Hydrogen fuel plant set for 2010 debut

As early as next summer, UCLA expects to house one of California’s largest hydrogen fueling stations after securing $2.1 million in financial grants earlier this month.

The school plans to break ground on the project this summer, with the fueling station for hydrogen-powered vehicles up and running by June 2010, said Michael Swords, executive director of strategic research initiatives at UCLA.

The funding includes $1.7 million from the California Air Resources Board and $400,000 from the California Mobile Source Air Pollution Reduction Review Committee.

Located adjacent to the transit facility near the corner of Veteran and Kinross avenues, the station will be designed for use by the general public, Swords said. He added that filling up on hydrogen will not be entirely unlike refueling on gasoline.

“It will be very similar to a retail experience, on a much smaller scale,” Swords said.

The station will generate its own hydrogen on-site using natural gas, eliminating the need for trucks or piping systems, Swords said. The station will also be run by UCLA’s Hydrogen Research Engineering Consortium, he added, and will therefore serve as a powerful educational resource.

“From a student perspective this is going to be an incredible learning tool,” Swords said. “This is going to be an opportunity to get hands-on experience in creating hydrogen from natural gas.”

Graduate and undergraduate engineering students will have access to the portion of the station where the hydrogen is manufactured, said Vasilios Manousiouthakis, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, and the recipient of the grant.

On-site hydrogen generation will provide data for engineering students studying the transformation of natural gas to hydrogen.

“They will create the theory, the mathematical model of the system and then they will also have the real world,” Manousiouthakis said. “They will be able to do comparative studies and learn how to better carry out the transformation.”

Hydrogen fuel cell cars have no carbon emissions, Manousiouthakis said, though the overall hydrogen production process is still not completely carbon-neutral.

In addition to hydrogen, the conversion of natural gas also leaves behind carbon dioxide as a by-product, something Manousiouthakis said engineering researchers and students know all too well.

“We right now are looking through our research efforts into methods to produce hydrogen from natural gas without emitting any carbon dioxide,” he said.

In fact, UCLA has been at the forefront of hydrogen engineering since the 1970s, Manousiouthakis said, when it produced a first-of-its-kind, award-winning hydrogen-powered vehicle.

Looking at the progress of hydrogen-powered vehicles nearly 40 years later, Manousiouthakis said that the remaining obstacles to a hydrogen-fueled transportation paradigm are more economic than scientific.

Many hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are now able to run roughly 200 miles on a full tank, he said, a range comparable to their gasoline counterparts. Besides a drop in cost of hydrogen-powered vehicles, Manousiouthakis said that an increase in self-sustaining fueling stations like the one UCLA has been awarded are pivotal toward achieving a hydrogen economy.

“It demonstrates that we don’t need to build a pipeline infrastructure,” he said. “We can use existing pipeline infrastructure, namely natural gas.”

When the station opens adjacent to the transit facility in Westwood, it will have room for one car at a time, said Manousiouthakis.

The setup is small, but it is an important step toward a green infrastructure, said Sherry Lewis, associate director of the transportation fleet and transit at UCLA, who also helped on the project.

“Someone has to do it,” Lewis said.

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