California drives the future of the automobile: impatience with fossil fuels is shaking California, which is the world's sixth-largest economy and has the dirtiest air in the United States. The state's leaders have their sights set on hydrogen.

• Author: Birdsong, Annie

In October 2003, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger came to office in a recall election promising to create the world's first "hydrogen highway," with hydrogen fueling stations situated along the state's major roads. "I intend to show the world that economic growth and the environment can coexist," he told constituents in his January 2004 "state of the state" address.

This may sound strange coming from a former Hollywood action hero who has owned at least seven Hummers, gargantuan vehicles that get only 10 to 12 miles per gallon. But Schwarzenegger is coming through on his promise. Six months after taking office, he signed an executive order to develop the new California Hydrogen Highway Network by 2010. The goal is to speed the commercialization of fuel cell vehicles that run on hydrogen, one of the cleanest energy carriers* in existence (see sidebar, next page).

Shifting the state's transportation system, including its 10,000 retail gasoline outlets, away from petroleum and toward alternative fuels would be a milestone for California--and for the world. California currently leads the United States in gasoline consumption; its 30 million cars, trucks, and buses guzzle more than 40 million gallons each day. These mobile sources accounted for nearly 60 percent of the state's carbon dioxide emissions in 2003, and today more than 90 percent of Californians live in areas where air quality fails to meet federal standards.

State officials hope the new Hydrogen Highway will help California meet and even exceed its air pollution targets, among the most stringent in the world. In 1990, the state adopted legislation requiring that 10 percent of new vehicles produced for sale by 2003 be "zero-emissions" (a standard that has since been modified to require that two percent of vehicles sold be zero emissions and another eight percent be low-emission hybrids or super-clean vehicles). And in 2002, California became the first state or country to regulate the global warming impacts of motor vehicles, requiring automakers to cut emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and several other pollutants by 30 percent starting in 2009. Not surprisingly, car companies have contested the ruling in court.

Many analysts view hydrogen as the obvious means of storing and moving energy in a post-fossil-fuel economy. It has strong allure as a long-term gasoline replacement because, unlike carbon-based fuels, it is abundant and releases only water vapor (when used in fuel cells). Moreover, hydrogen can be derived from water using almost any form of energy, including renewable resources such as solar energy, wind power, and biomass derived from crops and waste. (For the near term, however, the most economical source of hydrogen is likely to be fossil fuels, particularly natural gas.)

Terry Tamminen, former head of California's Environmental Protection Agency and now the state's cabinet secretary, has outlined an early network of 150-200 hydrogen fueling stations, or roughly one station every 20 miles along the state's 21 interstate freeways. The pumps will be located in the maintenance yards of bus stations, at rest stops along highways, in the parking lots of "big box" retail stores, and perhaps ultimately at some of the 250 stations that now sell natural gas in the state. The goal is to make hydrogen accessible to most Californians, Tamminen says: "If you get the baseline network evenly distributed around the state, you can give confidence to consumers that ... they will find the fuel."

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For a long time, hydrogen has been plagued by a "chicken or egg" problem. Developers of hydrogen fueling facilities have been reluctant to invest too heavily in the sites because very few vehicles can actually use them. And with only a handful of filling stations out there, automakers have held back from large-scale production of fuel cell vehicles. "To get this to work, both the hydrogen infrastructure and the technology that uses it need to be developed in parallel," notes Bob Wilkinson, lecturer in environmental studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

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