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EV World Open Access Article |
Honda Civic GX being refueled in owner's garage. The wall-mounted Phill unit uses low-pressure residential natural gas and slowly compresses it overnight, refilling the 3,600 psi tank in the trunk, giving the car a 200-220 mile range. The price of the natural gas, plus the added electricity cost results in the gasoline-equivalent of $1.20 a gallon.
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Honda's Phill-way to Hydrogen
Honda's Stephen Ellis talks about home refueling and the path to a hydrogen-based transportation future
By
Bill Moore
Open Access Article Originally Published: May 06, 2005
A Chinese proverb says a journey of 10,000 miles begins with the first step. And at Honda, it could be said to start with PHIL, or at least that's the way my friend Stephen Ellis sees as the most logical way to get to hydrogen-powered vehicles.
Estimates vary from a "few" billion dollars to hundreds of billions to create the necessary infrastructure to fuel hydrogen cars. While there are something like 170,000 gasoline stations in America, there are just a handful of sites -- mostly in California -- where the public can conveniently buy hydrogen (excluding industrial gas suppliers). This raises the age-old "chicken 'n egg" conundrum. People won't buy fuel cell cars until there is a convenient infrastructure, and energy companies won't build the necessary stations until there are sufficient numbers of cars to justify it.
But what if you could simply side-step the problem by letting people make their own hydrogen at home, refueling their H2-powered vehicles (both internal combustion engine or ICE-based and fuel cell-powered) in their own garages?
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Honda's Stephen Ellis explained to me that Honda learned from its electric car program that owners really appreciated the convenience of home recharging. They could plug-in their cars at night and wake-up the next morning to a fully-charged battery that gave them 80-100 miles range, usually more than enough to meet their daily commuting needs.
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Honda's Stephen Ellis demonstrating Phill refueling unit. |
With that lesson firmly implanted, Honda decided to partner with FuelMaker Corporation to develop "Phill", a residential, compressed natural gas refueling station that will enable Civic GX owners to conveniently refill the car's tank at home. The unit will initially be leased in California for as low as $39 a month when soon-to-be announced state incentives take effect. Ellis estimates installation will run between $500 and $1,500. Honda plans to start slow with the program, setting a sales target of 400 units in California in 2005.
What excites Ellis about the Phil program is the fact that it may be a model for how we get from a fossil fuel-based economy to a hydrogen one. He explained to me that earlier this year, he and his colleagues were brainstorming ways to help promote cleaner transportation alternatives. They developed the chart below to help them visual a potential pathway to a hydrogen-powered transportation future, one that avoided the huge costs of a new fuel infrastructure.
With earnestness in his voice, Ellis explained to me during the Clean Cities Conference in Palm Springs earlier this week that the natural gas-based Phill program is a logical stepping stone to hydrogen vehicles. Clearly sensitive to criticisms from the electric car community for killing its EV Plus program, he reasoned that although Honda's super-clean conventional and hybrid vehicles are good for the environment, they still rely heavily on imported petroleum and generate substantial greenhouse gas emissions.
A better solution -- in his view and others, including T. Boone Pickens -- is compressed natural gas (CNG), which is significantly cleaner than gasoline in terms of its overall emissions and the climate-changing CO2 our vehicles pump into the atmosphere. In fact, the Civic GX, which is a dedicated CNG vehicle whose 3,600 psi tank occupies most of the trunk space of the four-door, five passenger compact, has earned a number of accolades for its environmental merits. It is the only vehicle distributed nationwide that is certified to the stringent EPA Tier 2-Bin 2 emissions standard, as well as meeting California's Advanced Technology Partial Zero Emission Vehicle (AT-PZEV) standards.
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03-Dec-2006
39141
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Just saw the Honda and Phill at the LA carshow. As already mentioned I'd also thought of combining this technology with a hybrid or plug-in. But looking at the cng tank size and the space the hybrid motor & battery would take up I see this as very doable, but it will require more Honda engineering to fit it together.
Posted by: Dave C
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10-May-2006
20383
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One thing everyone here seems to forget is that Electricity is often generated by coal, nulear, or hydro-power. All of which have drastic effects on the environment. Hydrogen is possibly one of the only options that breaks away from reliance on electricity.
Posted by: Brig Day
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16-May-2006
21150
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Until you can show me a battery that can power motors that can get a 2000kg car from 0-100kph in less than 9 seconds, and have a range of 800km or greater, and can be fully recharged in less than 10 minutes anywhere in the country, you will not have a viable option in the US.
IMHO the US would be a lot better off for security reasons alone if we were to have hydrogen/gasoline FFVs (such as the BMW 745h) as an option, and home filling via reformulation (either of natural gas or water electrolysis) would be a huge win.
Posted by: Otis Wildflower
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07-May-2005
7500
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EV's are 4 times as efficient vs Hydrogen fuel cells.
Fuel Cells aren't here yet.
Hydrogen fuel is limited.
You have to use a lot of energy to make Hydrogen and if it's from additional Nuke, coal and other non renewable power plants it's a loser.Electric can charge at night and even feed back to the grid during peak times.
We can use the great new batteries and efficent Electric Vehicles like the AC Propulsions T-Zero and coming SCION conversions to change the world at low cost and time.
If we wait for Hydrogen and keep using natual gas and other limited resources we create more problems.
Jim"
Posted by: Jim Stack
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07-May-2005
7503
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Here we go with more false hope about hydrogen. The good thing about hydrogen is that yes, it "burns clean" (actually a fuel cell doesn't burn at all). But everthing else about hydrogen is a problem. It fundamentally is not a good or a cheap fuel. Its not even a source of fuel. I'm not getting excited about a gaseous fueling system. That is the least of hydrogen's problems. More power to you if you can make hydrogen a viable option but my money is on an electric solution. "
Posted by: Greg Collins
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07-May-2005
7504
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Until efficient batteries, made from nano-technology, are developed, it seems to me that
hybrid natural gas autos are the best solution
as a bridge to EVs."
Posted by: John Boyd
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07-May-2005
7509
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The bottom line is with fossil fuels becoming ever more scarce we will have less and less energy to work with. The hydrogen economy is meant to try and keep up the extravagant lifestyle created by suburban sprawl. It is absolutely unsustainable. We need to use our ever limited energy supplies in the most efficient ways possible. For transportation that means electric vehicles."
Posted by: Eric Krofchak
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07-May-2005
7515
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Electric is certainly the best way to go, but societies don't make these kinds of transitions over night. We have many more millions of used ICE engines already on the road than we have new ones to add to the mix, so that even a sudden total switch to electrics for new auto purchases would not solve this problem very quickly. We must applaud every move that improves the situation, however, including home refueling with CNG. Older vehicles can be readily converted to CNG. They cannot be as readily converted to Hydrogen. My proposal, however, is that we work on capturing the carbon at the point at which it is produced or created, i.e.,from each vehicle exhaust and recycle it back through the same vehicle by adding hydrogen from renewable sources to make either gaseous or liquid fuel. One can even make clean gasoline by this method in a fashion similar to the Mars project. That way the carbon is catalytically converted back to fuel without ever leaving the vehicle. This is not as impossible as it sounds.
"
Posted by: William Thompson
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15-Aug-2010
92015
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It is amazing how honda pro created the civic parts in order for it to become hybrid. I hope this would be available in our area soon.
Posted by: Steph Courtnety
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10-May-2005
7542
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Interesting comments - capturing carbon and converting back to fuel. Great, but you need energy in. Also, hydrogen is not viable yet - it leaks like a sieve, the well-to-wheel efficiency is only 6% and available sources are predominantly coal (2%) and nuclear power. CNG is wonderful, but also non-renewable. The solution in simple: conservation, along with continued research into energy efficient fuels and energy sources. Get the 300mpg vehicles out, boycott gas hogs, drive BEVs and start using biofuel (esoteric energy sources, such as the hydrogen infrastructure, should have limited government funding with investment from private groups that do not detract from biofuel or renewable energy development programs). Ongoing research, along with ramp-up for full scale production of high yield biomass such as algae should be a main focus for both government and industry. Production of plug-in diesel hybrids can be readily implemented to maximize efficiency. Vehicle size, weight and performance are a costly commodity - let's tax consumers that refuse to change their habits in an appropriate manor. Levy greater taxes on petroleum products, while removing them from biofuels or electricity from renewable sources. The solutions are in front of us – with concerted effort, we can transition to a sustainable energy system, but we need government incentives and industry cooperation, along with public awareness to make it happen."
Posted by: Andriko Zavadell
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13-May-2005
7586
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As a previous responder noted, why not a CNG hybrid vehicle. Honda is could put it's combined technologies together and build a CNG hybrid Honda Civic. The conversion process is not difficult, what would it take to modify the hybrid Civic to run on CNG. It would make it the cleanest production vehicle on the planet. That is the question I would like to ask Mr. Ellis, I feel that anyone willing to install the Phil in their garage would love to take it a step further and make it a hybrid to increase the range. Once that is done, we can discuss how they could take it a step further and use the technology from the Honda EV+ experiment and make it a CNG plug-in hybrid Civic.
Posted by: Christopher Riess
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