Publication date: 11-January-2004
Source:Jeff Nesmith-COX NEWS SERVICE

The reason: Congress spent most of the money on pet projects back home, leaving too little to fund the new research.

Although an Energy Department appropriations bill signed by President Bush on Dec. 1 included $28 million of $30 million the department had sought for new hydrogen research, half of that amount was "earmarked" for specific projects.

The other half will be only enough to continue already approved research, leaving none for the new initiative, the department said in a formal announcement just before Christmas.

Experts say that unless someone comes up with a better way to store hydrogen fuel aboard vehicles, it won't be practical to drive the "Freedom Car" that Bush described in his State of the Union address last year because it will have to stop so often to refuel.

"Storage will be the number-one problem for fuel cell vehicles," Steven Chalk, manager of the Energy Department's hydrogen fuel program, told industry and university researchers who were summoned in June to discuss the research challenge.

"Without storage, we won't make it. The whole success of the president's hydrogen initiative hinges on overcoming this one barrier," he said.

Instead of the lump sum for research the department had requested, Congress earmarked the money for projects such as a vaguely defined Shared Technology Transfer Program at Nicholls State University in Thibodeaux, La.

The university, which got $1 million, is in the district of Rep. Billy Tauzin, the Republican chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Another $1 million went to the Lansing Community College Alternative Energy Center for unspecified purposes. Lansing is about 80 miles from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, site of one of the country's top hydrogen storage research programs – which got nothing.

There was $3 million for the Hydrogen Regional Infrastructure Program in Pennsylvania, $2 million for the Florida Hydrogen Partnership and another $2 million for hydrogen research at the University of South Florida in Tampa.

"The practical effect of these earmarks has been to obliterate the president's expanded hydrogen research program," said Robert Rose, executive director of the Breakthrough Technologies Institute, an independent nonprofit organization that works on fuel cell issues.