GM Motors Towards Hydrogen-Powered Cars

By Yekaterina Dranitsyna

Staff Writer

Published: October 28, 2005 (Issue # 1117)

By 2010 General Motors, the world’s largest car manufacturer, has promised to develop economically viable models of a hydrogen-powered car, the company announced Wednesday at an exhibition in St. Petersburg.

Although experts remain pessimistic, the company’s managers said that a new Research and Development office opened this week in Moscow would help them make advances in developing energy-saving and advanced materials.

The efficiency of petroleum-based internal combustion engines could be improved by about 20 percent, but the future belongs to hydrogen fuel cars, said Alan Taub, executive director for R&D at General Motors.

Industry experts expressed skepticism, however, about the feasibility of such vehicles. “There is no simple and economic way to produce hydrogen. Hydrogen is not found free in nature, and to produce it from water you need at least as much energy as it can give back when it is used,” said Gianguido Piani, an independent expert on the power industry.

Apart from the unsolved problem of how to store hydrogen, “new infrastructure to distribute hydrogen as fuel would probably cost at least as much as the current gas or oil transport and distribution infrastructure,” Piani said.

Among more viable petrol and diesel substitutes he named ethanol and bio-diesel. “Ethanol is already used in Brazil and the USA. Bio-diesel is mostly used in central Europe,” Piani explained.

He went on to say that the EU has already planned a directive stating that until 2010 about 5.75 percent of all fuels for transportation used in Europe must be of vegetable origin. Production costs for vegetable fuels are twice as high as for gasoline or diesel, but become relatively less important when oil prices go up.

“Vegetable fuels do not pollute the environment, are biodegradable, have no net CO2 emissions and can be used on existing engines with minor modifications. Their yield in terms of mileage is 5-10% less than for fuels of fossil origin,” Piani said.

Nevertheless, GM hopes to contribute to technological advancement, which is one of the main goals for “serious automotive companies,” said Warren Browne, CEO of General Motors CIS.

At the moment GM is the only foreign carmaker running research and development operations in Russia.

According to Ralf Wagener, managing partner for Ernst & Young in St. Petersburg, “this idea of opening a research and development center is likely to be followed by other car and component manufacturers in the St-Petersburg region, given Toyota, Ford and Scania production.”

“Thus the region is becoming a new automotive cluster in Russia, and given the high intellectual potential of Russian scientists it will play a significant role in researching and implementing environmental friendly technologies,” Wagener said.

At a press briefing Vladimir Blank, chairman of the city committee for economic development, industrial policy and trade, emphasized the positive effects which could result from scientific and technological cooperation between large foreign companies, Russian authorities and scientific centers.

Wagener saw the GM initiative as just another event proving that the car industry “is one of the powerhouses of the Russian economy attracting growing interest from foreign investors.”