Speech given by Larry Burns of GM at the 2008 National Hydrogen Association annual meeting
(Note: To learn more about hydrogen fuel cell cars 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.)
Larry Burns, vice president of R&D and strategic planning for General Motors, has been very vocal about the need for energy companies and the government to get involved in building the hydrogen infrastructure. Although I have written about this several times, the speech he recently gave on April 2nd at the National Hydrogen Association annual meeting in Sacramento, California, will give you a much better sense of the urgency and passion that he has when discussing the issue.
I would strongly recommend listening to this speech. It is the closest thing you will find to a “State of the Union” address for the hydrogen industry.
An audio clip can be found at the following link (Note: It may take a minute or so for the web page to come up). The speech lasts just over 24 minutes.
Here are three quotes from the speech that I found particularly intriguing:
“The potential societal and customer benefits of fuel cell electric vehicles are clear and compelling. Fuel cell technology promises to deliver family-sized automobiles that are fun to drive, safe, look great, refuel fast, go far between fill-ups, and are emissions-free and petroleum-free. And very importantly it holds the promise to do all of this while keeping automobiles affordable to own and operate. Quite honestly, no other technology offers this exciting potential.”
“It’s great to have small numbers of these vehicles running around. But be very, very clear, the mission is to heavily penetrate the 70 million cars and trucks that are built worldwide each year with this technology.”
“We feel it is past time for the necessary infrastructure to accelerate. What is urgently needed is sufficient investment by energy providers and the cooperation of government to assure auto companies that the required hydrogen infrastructure will be in place when we deploy our next generation of fuel cell electric vehicles.”
