UMHI was formed to bring fuel cell technology into use in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, the Dakotas and Manitoba, Canada -- and it is pursuing about $2 million to fund a hydrogen-fuel-cell bus demonstration project in Minnesota. As part of the federal transportation bill, Congress has allocated $49 million to a program called the National Fuel Cell Bus development program.

"UMHI has a decent shot at getting money from this program to do a hydrogen fuel cell bus," said UMHI executive director Rolf Nordstrom.

The UMHI project will use as a starting point the technology of Lanny Schmidt, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Minnesota, who demonstrated how ethanol could be used as a source for hydrogen in a fuel cell in 2004.

A number of different hydrogen technologies are quickly approaching commercial viability, including both fuel cells and internal combustion engines. Nordstrom said it would make sense to develop a stationary reformer that turns ethanol into hydrogen -- such a technology would be useful regardless of which hydrogen technology the bus demonstration uses.

The site for such a demonstration could be the University of Minnesota, where it could be employed for student shuttle buses running between the Minneapolis and St. Paul campuses.

"Hydrogen is going to play a major role in our energy future," said Duane Adams, a farmer in Cosmos, Minn., who serves on Renewable Fuels Association's fuel cell task force. "What we have to do is figure out how agriculture can fit into this -- will it be through ethanol, or by every farmer putting a windmill on his farm to generate hydrogen from water, or will we use methane digesters that reform the methane gas into hydrogen?"

Adams and Nordstrom were among many participants in a national hydrogen conference held in Long Beach, Calif., in March.