Dr Helmut Panke, BMW’s Chairman, today drew attention to the UK’s potential to play a leading role in the establishment of a hydrogen-powered economy. Dr Panke was speaking in London at the first stage of BMW’s CleanEnergy World Tour 2002 – an event promoting hydrogen as the fuel of the future.
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“We have come to Great Britain with our CleanEnergy project because this country has enormous potential to promote and advance the hydrogen society,” said Dr Panke, speaking at the London Science Museum to an audience of politicians, industry experts and academics.
The UK has particularly large potential resources of renewable energies such as wind and wave power that can be used to generate the electricity needed to extract hydrogen from water by electrolysis. Britain could therefore become a major producer of hydrogen in Europe.
In a statement, BMW said that it is prepared to invest heavily in hydrogen technologies, but the precondition has to be a strong political commitment to hydrogen and that further investments can only be justified when infrastructure solutions can be developed and stable political frameworks can be implemented.
The company also said that under the right circumstances the BMW Group could consider the production of hydrogen internal combustion engines at its UK engine plant, Hams Hall in Warwickshire.
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By GlobalDataAccording to BMW, it will be the first automobile manufacturer in the world to launch a series production hydrogen-powered saloon car, based on the current 7 Series model, in a few years’ time.
BMW has developed a “bivalent” internal combustion engine which can run on both liquid hydrogen and petrol. BMW says that this could help to overcome the infrastructure problem facing hydrogen because ‘customers can drive the car without any inconvenience, even before a complete network of hydrogen filling stations is established, using petrol if the next hydrogen station is too far away’.
Dr Panke added: “For this reason I am confident that our bivalent concept will be an important key to the introduction of a hydrogen infrastructure.”
