Larry Burns from GM: Initial hydrogen infrastructure would cost $12 billion

(Note: To learn more about hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and their potential to solve the oil crisis, please read the series of articles titled “Twelve Hydrogen Facts” which is part of the Hydrogen Manhattan Project.)

The following Motor Trend blog post discusses the possibility of GM selling thousands of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles by 2012.  One major issue involved in selling hydrogen cars is fueling infrastructure.  If the fueling stations are not in place, nobody is going to buy the cars.

The following excerpt from the blog post discusses this issue:

“If it sounds like three or four years isn’t enough time, there’s another issue – infrastructure.  GM’s partner in the 100-vehicle Equinox fuel cell program is Shell Hydrogen.  And it’s talking to the Transportation Department and State of California, and with officials in China.  Burns doesn’t sound worried about having the infrastructure in place by the time fuel cells hit showrooms.

He says that GM calculates that Shanghai would need 124 hydrogen stations to assure availability within two miles from anywhere in the city.  “Not too many, really,” he says.

“We did that same calculation for the 100 largest cities in the U.S. … and we connected all the cities with stations on the freeway with stations every 25 miles, and that added up to 12,000 stations.  Out of the 170,000 total in the U.S.  Even if every station cost $1 million for hydrogen, that’s $12 billion.”

That would only be 2.4% of the nearly $500 billion dollars that has already been spent on the Iraq War.

(Note: The hydrogen infrastructure would also need to include pipelines to transport the hydrogen produced from clean sources of electricity.  Furthermore, local distribution facilities would have to be built where trucks would transport the hydrogen to fueling stations.  This would likely put the total closer to $25-30 billion, but the cost would still only be 5-6% of what has already been spent on the Iraq War.)