Valri Lightner, fuel cells team leader for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Hydrogen, Fuel Cells and Infrastructure Technologies Program, spoke at the FuelCellSouth 2006 conference, which got under way in Columbia.

Lightner also is co-chairman of the FreedomCar Fuel Cell Technical Team. FreedomCar is the joint government and auto industry research partnership working toward a hydrogen-powered vehicle.

In addition to fuel storage, the other top challenges are:

• Driving down the cost of fuel cells so that an engine equipped with them is competitive with an internal combustion engine

• Finding a way to produce hydrogen that is economically feasible

“For hydrogen storage, we issued a grand challenge,” she said.

Because hydrogen is such a light gas, the biggest challenge is getting enough of it “on board the vehicle” to enable it to go 300 miles.

High-pressure tanks do not meet the long-term target for storage. Research is centered on novel types of materials that can store and then release hydrogen as it is needed.

That fuel also needs to be equivalent in cost to the gasoline, “about $2 to $3 per gasoline gallon equivalent,” Lightner said.

The rising cost of oil might make that goal reachable sooner than later.

Cost also is a factor in making a fuel-cell engine competitive with an internal combustion engine. That would require that it cost about $30 per kilowatt, she said. The cost of fuel cells is closer to $3,000 per kilowatt.

Other challenges that need to be addressed are:

• Developing and establishing codes and standards to enable the use of fuel cell technologies

• Figuring out a delivery infrastructure for hydrogen. That is going to be huge cost, Lightner said.

• Educating everyone from first responders, who need to know how to handle hydrogen, to teachers and students to increase familiarity with the technology

Developing the overall hydrogen economy is a long-term strategy, Lightner said. It will probably be more than 40 years before the country sees it realized, she said.

The Department of Energy is “focused right know on developing the research and development to overcome the challenges to implementing the hydrogen economy,” she said.

Many of those problems are being worked on by scientists at USC, Clemson and the Savannah River National Laboratory.

If the United States hopes to be producing fuel-cell cars by 2020, it must solve those three top challenges by 2015, Lightner said.

Those dates were developed by the Department of Energy in support of President Bush’s Hydrogen Fuel Initiative.

Lightner’s program focuses primarily on transportation because of the ability of hydrogen to replace oil as a fuel.

But “it is really about fuel supply and it is really about the United States being able to produce its own domestic energy needs,” she said. “That is really the focus of the hydrogen fuel initiative.”

Hydrogen fuel-cell technology can also be used for power generation, she said, and it is already becoming viable in some niche markets such as portable power.

FuelCellSouth 2006 continues through Wednesday at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center.