Firm Perspectives on Hydrogen

A glance at the product range in today’s car showrooms shows a strong commitment of all mainstream vehicle manufacturers to conventional petrol and diesel internal combustion engine (ICE) technology. These types of engines have been built and refined for more than 100 years (Cowan and Hulten, 1996). Since 1990, alternative ways of propelling vehicles have been presented by various automobile manufacturers: full electric and hydrogen driven, as well as hybrid-electric models. In general, these three alternatives have received much less R&D attention than has the dominant IC engine. Hybrid-electric engines have by now been incorporated in most car manufacturers’ research efforts, at least to some extent, and most firms consider them important in the short or medium term (Chanaron and Teske, 2007). From an environmental perspective, they should be considered to be neither a minor nor a major innovation, decreasing harmful emissions (from driving) by 10- 20 per cent (Lave and MacLean, 2002). Alongside hybrid-electric systems, more radical alternatives have also been presented. There are full electric vehicles, (re)introduced in the 1990s, and hydrogen-fuelled vehicles, introduced around 2000. These latter two types of vehicles are examples of ultra low emission vehicles (ULEVs). They emit extremely low levels of harmful gases compared to existing diesel and petrol vehicles. California’s Air Resources Board defines a ULEV as a vehicle that emits 50 per cent less pollution emissions than the average for new cars released in that model year. We follow that definition here, and include CO2 as a harmful gas in the examined emissions.1