GM Looking for Alternate Funding for Fuel Cell Car Development

General Motors is committed to developing a hydrogen fuel-cell car despite its bankruptcy and a huge cut in research dollars for the zero-emission vehicle, a company executive said Monday. Lawrence Burns, GM’s vice-president of research and planning, said the company will be looking to alternate sources of funding to keep development going.

It also remains committed to providing a couple of fuel cell-powered SUVs for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, he said.

The once-dominant automotive giant went into bankruptcy protection on Monday and is expected to emerge a much smaller company.

Last month, U.S. Energy Secretary Steve Chu cut US$100 million from hydrogen fuel cell program, leaving around US$68 million for this fiscal year.

GM has lobbied Congress and U.S. Department of Energy to continue funding research towards commercializing fuel-cell propulsion systems, he said.

“We believe they’re strategically important for the nation,” he Burns said in an interview after making a presentation at a fuel-cell conference in Vancouver. “We’ve shared that perspective with members of Congress, members of the Department of Energy.”

In announcing the cut, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said the government would focus more on near-term solutions to reducing greenhouse gas emissions such as biofuels and battery-electric vehicles.

Burns pointed out it’s Congress that approves the budget.

“So Dr. Chu’s statement that he was going to zero out the funding for hydrogen for transportation purposes, I think it got the attention of a lot of people in Congress and they’re asking all of the right questions right now,” he said.

“So we’re going to have to keep our eye on seeing how that whole process plays out.”

Hydrogen fuel cells, which produce electricity with heat and water as the only byproducts, suffered from raised expectations in the 1990s as a technology that was just around the corner.

But the work needed to reduce their size while increasing their power and bringing costs to mass-production levels has kept the corner just out of reach.

GM and other automakers have leased limited-production fuel-cell vehicles to U.S. consumers for real-world testing, but say the earliest they’ll show up for sale in dealer showrooms is 2015.

Burns said the effort in Washington now involves letting legislators know they’ve made big strides towards commercialization in the last decade.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a sell job as making sure everybody works from the same facts,” he said.

Burns said another way to another way to reduce development costs would be for automakers to co-operate on common components that don’t affect the overall drivability of the vehicle, such as compressors, values and humidifiers.