As devoted solo commuters zoom, or crawl, along Interstate 15, they should take a moment when crossing Scripps Poway Parkway to gaze east and salute. Over in that direction, working quietly from modest facilities in the Poway Tech Center, sits Dbb Fuel Cell Engines Corp. Led by Managing Director Rick Cooper, the company has grabbed a leading position in the international race to build and market a non-polluting replacement for the internal combustion engine.
    Fuel cells are the name of this game. If Dbb succeeds, Detroit Iron and its successors will continue to rule America's roadways long after the last drop of oil has been pumped from Mother Earth. And the powerplants might be assembled in San Diego.
    Financing for Dbb is not an issue. So far the effort has been funded with nearly a half-billion investment dollars from auto giants Ford and DaimlerChrysler. The actual fuel cells are supplied by Dbb's partner, Ballard Power Systems of Vancouver, Canada.
    To win the game — competition is plentiful — they both must perfect and miniaturize the method for collecting, storing and driving "fuel" into the "cells" that in turn generate the electricity that powers the electric motors that make a car go.
    The 50 employees at Dbb are working with a century-old technology that already has many uses, including providing electricity for orbiting space shuttles. It’s just that right now the existing powerplants are too big, too expensive and too dangerous to use in mass-production cars.
    Why San Diego County for the effort? (The Poway operation is the U.S. subsidiary of Dbb Fuel Cell Engines GMBH, of Nabern, Germany.) Well, where better to work out the kinks than Southern California, the smog capital of the world's wealthiest country and a region where stringent regulations mandate that growing numbers of zero-polluting vehicles prowl local roadways.
    "We opened the first facility here in 1996, and I was the first employee," says Cooper, a Canadian engineer who once worked at Ballard. "We are now moving into our third leased building in Poway, and we plan to build a fourth building of our own close to the other three buildings. These buildings are intended to accommodate the increased activity we have planned here. We will be the supplier of fuel cell engines for all of Ford's test vehicles, and for Ford and DaimlerChrysler early production models for use in the United States."
    In a fuel cell-powered automobile, hydrogen gas is combined with oxygen (from air) in the presence of a catalyst, generally platinum, to make electricity. The electricity is supplied to an electric motor which powers the driving wheels.
    Remember all the fuss about electric cars? They are fun to drive, peppy and almost completely silent. The bad stuff is that more than one-third of the weight of the car is accounted for by expensive batteries, which have a relatively short life — the range between charges is 50 to 100 miles — and a recharge time that takes hours. And besides that — they don’t like cold weather.
    General Motors' electric car, the two-seat EV-1, went on the market locally about three years ago with a heavily subsidized lease. So far GM has only leased around 50 of them in San Diego County.
    Honda offered its EV Plus electric car for lease about three years ago and has managed to lease only 13 of these cars locally. Honda also has shut down manufacturing of the vehicles, and after the remaining cars have been leased will terminate the program.
    Both companies discovered that the marketplace will not tolerate inconvenience.
    Like the battery-powered electric car, the hydrogen fuel cell car has no noxious emissions. The only residue is pure water. It is quiet and smooth on the road, with no shifting needed.
    Of course, there are issues involved with the creation of a hydrogen fuel manufacturing and delivery infrastructure, and the storage of liquid hydrogen in an automobile at minus 423 degrees centigrade with significant space, weight, and cost problems to solve.
    One alternative being pursued by Ballard and Dbb is to store methanol in the car's fuel tank and use it to make hydrogen onboard the car.
    It is an attractive proposition. The present gasoline delivery infrastructure can be relatively easily converted to deliver methanol (there are some 60 methanol stations open in Southern California). Methanol is derived from natural gas, of which there is an abundant supply. Methanol also can be produced by renewable sources such as biomass or garbage.
    Extracting hydrogen from methanol produces some undesirable emissions, but only one-tenth of the pollutants from the cleanest automobile on the road today.
    In 1997, Daimler-Benz introduced a fuel cell car which runs on methanol, the NECAR 3.
    Dbb uses the PEM proton exchange membrane fuel cells produced by Ballard Power to develop the engines that will power electric cars and buses. Ballard is a publicly-traded firm listed on the Toronto and Nasdaq Stock Exchanges. Ballard's major shareholders are DaimlerChrysler and Ford, with the pair owning, respectively, 20 percent and 15 percent of the stock.
    Dbb Fuel Cell Engines is owned by DaimlerChrysler (51 percent), Ballard (27 percent), and Ford (22 percent). Ballard and Dbb have partnered with Ford and DaimlerChrysler in a financial and technical arrangement with the goal of developing mass production fuel cell-powered automobile, bus and other applications.
    Ford and DaimlerChrysler have each committed more than $500 million to the partnership.
    Fuel cell engine development largely has been driven by California clean air laws. After reviewing various Los Angeles area sites, Cooper says, Dbb senior management settled on San Diego County, attracted by the lifestyle and atmosphere. The Poway Tech Center was judged an ideal place for the operation, offering plenty of room for expansion.
    "We are very happy in Poway, and Dbb management feels they made the right decision to come here," says Cooper.
    The Ballard, Dbb, Ford and DaimlerChrysler partnership recently teamed with the state of California, Arco, Texaco and Shell to form the California Fuel Cell Partnership, with the goal of introducing 20 fuel cell-powered buses and 30 automobiles by 2003 and setting up a fuel delivery infrastructure to support fuel cell vehicles.
    "Never before has such a partnership occurred where the auto industry, the oil industry and government have partnered to introduce a new technology," says Ferdinand Panik, the German-based head of DaimlerChrysler's fuel cell project, and chief executive of Dbb Fuel Cell Engines.
    The Dbb facility in Poway is planned to be the assembly plant for Dbb fuel cell engines sold for use in the U.S.
    While fuel cell vehicles may begin appearing on state highways in less than four years, mass production of cars and buses is likely a decade or more away.
    "I think the complete replacement of the internal combustion engine with fuel cells will take decades," says Cooper. "However, the phase in of commercially viable fuel cell cars and buses will start around 2003. The marketplace will drive the actual rate of fuel cell car sales."
    A lot depends on how quickly the powerplants can be made affordable.
    "It is hard to measure precisely since further work is needed to bring our projected unit costs down," says David McLeod, the Vancouver-based director of corporate communications for Dbb. "Fuel cell system costs are being aggressively addressed now that space problems have largely been solved. Recent work in Germany on reducing the cost of reformers is promising, and electric motor costs are well understood. Once the production costs have been reduced to commercially viable levels, conversion to production could be very fast. I feel that this technology is on a very fast development curve, something like computers and software were in the early stages. Very fast."

An exploded view of the DaimlerChrysler NECAR 4.

    Progress has been fast. For example, in 1994, when Daimler-Benz introduced its first fuel cell car, the NECAR 1, the fuel cell engine filled an entire Mercedes van. In DaimlerChrysler's latest fuel cell car, the NECAR 4, the fuel cell engine providing the same power is the size of a suitcase and tucked beneath the floor of the Mercedes A series small car.
    Still some in the automotive industry remain more cautious about how swiftly fuel cells will reach the marketplace in appreciable numbers. John Smith, chairman of GM, predicts, "a slow phaseout of the internal combustion engine in 20 to 30 years."
    John Wallace, Ford's director of alternative fuel vehicle programs, admits his company is working on an aggressive timetable. "Our target to commercialize these vehicles by 2004 has a lot of risk," Wallace says. "We don’t know how to get there."
    One of Ford's key fuel cell researchers, Bradford Bates, notes, "We really have no confidence these things will completely deliver on their promise. But the promise is so great, you just have to give it a go."
    Yet Ford's new chairman, William Clay Ford, appears to be an enthusiastic supporter of fuel cell cars. "Ford's goal is to get the technology into customers' hands — high-volume applications that car and truck buyers can afford," he said in April during the Sacramento launch of the California Fuel Cell Partnership. "There's no point in offering technology that sits unused on dealer lots. We must offer customers environmental solutions that are affordable and convenient. Fuel cell electric vehicles have great potential to offer future families the same comfort as today’s vehicles with zero emissions and increased fuel economy."
    Test results alone have GM excited about the possibilities.
    "Fuel cells have strong potential to be the best long-term solution," notes Harry Pearce, GM's vice chairman. "Our fuel cell test vehicle gets 80 miles per gallon and has a driving range of 300 miles."
    Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, in a 1997 evaluation of Ballard Power Systems, forecast that by 2010 there will be 600,000 fuel cell-powered cars and 3,000 buses on the roads.
    Even though many risks along the path to mass production could trip up that forecast, Dbb's Cooper notes, "It is reasonable to expect that the majority of these vehicles will be sold in limited key markets such as Southern California."
    The effect on the quality of the air by replacing even this small number of internal combustion engines could be significant.
    What will a fuel cell car cost to run? Taking into account all of the pros and cons involved in a comparison of operating costs between the internal combustion engine and a comparable fuel cell engine, such as the superior efficiency of the fuel cell, the higher energy content and lower cost of a gallon of gasoline versus hydrogen or methanol, it seems that the fuel cell engine will achieve comparable or better per-mile operating cost.
    Although analysts tab Ballard and Dbb as the leaders in the fuel cell field, other competitors are working furiously to be the first with a viable, commercial vehicle. Some are using Ballard fuel cells; others like International Fuel Cells (Division of United Technologies), Zevco of England, and Mitsubishi are working on in-house programs. Nissan and Honda have both purchased fuel cells from Ballard and have aggressive fuel cell programs, as do Volkswagen and Volvo. General Motors and Toyota announced in April plans to team up in a five-year pact to jointly develop fuel cell cars and trucks.
    McLeod says that competition in the fuel cell business is healthy. "The more the merrier; this is the way it will take off."
    Indeed, the fuel cell has been called "the microchip of the energy industry."
    Other commercial applications for fuel cells are being pursued by Ballard and Dbb. For example, a home could obtain all its electrical power for lighting, heating and cooling from an in-house fuel cell system. If all homes had fuel cell systems, there would be no need for central power generating plants and the power-robbing electricity distribution systems that inefficiently bring electricity to the home. In fact, the fuel cell car, when at home, can easily provide all the electricity the home needs. No need to hook up a remote cabin to the grid, just plug in the car. Portable fuel cell electric generator sets are a natural application for this science.
    Fuel cell buses already are making appearances. "We have buses being operated by the Chicago and Vancouver transit authorities on a test basis," says Cooper, whose lab includes a bus cab and engine compartment. "We plan to have 20 buses in service by 2003."
    Chula Vista likely will be the first San Diego county city to use one of the buses. Bill Gustafson of Chula Vista Transit says the city is in the early stages of arranging federal and state funding assistance for a demonstration fuel cell-powered bus using a Dbb fuel cell engine which will likely be assembled in Poway. The plan is to put the bus in service in Chula Vista in the spring of 2001. Joe Irvin of the California Fuel Cell Partnership confirms that one of the buses planned to be in service in early 2001 is slated for Chula Vista.
    It’s nice to know the engine will be built locally, and may be one of the first of thousands. "San Diego will remain a major player in the system's integration of fuel cell engines, even into the production period," says McLeod.