Opel banking on hydrogen future

Not convinced of the promised advances in battery range, the firm is planning a hydrogen fuel-cell model. So will the plug-in electric car be history before most of us even own one?

WHITHER THE future of the fossil-fuelled motor? It’s the question that tasks the minds of all those who earn a crust from the motor sector. With 750 million cars on the world’s roads today, some predictions are that it will dramatically rise to two billion by 2050. With the surge in sales in China and other emerging economies with large populations coming into the consumer markets, that’s not an implausible figure.

That supposes, of course, a continuing supply of the natural resources to build and fuel these vehicles. Now that’s a very questionable supposition.

Opel’s vice-president of powertrains in Europe refers to the oil age as a “candle in the night” when graphed over centuries. Our usage soared at the turn of the last century, peaked in the next decade or so, then fell off just as quick.

Opel has adopted a varied and multi-pronged response to the quest for power. First, more efficient engines; then a mix of electric powertrains, sometimes supported by small petrol engines for greater mileage between recharging; and finally, fuel cell vehicles powered by hydrogen. While some rivals suggest the Opel approach – and that of its parent General Motors (GM) which is effectively mapping out the strategy – seems indecisive and accuse it of hedging its bets, the firm’s engineers see it as working in a linear flow, with electric powertrains merely easing us towards the ultimate change to a fuel cell future.

Others may envy GM’s ability to straddle all angles of the powertrain debate, but it’s worth remembering that it has had its own financial woes of late and has stepped back from the precipice to return to healthy profit only recently.

So, how does GM foresee the future? First off will be the Opel Ampera, already on sale in the US under the arguably more attractive moniker of Chevrolet Volt. This is what they call a range extender: a vehicle that can run on electric power alone for up to 60km but can then call upon a relatively small 1.4-litre petrol engine to act as a generator for added power supply to get you to over 400km before you need to recharge or refuel. It’s different from the hybrids on our roads in that all the power supplied is electric, the engine merely converting its fossil fuel supply to electricity when called upon. The benefit, say Opel engineers, is the ability to have an electric car for the vast majority of trips, but a range extender to get you across country on those longer trips without stopping off along the way for a few hours to plug in your car.

For the purists, a small electric car is due by 2013. This will be a city car and, without the range extender, it will be confined to the sort of limits between charges other all-electric cars can muster.

Finally, in what is a massive leap towards the long-term solution, Opel and GM are determined to have a hydrogen fuel cell model on commercial sale – albeit in limited numbers – around 2015.

So, why the hydrogen approach? Frankly, says Opel’s senior European engineer Christian Kunstmann, they don’t buy the battery hype that the ranges between recharges are going to radically improve.

While Opel is preparing its own electric supermini for 2013, its senior engineers are already playing down the likely advances in battery development that will make electric cars as user-friendly as their fossil-fuelled counterparts.

Consider the issue of range between recharges: several car firms have bandied about predictions of a significant leap in battery technology over the next five years. The suggestion is that the average range of 60km between charges at present could hit 400km by the end of the century. Christian Kunstmann, Opel’s chief engineer for electric vehicles, is dismissive of such claims. “If you want to maximise range, batteries will become small and tiny and cheap. That is fundamentally not true. Even if they do, they will never be able to compare with a regular car in terms of recharging time.”

He is supported in his reservations by fellow Opel engineer Andreas Konekamp who says that the weight a battery needs for a significant range means that such massive improvements are unlikely. “To give you an example of the progress we’ve made, in 1992 we operated a fleet of Opel electric cars. Comparing those with the new Ampera model, which is a range extender and not fully electric, we’ve reduced weight from 325kg to 180kg and output has increased from 45kW of power. Now we have 111kW. These are impressive, but consider the timeframe after nearly 20 years of work. It makes talk of a tenfold improvement in battery technology over the next few years seem unrealistic. The development of energy density in batteries is very slow. There are small development steps but not on the scale of tenfold improvements over a matter of years.”

And according to Kunstmann, even if we do eventually get small and relatively cheaper battery packs, “they will never be able to compare with a regular car in terms of recharging time. I need a vehicle that will cover my daily drive but will also cope with going more than 500km. Pump in fuel and have it ’recharged’ in two minutes.” Hence the attraction of hydrogen.

In many ways hydrogen-powered cars run the same as electric ones in that the hydrogen is used to create an electrical charge through a chemical reaction. The only difference is that power comes not from plugging the battery in, but filling a fuel tank with hydrogen.

On prototypes at present, the range is 220km between refuelling but they believe that will improve. Alongside this will be a reduction in the amount of platinum needed in a fuel cell. As a precious metal, it adds to the cost of current fuel cell cars. Then there is the issue of infrastructure: swapping over filling station forecourts is not going to be an easy task. Finally there remains an issue of public perception: people need reassurance about driving about in cars with such hydrogen fuel on board.

Opel accepts there are still major hurdles to overcome before we see the public jumping on board the hydrogen bandwagon as quickly as some have accepted the arrival of electric cars. But it believes the current wave of electric models will merely act as a bridge to the future.

It’s not alone. Its work on a hydrogen fuel cell future is being carried out in conjunction with Daimler Benz, while BMW has continually worked on this technology for over three decades. The Germans, it seems, see an alternative to the plug-in future others are painting.

For a while it seemed that some degree of agreement had been reached on the direction we were taking to wean our cars off the petrol pumps, but already the engineers are preparing the way for unplugging the motoring world from the national power grids.