The car industry is preparing for the day when oil wells run dry, by investing billions to develop hydrogen-powered vehicles.
But the new fuel comes with its own built-in commodity crisis. Today's experimental hydrogen fuel cells use so much platinum that there is not enough of the precious metal to replace all the world's petrol engines.
Kazuo Okamoto, Toyota's new head of research and development says: "With the current type of technology we know already that platinum supplies will not be sufficient." The problem cannot be solved by digging up more of the metal in South Africa, which has the bulk of the world's reserves.
At the current 60g or so of platinum in each fuel cell, the world's 780 million cars and trucks would use 46,800 tons of the metal, just below the 47,570 tons estimated to be still in the ground. This also assumes each vehicle has only 100 horsepower, the same as the diesel engine in a VW Golf hatchback, well below the 362hp of a BMW 7-Series.
No car-maker has yet sold a hydrogen vehicle, and only a few dozen are on the road, mainly at research centres in Japan and California. But makers are committed to cutting costs, with GM, the biggest car-maker, planning a production vehicle by 2010. Toyota, the second-largest producer, wants to lower today's cost from more than $1 million a car to $50,000 by 2015, when it plans to begin sales. "There is no other alternative to hydrogen," Okamoto says. "So one day precious metals will be a big big problem. That will be the barrier to hydrogen."
Dan O'Connell, a GM fuel cell engineer, said he was confident the company could cut platinum usage by a factor of two to three times. Researchers are trying to use nanotechnology to make the platinum more effective as a catalyst in the reaction that converts hydrogen into electricity and water.
But others are less concerned about platinum supplies. A study by consultants TIAX, for the US department of energy, claimed platinum would not run out. It believes platinum use would drop by three-quarters to 15g per fuel cell once hydrogen cars became viable.
Any shortage could be eased by recycling. Already more platinum comes back from exhaust catalysts in old cars and other industrial uses than from any single mine, and recycling rates remain low.
But TIAX found that even with recycling, if fuel cells power 80 per cent of cars by 2050, miners will be unable to extract platinum fast enough. On its base assumption that half of cars are hydrogen powered by then, and platinum use per car drops sharply, there would be no shortage. - Financial Times Service