To be competitive, fuel cell vehicles have to show better performance, efficiency, and gas mileage than current and emerging power trains. Nuvera's target for a commercial onboard fuel processor/fuel cell vehicle is a well-to-wheels CO2 emission of 100 g of CO2/km with 80 g of CO2/km for the onboard tank-to-wheels portion. Correlating these emissions with the properties of the primary design fuel (gasoline), the efficiency of the engine will be over 40% and the fuel economy will be around 3.2 liters/100 km, or approximately 75 miles per gallon.

At the same time fuel cell vehicles must offer equal or greater driving range. Although research for onboard hydrogen storage has made progress, there still remain issues of energy storage density, driving range, and energy consumption during refueling. Gaseous hydrogen (even at 700 bar), metal hydrides, and liquid hydrogen all have lower energy densities than some common liquid fuels, which is why hydrogen fuel cell vehicles have a limited driving range.

Onboard fuel processing is the short-term answer. To learn more about how Star works take a look at our Fuel Processing diagram.

The Star™ (Substrate Transportation Autothermal Reformer) fuel processor, developed in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Energy, utilizes advanced catalysts developed by Nuvera and its catalyst partners. A revolutionary technology in both size and operation, Star is on its way to become the first multi-fuel processors in a realistic form for automotive deployment.

Today, Nuvera is a recognized world leader in fuel-processing technology design. Our fuel processors range in size from 500 W to 250 kW and lead the industry in size, efficiency, and flexibility. With our proprietary steam, autothermal, and partial oxidation technologies, we remain one of the only companies in the world capable of converting virtually any hydrocarbon fuel (gasoline, natural gas, propane, methanol, diesel, JP-8, and jet fuel), renewable fuel (ethanol and bio diesel), and synthetic fuel into hydrogen. Extensive durability and reliability testing is underway as is design for manufacturability analysis. Additionally, our innovative technology is set to crack the last remaining barriers to onboard fuel processing - start-up time and start-up energy.

Nuvera is confident in its ability to meet the rigorous automotive specifications and has enacted a multi-year development plan to achieve the targets. The plan, which was put into place in 1999, is proceeding on plan, and by 2008 all major specifications will be met or exceeded.

At the present time we are working with Renault, among other leading automakers around the world, to demonstrate Star's effectiveness in laboratory trials. Pre-commercial units could be placed in demonstration fuel cell vehicles as early as 2010.