[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 152 (Tuesday, October 20, 2009)]
[House]
[Pages H11500-H11505]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     ENERGY AND TECHNOLOGY OPTIONS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 2009, the gentleman from New York (Mr. Massa) is recognized 
for 60 minutes.
  Mr. MASSA. Mr. Speaker, I thank you for the opportunity to rise today 
to discuss something that has become exceptionally important to me and 
to many in my district. In fact, it has become exceptionally important 
to individuals all over this country.
  I ask the Speaker's indulgence tonight to engage both on a short and 
technical historical discussion of a technology that not only holds 
great promise for the United States but, in fact, for the world; and I 
appreciate the Speaker's indulgence as I do so.
  It was a pivotal time in history, just about 100 years ago, when 
motorized transportation was, in fact, in its infancy, and our country 
and its transportation industry faced a very important choice: Should 
the energy for powering the newly developed horseless carriage come 
from electricity and batteries, or should it come from the internal 
combustion engine and petroleum fuels?
  Remember, please, that both of these technologies--and it's hard for 
us to imagine--were at that time brand new. Both technologies had been 
established in the fledgling motorized transport industry from the 
beginning. There were down sides to both choices.
  Batteries were heavy; took up a lot of space and took a long time to 
reenergize or, as we come to call it today, recharge. Whereas, internal 
combustion engines were noisy. They scared a lot of horses; required 
fuel that was both difficult to come by; they were scarce, smelly and 
volatile. Our other choice, the electric drive, or the internal 
combustion engine, would require a huge investment in the development 
of a nationwide infrastructure.
  Obviously, the choices taken then heavily favored the internal 
combustion engine. By a large margin, the internal combustion engine 
outperformed electric drive; carried more passengers; could carry more 
cargo; could go farther while taking far less time to refill its on-
board energy supply. This was for the fundamental reason that, by both 
weight and volume, more energy was contained in petroleum fuels, and 
they could then be packaged in batteries.
  Thus, for the last 100 years and continuing today, petroleum-
dependent internal combustion engines dominate every common mode of 
motorized transportation, but some things have not changed in 100 
years. Batteries, no matter how improved, are still heavy. They take up 
a lot of space, and they require an awful long time to recharge.

                              {time}  2200

  Internal combustion engines, however improved, still scare a lot of 
horses, at least back where I am from, are still noisy, and require a 
fuel that is both smelly, hard to come by and volatile.
  Among the things that have changed is our realization of the long-
term consequences of our earlier choices. Increasingly in recent 
decades we have come to realize that there are many compelling flaws in 
our choices for internal combustion engines: The noise, the smell, the 
volatility, the scarcity of the fuel. The overriding concern now and 
the overriding environmental impact and national security 
considerations dominate today's discussions.
  But that is not all. In the complex and dangerous world in which we 
live, international industrial competitiveness and domestic access to 
advanced technologies are now paramount. So, as with 100 years ago, 
much is at stake for our country and for the world in the decisions we 
make now. And as we are consumed in internal domestic debates over 
things like health care and other critical issues that we face, Mr. 
Speaker, I pause tonight to talk about advanced technologies.
  Fortunately, the automotive industry and governments around the world 
have foreseen the present, what we face today, and they have been 
making preparations. Clearly, solutions to the environmental impact and 
energy security issues that we are facing have been embraced by the 
automotive industry, and technologies to move us to a future of clean 
environment and energy independence are now at hand and at the ready.
  The automotive industry has proven its commitment by inventing and 
investing in these technologies and products, and governments have 
professed their support through statements such as the following from 
our President, Barack Obama, just recently on March 19th of this year. 
Mr. Speaker, please allow me to quote:
  ``So, we have a choice to make. We can remain one of the world's 
leading importers of foreign oil, or we can make the investments that 
would allow us to become the world's leading exporter of renewable 
energy. We can let climate change continue to go unchecked, or we can 
help to stop it. We can let the jobs of tomorrow be created abroad, or 
we can create those jobs right here in America and lay the foundation 
for lasting prosperity.''
  National energy and environmental goals have already been set. We 
must address America's incredibly and increasingly dangerous dependence 
on petroleum and reduce the approximately 140 billion gallons of 
gasoline that U.S. drivers use every year--140 billion gallons of 
gasoline--and every year more and more of it imported from the very 
countries who would both do us economic and national security harm.
  To meet these challenges, we must embrace the ingenuity of our 
national research community, an ingenuity and national research 
community that took us to the moon and beyond, and we must take these 
technologies from their cradle of infancy through commercial deployment 
and development.
  Understand that we are again at a pivotal point in history. We are 
standing at the threshold of the greatest single paradigm shift in the 
entire history of motorized transportation. It has only been since the 
day we decided to shift from the horse and carriage to the horseless 
carriage that we have the options in front of us today. And only one 
phenomenon stands in the way of our accomplishing our national goals 
through the automobile industry, the phenomenon known as, and may I 
quote the automobile industry, ``the valley of death.''
  The valley of death is an automotive industry reference to the 
treacherous territory between proven feasibility in the research 
laboratory and the commercially successful products in the marketplace. 
Every single new technology that we have come to enjoy in automobiles, 
from power brakes and power steering to factory air, has languished in 
the valley of death until it became a commercially available product in 
the mass market.
  There are now four or five major technologies for us to choose from, 
and they are, from the most straightforward to the most technologically 
challenging, first, improved internal combustion engine technologies; 
next, internal combustion engine technologies that use alternative 
fuels, and we have already seen the increased deployment of things like 
corn and mixed cellulosic ethanol and hopefully future biodiesel. After 
that comes something we are somewhat familiar with, gasoline engine 
hybrids that we see deployed in commercial vehicles like the Prius. 
Next we will see electric hybrids, and, lastly, hydrogen fuel-cell 
technologies.
  The least difficult of these technologies is the refinements to 
existing conventional engine technology, already discussed, and the 
most difficult are the advanced technologies that are brand new to the 
marketplace.
  Automakers everywhere recognize that the technologies at the 
difficult

[[Page H11501]]

end are the ones that cannot cross this automotive valley of death 
alone. Successful movement from research and development successes to 
market successes require the cooperation and support of national 
governments.
  One of the most promising but highly threatened technologies is the 
hydrogen fuel cell. This technology has an impressive history and 
important implications for our Nation's energy portfolio. But we are at 
a point where we must decide, is it worth saving this technology and 
promoting a vast domestic hydrogen-fuel capability? I happen to believe 
it is.
  Let me be very clear, speaking as an individual who spent most of my 
life in military uniform and the final years of my military career as a 
senior advisor to the commander of the North Atlantic Treaty 
Organization, where I witnessed firsthand the cooperation between the 
governments of NATO and their industries, this is a national security 
imperative.
  In order for us to maintain our place in the world, we must maintain 
our industrial competitiveness, and that means we must have robust 
supply bases and parts manufacturing. We have let our ingenuity and 
investments in industry fail before, only to be picked up by 
foreign competitors, and then we pay the price for reimportation. It is 
dangerous to rely on their industries and not on ours. We must focus on 
maintaining a strong advanced-technology domestic industry, and we are 
in a good position. In fact, we are in the lead with respect to 
hydrogen fuel cells.

  This is an energy issue involving national energy security. It 
involves sustainability that couples the capabilities of fuel cells 
with biofuels, hybrids, photovoltaic, wind. This is an entire 
portfolio. It is not one over the other, but the synergy of all of 
those technologies, and we cannot rely on foreign countries to power 
America. We must embrace domestic energy technologies for both their 
reliability and sustainability in the future.
  If we are going to be a world leader with a strong domestic economy 
and not rely on foreign countries both for technology loans and for 
foreign loans, as we are today, we have to move forward in partnerships 
with industry. We risk maintaining and repeating the mistakes of the 
past.
  In the late 1990s and the early 2000s, the United States Advanced 
Battery Consortium worked on battery research and development. Today, 
that battery technology has been commercialized and it is a market 
dominated by both Japanese and Korean manufacturing giants, not 
American.
  From the early 1990s, the Department of Energy and General Motors 
have developed a U.S. fuel-cell program into what is today a global 
leadership position. Today, catching up quickly, there are announced 
programs from Germany and Japan, China and Korea, with huge investments 
to commercialize hydrogen fuel vehicles by 2015, and this will push the 
United States to a number three or worse position. I think this sounds 
all too familiar.
  Mr. Speaker, I would like to refer to a series of charts to help us 
visually understand some of the challenges, the risks, and the benefits 
that we face today.
  Back in 1968, we had the Electrovan. It was completely filled with 
fuel cells and hydrogen tanks and it was done in a van of that size 
because this technology at that time could not be miniaturized. It was 
so large, it required the entire interior volume of a van.
  In 1997, the first Department of Energy and General Motors fuel 
stack, not yet packageable for a vehicle, became an industrial reality.
  In 2007, a complete hydrogen fuel-stack system was packaged into a 
Chevrolet Equinox, and over 100 of these vehicles matched in their 
capabilities were built and deployed all over the United States. They 
are now on the road being driven by your neighbors and friends in test 
and pilot programs and have accumulated over 1 million road miles of 
research and development.
  In the very near future and in the research and development centers 
today--I have seen them with my own eyes--is a Generation 2 system 
being readied for 2015, half the size of its predecessor, with 
increased performance, and it will be both not only lighter and 
smaller, but it will be progressively even smaller to fit into more 
styles of vehicles.

                              {time}  2210

  This, frankly, in this short of a period of time, is incredible 
technology progress. From the humble roots of this technology and a van 
full of equipment to today's Equinox fuel cells and beyond, the U.S. is 
the country that has advanced automotive hydrogen fuel cell technology, 
us, Americans, right here in the United States.
  The Department of Energy Research and Development program, developed 
in partnership with domestic automobile manufacturers, was one of the 
best thought-out, most fully vested, periodically reviewed programs the 
Department of Energy has ever deployed. And the DOE invested to help 
advance this technology quickly towards production, and it set 
difficult technical goals to measure the progress of that program. The 
auto companies met or exceeded every single technology milestone placed 
before them. These included the size and weight of hydrogen fuel cell 
technology as both of those shrank significantly.
  The technology was cold weather tested, and I cannot tell you, coming 
from upstate New York, how critical that is. It proved to be extremely 
versatile under multiple different environments. It was also done while 
improving durability, and current hydrogen fuel cell vehicles increased 
a mileage capability that before was unheard of, right now achieving 
some 800,000 miles--let me rephrase that, some 80,000 miles of lifetime 
between hydrogen fuel cell change-out, and the first commercial 
vehicles available in 2015 will have 125,000-mile durability capability 
between changing. That was unheard of just 10 years ago.
  In the United States, billions and billions of dollars have been 
invested in government and private partnership to make hydrogen fuel 
cell vehicle technology a reality. The Department of Energy alone 
invested $2.3 billion in vehicle-related research and development. And 
General Motors, from their own coffers, invested $1.5 billion to place 
this company and this country at the forefront of hydrogen fuel cell 
research and development. Remember the goal, the billions and billions 
of gallons of gasoline we burn every year that will some day no longer 
be needed.
  Hundreds of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are currently on the road. 
Many major automotive companies have fleets. Preeminent among them, 
General Motors, but catching up quickly, Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, and 
Daimler. These are not some laboratory curiosity. Several automobile 
companies now loan or lease these vehicles to people just like you and 
me that take them home, park them in their garage, get up and take them 
to work the next morning. I know, because on my very first day as 
Member of the United States Congress just some 10 months ago, on a very 
cold January morning, I fired up a hydrogen fuel cell Equinox and drove 
it and its companion vehicle to the steps of the United States Capitol 
to demonstrate that this technology is no longer a laboratory miracle 
but is on the cusp of commercial development and deployment. So we've 
come a long way. And the question now is: Should we continue with this 
technology? Is this technology essential?
  Mr. Speaker, let me turn to the next slide if I might. I'd like to 
talk for a moment about energy and technology options.
  Energy security and the ability to reach emission gas reductions is 
critical. On this slide, we see in green, blue, and yellow, a library 
of our energy source portfolios: oil in its conventional, oil its 
nonconventional formats, biomass, natural gas and coal, renewables of 
many kinds, and nuclear. That's about what we have where we can go 
shopping for today's energy sources.
  In the center is the type of fuel that those energies provide from a 
liquid fuel, and we know that to be diesel, gasoline, to gaseous fuels, 
which have special uses in niche markets like agriculture, propane, 
natural gas compressed, electric vehicles and hydrogen. And then we can 
talk about propulsion systems. Today, we have conventional internal 
combustion engines. We have internal combustion hybrids. That would be 
what we call and have come to be known as the Prius, plug-in hybrids, 
next generation, range-extended

[[Page H11502]]

electric vehicles. We'll see those soon in a product called the Volt. 
Battery electric vehicles that have been around for quite a while are 
in use in many different ranges, and fuel cell hydrogen electric 
vehicles.
  This is the menu that we can choose from, and it's absolutely 
critical that we maintain the broadest menu possible. So how do we 
avoid potential conflicts, unexpected shortages, foreign countries that 
will hold us hostage to a particular kind of energy, whether it be oil 
or nuclear fuel? How do we strive to move forward? We maintain a full 
menu of choices.
  Now, some of these fuels have some limitations. We are very excited 
about biofuels, and certainly, based on my agricultural-dominated 
congressional district, I join in that. But they have a limitation. We 
can't fully meet demand based solely on biofuels, if for no other 
reason, because of land use requirements. We know and I've discussed 
briefly and will discuss in more detail that batteries have cost and 
weight problems. Let me illustrate this in the next slide, if I could.

  There are different amounts of energy contained in different kinds of 
fuel, and, Mr. Speaker, if you will indulge me just a brief discussion 
of a technical nature. Today, if I want to drive 300 miles, it will 
take me approximately 72 pounds of diesel fuel. Now, if you take that 
amount of diesel fuel and you wrap it into the fuel delivery system, 
the piping, the pump, and the fuel tank, the total weight of that 
onboard device is about 94 pounds. If I want to do that with compressed 
hydrogen, the amount of hydrogen that I want to use contains 13.2 
pounds. Now, why is that? That's because hydrogen, pound for pound, 
contains much more energy than does diesel fuel. It's an incredibly 
more efficient energy delivering fuel. But because it's a gas, it must 
be compressed and so its tank will weigh more. And the entire energy 
delivery system for a vehicle will weigh about 275 pounds. Well, that 
sounds like a lot more than the 94.8 pounds, but it's really only about 
180 pounds heavier. That's about one passenger's worth. That's a very 
manageable technical challenge to engineers in the automotive industry.
  But when we talk about batteries, it will take 1,829 pounds of 
Lithium ion batteries to allow me to drive 300 miles without 
recharging, and the delivery system, the encasement, the battery, 
cables, and the harnesses, will weigh about a total of 1,829, with 
1,190 of that actually being the battery itself. Now, that has market 
value. There are urban uses for battery-powered vehicles, but long-
range, high torque, high horsepower extended driving is not one of 
them. It is only through a high density, high energy fuel, in this case 
today, diesel or gasoline, and in the cars of tomorrow through 
hydrogen, that you can achieve that. Lithium ion batteries technically, 
because of the laws of physics, will never get us to where we have to 
go across a broad spectrum of driving requirements. It is simply not 
physically possible. In order to do this, I believe, and many experts 
join me, we have to harness the power of hydrogen through advanced fuel 
cell technology.
  Now, petroleum and hydrogen have two other advantages. These vehicles 
can be refueled every 300 or so miles, and it takes about 3 to 10 
minutes to do it. A battery electric vehicle requires overnight 
charging and it requires it to be done with a high-capacitance 
recharging system. That's fine if you have 8 or 9 hours to recharge 
your car. And there are many uses in urban America where that's 
possible, but not in long-range, high horsepower transportation 
requirements.
  Let's talk, if I could, on the next slide, about the range, about the 
requirements of driving as we see them today in the United States. This 
brings the technology back to the consumer. On this chart, on a four-
way arrow, here we talk about high loads. Now, those of us who come 
from farm country know that there's a lot of driving to be done 
agriculturally that requires heavy duty pickup trucks.

                              {time}  2220

  On the other hand, light-load driving for those in a much more urban 
environment, like a Los Angeles or Miami or New York City, recognize 
light-load small vehicles.
  Then we go as far as range: continuous highway driving down 
Interstate 90 and Interstate 5, or short-burst driving as we go on 
errands from store to store. Battery electric vehicles perform very 
well in local light-weight driving, and they can do a great deal to 
lesson our burden on imported petroleum in that market. Extended-range 
electric vehicles can make that just a little bit better, but it's 
still about a four-passenger car.
  Fuel cell vehicles are the only vehicles that will be able to meet a 
consumer demand for range; that's long-range highway driving--load 
requirements--that's heavy pickup truck-type requirements--and quick 
refilling time.
  Diesel fuel for the near foreseeable future is probably going to be 
the fuel required to move heavy buses and heavy trucks over long-range 
routes. But imagine that they are a mere fraction of those billions of 
gallons of gasoline that we burn and import every year from overseas. 
There is a huge application for hydrogen fuel cells in meeting consumer 
demand for vehicles that have long-range, high-load requirements, and 
quick refilling time.
  But can hydrogen fuel cell vehicles become a reality? Let's look at 
the next chart just where we were in the year 2000.
  There are four myths that are currently being discussed with respect 
to hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. One of them is fuel cells are too 
expensive, and they're not durable enough. The reality is the cost 
benefit of a hydrogen fuel cell is measured in something called dollars 
per kilowatt. You measure the output in a kilowatt.
  Now, just to bring this back to home, your average light bulb at home 
is 100 watts. So 10 of those turned on at the same time is one 
kilowatt. An Equinox extended-range hydrogen fuel cell vehicle today 
produces about 120 kilowatts of electricity, and significant cost 
reductions of this measurement have already been made just in the past 
10 years from a plateau of $275 per kilowatt all the way down to today 
at 61 kilowatts, well on the way to the commercialized requirement of a 
45-kilowatt vehicle. That's $45 per kilowatt.
  Just last week the Department of Energy in its hydrogen program 
released a document confirming a current $61 per kilowatt in 2009 
dollars projection. As shown on this chart, this is a reality today. 
Cost will be, and soon are, comparable to all other advanced 
technologies at high volumes of production, a high volume of production 
being 500,000 vehicles per year.
  It was an incredibly difficult challenge put forth by the technicians 
of the Department of Energy, and the goals have been met or exceeded as 
developed by major automotive manufacturers right here in the United 
States. In fact, GM is on track to release a commercial model that 
meets or exceeds all durability and cost guidelines by 2015.
  Myth two as shown on the next chart: hydrogen from natural gas is not 
an ideal source, and we don't have other options.
  Let's go back to chemistry class when we were in high school. 
Hydrogen gas comes from two main sources: either something called 
reformatting natural gas or fundamental electrolysis. The reality today 
when you measure the amount of CO2 that's expelled by a 
vehicle per mile driven as it is today, today's gasoline engines 
produce 540 grams, quarter of a kilogram, about half a pound, of 
CO2 per mile. And we will be able to lower that to about 410 
grams. If we just use and burn natural gas in a compressed tank, it's 
about 320. If we go to hybrid electric vehicles, of which there are 
four major types: gasoline, diesel, corn ethanol, and cellulosic 
ethanol, we can get it down to about 65 grams.
  If we're talking about plug-in hybrids, today we have a gasoline 
hybrid that gives us a 240-gram-per-mile burn, and cellulosic ethanol 
can get it down to 150. It is only hydrogen fuel cell vehicles that 
meet the emissions requirements required for us to move forward.
  If we take hydrogen and reformat it directly from natural gas, 
technology available today, we achieve a 200-gram-per-mile equivalent. 
That's half of the very best that we can get out of gasoline today. And 
if we go to hydrogen made from central wind electrolysis, it's almost 
untraceable. We actually achieve the goal of leaving nothing behind the 
vehicle but water vapor.

[[Page H11503]]

  Natural gas is an abundant, domestic resource. We have it in 
quantity. Eleven billion kilograms of hydrogen already produced from 
natural gas in North America and 60 percent of this, enough fuel to 
power 21 million hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, is used to clean up 
petroleum in refinery operations today.
  Natural gas-based hydrogen used to power hydrogen fuel cell vehicles 
is less than half of the greenhouse gas emissions of a conventional 
gasoline-powered vehicle. And looking forward, hydrogen, with near zero 
greenhouse emissions is possible, both from nuclear biomass and 
renewable electricity. In fact, solar arrays are in operation today 
that are producing hydrogen at generation efficiency twice of the 
Department of Energy's 2015 goals. This is not future science. This is 
science of today.

  Myth number three--this is associated with hydrogen fuel cells--is 
that no good storage mechanism is available for transportation.
  Most companies today use a 10,000 PSI compressed hydrogen tank. 
Vehicles use the storage tank, technology has been able to hook up to 
300 miles. It was the technology that was in the vehicle that I drove 
from my home in Corning, New York, all the way down to Washington, DC. 
Compressed hydrogen offers all of the capabilities needed to begin 
commercialization of vehicles today. This, like all continuing research 
that goes on around the world, will progress. But it is a reality as we 
know it today.
  Let's talk about myth four, which is probably the most daunting issue 
facing America. And, Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your indulgence in what 
is increasingly technological conversation.
  Distribution infrastructure isn't there, and there are no plans to 
establish it. That's myth number four. The reality is that the 
infrastructure challenge is solvable. Stations are here now, and 
according to the National Hydrogen Association of the United States, we 
currently have 75 stations located around the country, most in New York 
and California, with 44 more planned over the next 2 years.
  Like the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System or the international 
and national railroad systems, or our own aircraft and airport 
infrastructure, this will require a national involvement, a national 
government involvement, which will result in jobs and lots of them. It 
will create entirely new industries, industries that cannot be 
exported; and it will be a tremendous stimulus to the U.S. economy in 
and of itself.
  To roll out this infrastructure, all we need to do is start with 
nodes and then connect them, and the work has already started. It 
doesn't require a miracle. It only requires the will and the national 
focus to do it.
  Here we see to my right several of the stations that are already 
being designed and implemented for commercial exploitation around the 
world. In places like the University of California Irvine, in Germany, 
right here in Washington, DC., where I refilled the hydrogen fuel cell 
vehicle that I drove from Corning, and in Berlin, Germany, where they 
have taken that design--and I will talk soon about its mass 
introduction throughout their entire highway system.
  Again, it doesn't require a miracle, only the national will to do so.
  Let us take a look at the next slide and see how we can actually 
manage this transformation and manage it quickly.
  We start with select high-profile stations; and then we move to the 
next stage, about 40 stations per large metro area. Here we see both 
New York City and Los Angeles, just two examples.
  Thirty metro stations for the entire metropolitan Los Angeles area 
will provide a network where no matter where you are, you are only 3.6 
miles from a hydrogen filling station. Add 10 stations outside of the 
metro area, and that's what you need to allow consumers to meet their 
average weekly and weekend needs. And in Los Angeles, by the way, it's 
important to view the driving patterns of consumers.

                              {time}  2230

  There are consumers who want to be able to drive to Las Vegas, San 
Diego, Santa Barbara, Palm Springs and Big Bear, but they don't 
necessarily transit north to that extended range, and so this has a 
particular viability in southern California. Similarly, New York State, 
my home State, has the potential for a ``hydrogen highway'' as 
described in previous work by the New York State Energy Research and 
Development Authority. You can build nodes and link them together along 
roads like Interstate 90.
  But NYSERDA, the New York State Energy Research and Development 
Authority, recognizes that ``as with any vision, barriers to achieving 
our goals exist. The support needed must come from collaborative 
efforts among industry, as well as between industry and local, State, 
and Federal Government. Communication and cooperation will be required 
to overcome the technical, market, and policy challenges impeding the 
implementation of hydrogen energy systems.''
  As a proof that this technology is here now, we only have to look at 
what is happening within the automotive industry, especially abroad 
where foreign governments and car companies are teaming up to tackle 
the challenges of commercializing hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles.
  Let's take a look at some of those partnerships in the next slide. As 
I have said continually, the technology is here and here now, and those 
in the industry recognize the potential of hydrogen cars in the 
commercial market. The global automotive industry says that at the 
current pace, these vehicles will be on the road commercially by 2015. 
Major world automobile manufacturers have signed a Letter of 
Understanding as recently as September 9 of this year between Daimler, 
and they recognize the requirement of the synergy between hydrogen fuel 
cells and battery technologies. This letter went to energy companies 
all over the world and government organizations around their host 
countries.
  To quote that letter, allow me to say, over the last decade, 
governments, original equipment manufacturers and automobile 
manufacturers and the entire energy sector have given special attention 
to the introduction of hydrogen as a fuel for road transportation, and 
they have given it the priority option to reach several goals 
associated both with emission management and CO2 reduction. 
Battery and fuel-celled vehicles complement one another and can move us 
closer to the objective of sustained mobility.
  Honda, Toyota, Renault Nissan, Opel and GM, Ford, Daimler, Kia and 
Hyundai have all made significant investments and are moving ahead 
aggressively, but it is here in the United States of America, quite 
frankly with American ingenuity, that we have taken a leadership 
position that today is being threatened by a lack of partnership and a 
lack of vision. Let me quote further from the letter that was put out 
by Daimler, in order to ensure a successful market introduction of 
fuel-cell vehicles:
  ``This market introduction has to be aligned with the build-up of the 
necessary hydrogen infrastructure. Therefore a hydrogen infrastructure 
network with sufficient density is required by 2015. The network should 
be built up from metropolitan areas via corridors into area-wide 
coverage.''
  Mr. Speaker, others get it. And many in this country understand it as 
well. Foreign governments in Germany and Japan are listening to their 
automotive manufacturers. They are collaborating with those 
manufacturers to put production vehicles in the market and in the 
marketplace by 2015 and explore simultaneously the need to overcome 
infrastructure challenges. Working to blanket their countries with a 
national hydrogen fuel-station infrastructure that will free their 
countries from foreign oil. And we will be left side-lined, wondering 
how this happened.
  In our next slide, the flags tell the story. Our competitors are 
passing us by. They will soon have government-supported fuel-cell 
fleets on the road for research and development and prototype testing, 
as well as the infrastructure to support it. China, Korea, Japan and 
Germany are all in the fight competing with the United States, all 
moving forward aggressively and, in fact, faster than we are to 
commercialize technologies that we invented here in the United States. 
Their industries and their governments are working together. In Japan 
and Germany, long-term government industrial collaborations have 
existed, and they are

[[Page H11504]]

leveraging those collaborations and those partnerships to leapfrog over 
the United States and the work that we put in place initializing the 
very technologies that we may one day be threatened with having to 
reimport into this country.
  China is also learning a lesson and watching us carefully and 
matching their incredible ability to literally reverse engineer 
anything and everything that is developed and placing their massive 
industrial strength behind it. There is no doubt that should they want 
to and should we surrender the lead, they will overtake us.

  The bottom line is if we don't move on hydrogen fuel-cell 
technologies and the vehicles built from them and we do not move 
forward, someone else will, and we will end up buying it from them just 
as we have ended up buying hybrid technology from the very competitors 
who took it away from us after we invented it and moved that technology 
forward. We will be reliant on these foreign producers for this clean 
technology in the same way that we rely on foreign oil right now to 
power our automobiles.
  Let's look at a specific on the next slide. Germany, an ally and an 
industrial partner, has developed a logical plan with government 
infrastructure developments and hydrogen fuel-cell automobiles to roll 
out H2 fueling stations over a very short period of time. To the far 
right we see in 2013 some 150 fueling stations, and by 2017, 1,000 
hydrogen fuel-cell filling stations, allowing the Germans to access 
hydrogen technology all over their country. In just four short House of 
Representatives election cycles, they will be done. And we will be 
wondering how did it happen? How were we left behind? This is because 
countries all over the world have, or are developing, national hydrogen 
plans.
  Mr. Speaker, allow me to show you in the next slide who some of those 
players on the global market are. Germany and Japan are leading 
globally and leapfrogging ahead of the United States. China is coming 
on strong and in the past has not respected other nations' intellectual 
property rights. This will allow them to not only catch up quickly but 
surpass us. And believe you me, they will and they are. Korea is also 
stepping up with its manufacturing partnership with Hyundai. All over 
the globe we see other countries realizing the promising future of this 
technology. We invented it here. We developed it here. We are 
manufacturing it here. And yet, we are at the cusp of surrendering it 
here.
  In the big picture, manufacturers from Germany, Japan, Korea and 
China are now accelerating their movement forward, and they are doing 
so quickly with a massive government research and development program. 
They will likely soon have large fuel-cell fleets on the roads, even 
larger than General Motors' current research and development 119-car 
fleet. They are installing thousands of hydrogen fueling stations that 
will relieve their countries from the burden of foreign oil and 
establish a viable energy infrastructure that supports clean, renewable 
energy production within their own countries independent of 
importation. And they will be creating the tens of thousands of new 
green jobs that should be created and kept here in the United States of 
America.
  We have seen this before. Not too long along ago, this country 
invested in battery electric vehicle technology. And I'm not talking 
about the investments that came out of the recent stimulus bill, but 
rather the investments that were made back in the 1980s. The Department 
of Energy invested to kick-start the technologies and advance them 
towards production, and a large automobile manufacturer in the United 
States built a small fleet of battery electric vehicles that were 
placed on the road with real world drivers, sort of like where GM is 
today with hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles. The United States, in 
particular one State in the United States, California, then shifted its 
focus, and the programs became economically unviable and went away 
quite dramatically.
  Today, leaders in this technology, battery automotive technology, are 
in Korea, China and Japan. And yet, the research and development was 
done here in the United States of America.
  By the way, this is not an anomaly. I could have told you the same 
story but replaced ``battery'' vehicles with the word ``hybrid'' 
vehicles. And yet, last year, as the price of gasoline spiked and the 
United States consumer market focused on hybrid vehicles, there were no 
commercially available, mass deployable, domestically manufactured 
hybrid vehicles. Why? Because we embarked on that technology and we 
allowed foreign manufacturers to capture it, thus forcing us to 
reimport it at significant capital costs to the United States. If all 
the other major countries have a very specific program in place, what 
do they know that we don't know?
  Well, here is an aspect of it, Mr. Speaker, that I would like to 
leave you with tonight. Allow me to conclude with one final slide. This 
is not necessarily only an issue of commercial capabilities or of 
industrial capabilities. It is an issue of national security. The 
United States military sees a need for independent energy capabilities. 
This was recently outlined in an independent report by the Defense 
Science Board Task Force on DOD Energy Strategy. In recent letters from 
senior DOD officials, one individual quoted ``domestic leadership in 
advanced technologies such as fuel cells is of national importance.''

                              {time}  2240

  The task force concluded that the Department of Defense faces two 
primary energy challenges. Department of Defense energy operations 
suffer from unnecessarily high growing battle space fuel demand. Let's 
face it, an M1A2 Abrams tank powered by a gas turbine engine using 
aviation fuel burns a lot of gas. And we have seen over and over and 
over again in land, air, and sea warfare that the logistical 
requirements of moving fuel is one of the most important battlefield 
criteria.
  In fact, in my own life, I learned at advanced war schools, such as 
the National War College and the Naval War College, that amateurs talk 
about bullets and guns and professionals talk about logistics. And 
logistics harbor around the movement of petroleum products for our 
aircraft, our tanks, and our ships. And we are increasingly and at 
farther ranges dependent on that. In fact, Mr. Speaker, just recently 
on the front page of a major Washington political newspaper the 
headlines read that a gallon of fuel used by the United States military 
in Afghanistan is costing the United States taxpayer $400.
  Likewise, military installations both overseas and, of some 
significant national security curiosity, right here at home are 
completely dependent on a civilian electrical infrastructure grid. When 
the lights go out in New York City, they go out on any military base on 
the same electrical grid. There is no independent powering sources. 
This is not a position that we want our military to be in.
  Hydrogen fuel cells can help the military address its own petroleum 
reduction requirements. Nontactical vehicle applications, these are the 
everyday administrative vehicles used all over the United States by the 
DOD, are a wonderful place to introduce this technology and move 
forward. And stationary hydrogen fuel cell storage and requirements are 
also a significant national security increase for our shoreside 
installations.
  Fuel cells and nontactical vehicles will later enable tactical 
applications. And while it seems far fetched that we may one day have a 
fuel cell-powered tank, Mr. Speaker, I offer for consideration that 
those on the battlefield of the Civil War would have had a hard time 
imagining a gas turbine power aviation fuel Abrams M1A2 tank. We simply 
cannot rely on surrendering the promise of this technology and shipping 
it overseas.
  Now, Mr. Speaker, with total transparency, I must confess that one of 
the reasons that I am so motivated and so passionate about this subject 
is that for the past 15 years, out of sight and out of mind, in a 
corner of my congressional district that most people did not even know 
existed, some 400 engineers, technicians, and support personnel have 
worked to bring the vision of petroleum-free transportation and 
independence from imported petroleum to reality.
  Tonight and tomorrow, and hopefully into the future, the engineers 
and the

[[Page H11505]]

technicians at the Honeoye Falls advanced fuel cell research and 
development facility have brought the future today. Their leader, Mr. 
Matthew Fronk, a man who will soon retire from his position and seek a 
leadership role in academia, is to be commended for his vision and for 
his leadership. And it is not he alone, because it is a classic example 
of the ability of private industry, in this case, General Motors, a 
company often maligned and much in the press, who has brought to the 
Nation a unique, forward-looking capability that no other Nation in the 
world today has, and yet we are at the cusp of losing them. Right when 
we had the future in our hands, brought to us by hardworking and highly 
educated, incredibly passionate and dedicated technicians and 
engineers, we are about to surrender it as we surrendered battery 
technologies, as we surrendered hybrid technologies.
  So, Mr. Speaker, allow me to conclude by reading an article that 
appeared in CNN Money magazine just last week. It is titled, ``The 
Hydrogen Car Fights Back.'' President Obama is betting on biofuels and 
batteries, but that isn't stopping some automakers from investing in 
hydrogen fuel cars. As it appeared in Fortune magazine, I quote, ``The 
valley of death is auto industry speak. It is a metaphorical desert 
where emerging technologies reside while car executives figure out 
which of the experiments ought to make their way into actual cars. 
Every automotive leap forward has done time in the valley, turbo 
chargers, fuel injections, even gasoline electric hybrids like Toyota's 
Prius. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, the alternative energy flavor of 
the month back in 2003, are the ones languishing today, along with 
hovercraft and other assorted concept cars, but perhaps not for much 
longer.
  A number of automakers are now renewing their push for hydrogen, and 
now it is looking as though hydrogen cars will make its way out of this 
conceptual vehicular valley of death. Last month, Daimler, the German 
Government, and several industrial companies announced a plan to build 
1,000 hydrogen fuel cell stations across Germany. Days later, Daimler's 
CEO, Dieter Zetsche, showed off Mercedes Benz's latest hydrogen fuel 
cell effort, the F-Cell hatchback. Toyota, this summer, announced it 
will put hydrogen fuel cell cars into production by 2015. Honda, GM, 
and Hyundai all have hydrogen fuel cell programs running, and Honda has 
actually put vehicles--heavily subsidized by the car maker to be sure--
in the hands of some real customers as opposed to its own engineers. 
Parenthetically, GM, today, is focusing most of its energy on the plug-
in hybrid Chevy Volt, but the company still says it expects to have 
fuel cell technology ready for commercialization by 2015.

  Mr. Speaker, as we debate the great issues of the day, and there are 
many to debate, we hear them on the floor of this House every afternoon 
and every evening, be it national foreign policy issues that weigh 
heavily on our minds in Iraq and Afghanistan, whether it be a 
contentious debate about health care, allow us not to lose the vision 
of the future. Allow us not to do what has been done before. Allow us 
not to forget and give away the decades of advancement and work that 
have accomplished so much in this very focused area of technological 
development that holds so much promise not only for the automotive fuel 
sector, but for energy independence. We speak on the floor of the House 
in great and grand and umbrella arching metaphors, and yet now it is 
time to speak of specifics.
  And so, Mr. Speaker, I thank you that for this last hour I was given 
the opportunity to highlight a specific technology that holds so much 
promise, because back home at the Honeoye Falls research and 
development facility it can truly be said that not often in history 
have so few done so much for all of us.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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