Note: Fill 'er up with hydrogen? That’s what some California motorists may be saying soon, as car makers try to ramp up production of zero emission cars to meet state requirements by the year 2003.

Beneath the skin of this ordinary looking prototype sits an electro-chemical reactor: a hand built, astronomically expensive power plant known as a fuel cell. It’s expected to be running ordinary family cars on California’s roads within three years.

Rocket scientists have been using fuel cells ever since the United States went to the moon more than 30 years ago. But they're generally too complicated and expensive for much other than a government-sponsored space program.

The California fuel cell partnership says it’s about to change that.

Firoz Rasul of Ballard Power Systems says, "A fuel cell, very simply described, is a power generator. It makes electricity. It makes electricity on demand, and it makes it through the combination of hydrogen and oxygen."

In this Ballard power systems animation (see below), a hydrogen atom with its one electron, attempts to pass through a fuel cell membrane to unite with an oxygen atom. The membrane allows only the hydrogen proton to pass through, forcing its electron to scurry around the membrane to catch up with the proton on the other side. This creates electricity, water, and heat, but no exhaust emissions.

Eight of the world's biggest automobile makers, along with energy companies and fuel cell builders, will work side by side in this Sacramento, California center to learn how to build fuel cell vehicles that work as well as cars with gasoline engines.

John Wallace of Ford Motor Company says, "We still have technical challenges getting this extremely complex system to work properly, the way customers expect it to work. There are challenges in using new fuels, and providing the new fuel infrastructure.

And before fuel cell vehicles hit the road, there will have to be a network of hydrogen stations that will allow drivers to fill up with the flammable gas, under 36-hundred pounds of pressure.

Manufacturers are confident they can build fuel cell powered vehicles. The questions they hope to answer here are: how reliable can they make them, and can they make them cheap enough for people to buy them.

• Alternative Fuel Systems
• Ballard Fuel Cell Animation
• California Fuel Cell Partnership
• What is a Fuel Cell?
• How Fuel Cells Work
• Smithsonian—Collecting the History of Fuel Cells