Highway of Dreams
There’s no mistaking the Vancouver headquarters of B.C.’s Hydrogen Highway for anything but a government office. The angular grey building, nestled in a remote corner of the UBC campus, is dominated by National Research Council Canada signage. Decorating the entrance are logos attesting to the multiple public agencies and programs housed inside – Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Gateway, Institute for Fuel Cell Innovation, the Vancouver Fuel Cell Vehicle Program – while the lobby is festooned with full-colour brochures (in both official languages, of course).
We haven’t heard much about the much-touted highway since May 2007, when Premier Gordon Campbell and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger stood shoulder to shoulder to pledge support for a string of hydrogen fuelling stations stretching from Whistler down to the Mexican border. It seems to have dropped off the radar since that photogenic announcement, and I wonder about the highway’s B.C. leg, and how soon we can expect to be tootling from Vancouver to Whistler in fuel cell cars.
I’m met in the lobby by Gary Schubak, who informs me that he is the Hydrogen Highway. Sure enough, his business card reads “Manager, Hydrogen Highway,” and it turns out he’s the sole employee of a program by that name, funded by Natural Resources Canada. Schubak ushers me into his office, and when I ask him for an update on the highway, it soon becomes clear that, as with many government programs, things aren’t quite what they seem. “The Hydrogen Highway is really about a brand,” Schubak explains, “a way to communicate.” As he describes forklifts and stationary power generators, it dawns on me that the “highway” – at least, as far as B.C. is concerned
– has somehow morphed into a highway only in the metaphorical sense: a gateway to a future in which hydrogen figures prominently in our daily energy needs. As for when this change happened, Schubak can’t say, offering only the opaque explanation that “as the industry shifts, we have to shift with it.”
When it was conceived in 2004, B.C.’s Hydrogen Highway was seen as an actual road with “passenger vehicles and the stations required to support them,” according to Schubak. The idea began when the National Research Council, BC Hydro and Methanex Corp. got together to propose a string of hydrogen fuelling stations from the U.S. border to Whistler in time for the 2010 Winter Olympics. The triumvirate took out a trademark on the phrase Hydrogen Highway and would later hand the trademark over to Hydrogen and Fuel Cells Canada, a non-profit industry association. The project has since expanded to include an impossibly complex roster of public and private players. Their idea was that the string of fuelling stations would serve as a showcase proving the technology’s viability to the public, while at the same time convincing automakers that local drivers were ready to test drive fleets of prototype fuel cell cars.
The success in implementing that vision has been far more modest. Four years later, Metro Vancouver and Victoria are now home to a combined fleet of five prototype fuel cell cars supplied by Ford Motor Co., with five hydrogen fuelling stations in the region and a sixth, in Whistler, under construction. The most ambitious segment of the highway is a planned fleet of 20 fuel cell transit buses in Whistler, the first of which is currently being tested in Victoria. When I ask Schubak when we can expect to see Joe Public driving the Sea-to-Sky in a fuel cell car, however, he demurs. “The auto industry hasn’t commercialized in the timetable we’ve been hoping for,” he says, reminding me that Ballard Power Systems Inc. first promised we’d see commercial production of a fuel cell car by 2003, then again by 2007. Still, he hazards a guess: “I expect to see a commercial automotive application by 2015,” he says, before pausing. “Or later.”
Any attempt to get a clear picture of the hydrogen highway is also complicated by politicians who use the term in its generic sense – without seeking approval from Natural Resources Canada to use the trademarked upper-case “Hydrogen Highway.” It turns out there are in fact three hydrogen highways: the one originally envisioned between Vancouver and Whistler, another one in California initiated by Schwarzenegger and a mega-highway connecting the two (the highway announced, with much fanfare, by Schwarzenegger and Campbell in 2007).
I’m most curious about the road right here in B.C. But to understand what’s happening (or not happening) here, you first have to understand what’s going on in California, where that state’s hydrogen highway got off to a much faster start than ours, reaching a critical mass of 24 fuelling stations and 93 fuel cell vehicles within its first year.
Schwarzenegger made the California Hydrogen Highway his personal project by issuing an executive order demanding a blueprint for a hydrogen fuelling infrastructure from transportation planners. The May 2005 California Hydrogen Blueprint Plan calls for 50 to 100 hydrogen fuelling stations by 2010 and projects a fleet of 2,000 hydrogen vehicles.
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