Shell Installs Hydrogen Pump At DC Gas Station - WP

[hatrack]

The new pump at the Shell station on Benning Road NE in the District doesn't look much different from the others, but it represents a new concept in automotive technology: hydrogen power. The hydrogen-dispensing pump is the first installed at a public gas station in the country, according to officials from Shell Hydrogen and General Motors Corp., who will team up today to introduce it.

Average motorists can't do much more than look at it, because the only local vehicles that run on hydrogen are six minivans GM uses to demonstrate the technology to members of Congress. But the pump, which Shell spent more than $2 million installing, is a sign of how major corporations think they'll be able to wean the nation from dependence on foreign oil.

"This is a significant step on a bigger journey," said Jeremy Bentham, chief executive of Shell Hydrogen. "I think this is a little like the cell phone industry in the early 1980s -- you had a patchy infrastructure and cell phones the size of briefcases, but those people had a vision of how to step forward to the future and have created a very, very big business."

EDIT

Environmentalists hail the notion of cars and trucks that emit nothing more harmful than water vapor, but they have become increasingly skeptical about the promise of hydrogen. "The major unanswered questions about hydrogen are not whether you can run a car on it. They are, how do you make it? What is it going to cost? And what is going to be the public investment in infrastructure?" said David Hamilton, director of global warming and energy programs at the Sierra Club. The Shell station on Benning Road NE is "devoid of economic reality. doesn't exist in the real world except as a hugely subsidized example of something that the companies want you to see."

EDIT

Wow, the revolution has arrived.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38168-2004Nov9.html