Just say no, to hydrogen

Do you think that Schwarzenegger's pledge to build this hydrogen infrastructure now runs the risk of overhyping hydrogen, which could then hurt its prospects in the long term?

I definitely believe that overhyping a technology is quite counterproductive. I absolutely do. Electric vehicles were overhyped and prematurely introduced into the market place. And as you see, General Motors has now withdrawn every single one of the electric vehicles from the marketplace and squished them. They've recycled them all.

But isn't there an argument that the electric cars helped push the creation of the hybrid cars that we have now?

Have some of the California regulations pushing people toward cleaner vehicles helped advance technology? I think that there is absolutely no question that that is the case. I'm all for regulations that require cleaner cars over time. Take the cleanest cars on the road today, which are the Toyota Prius or the Honda hybrid vehicle.

If you buy a Prius, you can cut your oil consumption and your greenhouse-gas emissions in half, and you can cut your tailpipe emissions 90 percent. And you can do that without paying more for the car, and without giving up any other attributes that you like, such as range.

In fact, this car has twice the range, because it's so efficient. And it's a very roomy car. I own it. So it is really the first no-compromise environmental car. And in my mind it poses a great dilemma for the people who want any alternative-fuel vehicles. You've got to deliver superior environmental performance than the Prius without sacrificing any of its attributes.

Not only do you get twice the range, but you get half the fuel bill. And hydrogen is incredibly expensive. Hydrogen is a very expensive fuel. If anytime in the next two decades someone tries to sell you a hydrogen car, your annual fuel bill is probably going to triple, compared to the Prius.

As gasoline cars get cleaner and more efficient -- like these hybrid cars -- what does that do to the prospects for hydrogen fuel-cell cars entering the marketplace?

People clearly, by and large, don't go out and buy cars just to reduce oil consumption. After all, after the second Persian Gulf War, people bought SUVs and put flags on them.

I just don't see that you see a lot of evidence that oil consumption makes people buy cars. The higher price of gasoline does motivate people to reduce their fuel bill. The problem for hydrogen is that for all of the alternative fuels, it is almost certainly the most expensive.

You would be hard pressed now to get hydrogen delivered into the tank of a fuel-cell car in useful form for under about $5 a gallon equivalent. And what's worse, from my perspective, is that that would be the cheapest hydrogen, which would be hydrogen from natural gas.

Why would you want to go to all the trouble of buying your expensive fuel-cell car with limited range and limited fueling options, all so that you could replace imported oil with hydrogen from imported natural gas? I don't think that would excite most consumers, to be honest with you.

My feeling is that when you get right down to it, what we need to do is wait for renewable hydrogen, because that's the pollution-free hydrogen. But that's expensive. With renewable hydrogen, now, we're talking about something that costs $10 to $20 a gallon of gasoline equivalent.

And we can ask the existential question: Is hydrogen green if it is delivered by a diesel truck?

I think that what we need to do is wait for a low-cost renewable form of hydrogen, but that could easily be 20 or 30 years from now.

So my question, which I ask a lot of people, is: What is the value proposition of this car? It's not intrinsically good for the environment. It would only be good for the environment if it didn't cost more than, let's say, a Prius, and it ran on a renewable-based hydrogen. But I don't think there's much prospect that that's going to happen for two or three decades.

So I think a lot of this talk about building the cars or the infrastructure is premature.

We have three major scientific breakthroughs that are needed: We need a major breakthrough in the fuel cells to bring them to near parity to the cost of internal-combustion engine cars. We need a major breakthrough in the storage system or else you just are saddled with a car that I think is going to be wildly inadequate in the marketplace. The third breakthrough is renewable hydrogen, some form of low-cost renewable hydrogen.

I think absent those three breakthroughs this is not going to be a "green" car in any meaningful sense of the word.

With all the problems that you lay out about the safety, the cost, the infrastructure, the energy required to generate the hydrogen, why do you think that there is so much excitement about fuel-cell cars right now?

There's a beautiful vision of a pollution-free future. And so it's appealing in that sense. Everywhere I go people say: This is an appealing vision, and we have to get off of gasoline someday. And they themselves don't see any alternatives, although I see plenty of other alternatives.

I also think, General Motors, in particular, is hyping this because they don't like fuel-efficiency regulations for cars, and they've been holding out the promise that hydrogen will be this silver-bullet solution to all our automobile problems right around the corner, so don't force us into tighter fuel-economy standards.

What do you see as the other alternatives?

The first thing to say is that the key revolution of the automobile for the next three decades has occurred, and it is the hybrid platform. It is putting the large battery on your car, which makes the car much more efficient, and electrifies some aspects of the car.

So the key for us in the next few decades is to push hybrid cars into the marketplace. It's starting to happen. Every car manufacturer is introducing hybrids. California is pushing PZEV [partial zero-emission vehicles] into the marketplace.

And if alternative fuels prove practical, you're going to put them in a hybrid. You'll replace the internal-combustion engine with a fuel cell, and you'll run the car on hydrogen, if that is practical.

But you could also run that car on biofuels, which is to say ethanol. My preference is not the ethanol that is made from corn, but is rather the ethanol that is made from cellulose. Or, crop waste other than the food part of the crop. This is sometimes called cellulosic ethanol or biomass ethanol. And I do think that that is, if you take a Prius, and you run it on an ethanol 85 percent mixture, then you're getting 300 miles per gallon of gasoline.

Another strategy that I'm also quite keen on is the possibility of putting a larger battery into the car that would allow you to run the car pure electric for a certain number of miles, which is sometimes called a grid-connected hybrid.

You would therefore replace gasoline with more electricity use. It's going to use electricity a lot more efficiently than a fuel cell would. It gives you potentially the benefits of a zero-emissions vehicle in a city for kind of short driving. And then for long trips you have the advantage of an internal-combustion engine for ease of refueling.

I think that these grid-connected hybrids are a natural evolution once you introduce hybrids into the marketplace.

My whole thing is not to pre-judge the answer. Not have the government say: I know today that Americans are going to be driving hydrogen cars 30 years from now or 20 years from now. Because I don't see how any human being could possibly know the answer to that question.

If you read the National Academy report or the American Physical Society report, they were both clear that absent scientific breakthroughs, hydrogen cars may turn out to be a technological dead end. I just don't think that we know enough today to say that we know what is going to win in the marketplace.

Next Page: What about higher gas prices? Will that encourage Americans to conserve?

• View blog reactions