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As concern about both the environment and the availability of fossil fuels grows, the pressure to develop alternatives grows with it.

Most people in the transportation industry agree that hydrogen will be the fuel of the future, but only after considerable hurdles - regarding everything from supply and transportation to suitable vehicles - have been overcome.

Japan and Norway have taken leadership roles with demonstration projects designed to prove the commercial viability of hydrogen energy production and use in the transportation sector.

The Japanese exercise is called the Japan Hydrogen and Fuel-Cell Demonstration Project (JHFC). It involves a number of businesses, research and development institutes and government agencies. To date, there are 50 fuel-cell vehicles on the road and they can be refilled at 12 stations located in and around Tokyo, where the population swells from 12 million at night to 18 million during the day. Six million commuters are enough to focus attention on vehicular emissions.

At the opposite end of the population-density chart is Norway, where a unique joint industry-government demonstration project called HyNor is developing the infrastructure along the 580-kilometre transportation corridor between the capital of Oslo and Stavenger, the main energy and oil city in western Norway.

Called the "hydrogen highway," it will enable fuel-cell vehicles to be refilled at various points along the route.

Both the Japanese and Norwegian projects involve various methods of producing hydrogen, and assess its uses and how it adapts to local conditions. Vehicles being studied include trucks, buses, taxis and private cars in urban, inter-city, regional and national transportation systems corridors.

The Japanese project began in 2002, with Honda Motor Co. Ltd. and Toyota Motor Corp. producing the first generation of fuel-cell vehicles. The Japanese government became involved and spent $30-million (U.S.) to build 12 refilling stations - 11 hydrogen stations and one hydrogen liquefaction facility.

A further $45-million has been set aside annually to maintain the current stations and build new ones in co-operation with major international oil companies such as Shell.

The goal is to gather and share data on producing hydrogen from various feedstocks and to assess the performance, environmental impact, total energy efficiency and safety of fuel-cell vehicles under real-world conditions.

Six types of fuel-cell vehicles, a fuel-cell bus and two types of hydrogen internal combustion engines are included with vehicles from BMW, General Motors, Honda, Mazda, Mercedes, Nissan, Toyota, Suzuki and Hino (the bus).

The hydrogen used in the Japanese study is being produced by reforming a wide variety of fossil fuels including gasoline, naphtha, LPG (liquefied petroleum gas), methanol and natural gas, as well as through water electrolysis.

The total energy efficiency issue is a major factor, taking into effect "well-to-wheel" efficiency - the consumption of all associated energies from the mining of the primary energy source (coal or oil) to the production, transportation and filling of vehicles, and the operation of the vehicles and filling stations.

The project also will enable the development of regulations and standards, public relations and education programs, and the verification of energy saved and the actual environment impact.

The attractions of fuel cell vehicles are the absence of emissions and the fact they do not require recharging, which eliminates the need to generate electricity, which is fraught with its own environmental issues.

Fuel cells are also very efficient, capable of converting more than 80 per cent of the energy in hydrogen into electricity. A typical internal combustion energy has a net efficiency of about 45 per cent.

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