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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Diesel-powered boats are big-time polluters, pumping out more noxious fumes per passenger than cars or buses. Is it time to clear the decks for fuel-cell-powered watercraft?
Oct 23, 2003 | It's hard not to feel a little eco-smug as the first hydrogen fuel cell boat on the San Francisco Bay slides away from the dock at Pier 40's South Beach Yacht Club, leaving behind a marina full of giant yachts and sailboats that burn dirty diesel and gasoline in their engines.
There's a loud grind from the bow thruster as the 30-foot green fiberglass water taxi makes a left turn, but once the boat is on course, the engine generates little noise at all and the craft barely vibrates. "I've never been on a boat this quiet!" exclaims one passenger.
The boat, designed by Seaworthy Systems, produces no emissions, since it has no internal-combustion engine. It is powered by both a fuel cell and a battery, which is called upon during acceleration for extra oomph.
"When you're out there on the water, the energy is really coming from the fuel cell," explains Rex Hodge, president and CEO of Anuvu, the cell's manufacturer. As with a hybrid car, where the internal combustion engine charges the electric battery, the boat never has to be plugged in to recharge the battery, because the fuel cell does the job.
Turning away from the Bay Bridge, the craft makes a sharp right turn following the cement breakwater that separates the harbor from the bay. The wall is lined with seagulls, cormorants and a few brown pelicans, which appear to take no notice of the quiet boat or its human cargo. The vessel then circles around toward Pac Bell Park through the same waters where pods of kayakers and motorboaters try to catch home runs during Giants games.
But all too soon, our ride is over. "I was told my last trip was too long," apologizes Capt. Sweeney, an engineer for Seaworthy Systems. After all, it's just a demonstration, and besides, the sodium borohydride fuel that juices this baby costs $48 a gallon.
Hydrogen has been touted increasingly over the past year as the long-term solution to everything from global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions to the United States' overdependence on foreign oil. Until recently the province of a few futurists and environmentalists, hydrogen has even moved into the parlance of Republican policymakers. In January, President Bush talked up hydrogen as part of his "Freedom Fuel" initiative. Earlier this fall, now Governor-elect Schwarzenegger proposed a "hydrogen highway" for California to be ready to roll by 2010. Pumps would deliver fuel every 20 miles to a new generation of zero-emission vehicles -- a proposal that drew scoffs from those who wondered where the Hummer-driving actor would find the money to pay for a bold new infrastructure in the midst of a horrific budget crisis. Meanwhile, hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius are being snapped up by buyers as fast as they are made available.
And yet, like so many grand futuristic technological solutions to today's problems, the hydrogen economy has a way of receding into the middle distance the more you look at it, always appearing years, if not decades, away. There is the problem of the infrastructure, the problem of the fuel cell's price, the problem of where you get the hydrogen, and so on. It's not even clear that refitting boats with fuel cells is the best decision, right now, for cleaning up marine pollution. There are cheaper alternatives.
But hydrogen momentum does appear to be building, pushed by a rising tide both on land and sea. In October, Anuvu started quietly offering a fuel cell vehicle to the public -- a pickup truck with a hybrid fuel cell and battery engine -- that retails for $100,000. So far, nobody's bought one.
Despite all the hype and media coverage of fuel cell cars, it may be in fact be on water where the general public is likely to get -- and afford -- its first access to the transportation technology. San Francisco plans to have a fuel cell ferry on the bay by 2005, running from Treasure Island to the city and back, says Mary Frances Culnane, marine engineering manager for the city's Water Transit Authority. The project is funded by a $2.5 million federal grant from Congress to try out the technology in a working marine vessel.
