Remember back in July when I posted Wired.com’s Q&A with Larry Burns, General Motors’ vice-president of research and development? He made the following comment:

I don’t care whether the hydrogen comes from wind, geothermal, nuclear, solar, or fossil. What I care about is that each local economy plays to its strength. You get 5 per cent from here and 10 per cent from there, and suddenly you’ve created a transportation energy market with a number of pathways competing, as opposed to just a petroleum pathway.

I remembered those words after seeing an announcement this week from Industry Canada’s hydrogen early adopters program and Sustainable Development Technology Canada. Both government funding bodies are together contributing about $12 million towards a three-year project that will use waste hydrogen from a sodium chlorate manufacturing plant in North Vancouver to provide fuel for hydrogen-powered vehicle fleets. Specifically, the hydrogen will be purified and used to fuel eight light-duty trucks running on hydrogen, four hydrogen/natural gas ICE transit buses, and a fuel cell system that will provide electricity and heat for a local car wash.

The end result will be the creation of a local hydrogen “value chain” that will create a cycle of supply, storage, distribution and hydrogen use. Called the Integrated Waste Hydrogen Utilization Project (IWHUP), the North Vancouver fuel station will be part of BC’s hydrogen highway project.

As Burns said, local economies will play to their strengths and take a variety of paths to get to a hydrogen economy. This is just one example — with the potential of fueling a fleet of up to 20,000 vehicles — that could easily be duplicated across North America.

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