fuel for everyday use.

In Mantova in Italy’s Lombardia region and in Frankfurt in Germany’s Rhein Main region, Zero Regio is developing and demonstrating zero-emissions transport systems using hydrogen as an alternative fuel. This uses Fiat Pandas and Mercedes-Benz A-series cars.

Alongside its successes, Zero Regio also pointed to some difficulties – including a lack of European regulations for building hydrogen refuelling and distribution facilities, and problems with homologising fuel-cell vehicles in Italy.

Copenhagen environment mayor Klaus Bondam said 75% of CO2 emissions derive from cities and Copenhagen must work to change this. Overall, the municipality of Copenhagen will cut its CO2 emissions by 20% between 2005 and 2015, and should be completely CO2 neutral in 2025. This will be achieved in part by using electric vehicles, both battery driven and fuel-cell driven vehicles.

Having ridden in the Honda Clarity between Malmö and Copenhagen, Bondam noted that electric vehicles would reduce noise and pollution in the city, making living in Copenhagen more enjoyable and cleaner.

However, he said, the 4.83-m long Clarity would not solve the Danish capital’s congestion problems: drivers who need to bring cars into the city should consider the smaller vehicles – such as the Think, which Copenhagen has bought recently.

“All new passenger cars bought by the municipality of Copenhagen will be electrically driven from 2011,” the city’s environment mayor said.

Driving impressions are positive. As a passenger in the sleek Honda Clarity, the only noticeable noise was from the air conditioning compressor. There was little road or wind noise – listen to the interview with the driver for car-related noise. The finish was excellent, and there was no car-induced drive train shudder – which should not exist anyway in an electric car that runs as an automatic. The hydrogen tank, behind and under the rear seat, intrudes on the luggage space, and may reduce this a little compared with similar-sized fossil-fuelled vehicles.

The Opel HydroGen4 was also quiet, but this had an automatic gearbox with ‘drive’ and ‘low’ positions, as well as reverse and ‘park’. Driving this on a route from the parliamentary car part at Christiansborg to Højbro Plads and Kongens Nytorv, past the Black Diamond and the National Museum before returning to the parliamentary car park, I found the car very easy to drive, and it had a very good power take-up – shooting quickly forwards when the accelerator pedal was pushed hard to get past other vehicles at traffic lights. Manoeuvrability for this car – higher and boxier than the Honda, more an MPV – was good, and I quickly felt at home.

However, driving the Opel brought home to me the difficulties road-users have with each other: the car is so quiet that cyclists and pedestrians may not notice it is behind or beside them if they do not keep themselves aware of what is happening about them, so perhaps electric vehicles need some sort of artificial noise source to alert other road-users.