Obama Budget Kills Clean-Diesel Retrofit, Fuel-Cell Funding

By John Voelcker

698 views Feb 15, 2011

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U.S. Environmental Protection Agency adminstrator Lisa Jackson and President Barack Obama

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The budget that will be submitted to Congress on Monday by President Barack Obama contains cuts for two clean-vehicle programs: retrofits that reduce diesel emissions from heavy trucks and other commercial vehicles, and research funds for hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles.

Whether those cuts will survive the budgeting process remains to be seen.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Diesel Program had been funded at $80 million in 2010, and it was reauthorized last December by Congress for five years at a cost of $500 million.

U.S. Capitol

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Diesel-powered trucks, buses, and construction equipment made before 2007 are some of the highest-emission vehicles in use. Many of them have their engines running constantly during the day, and their emissions are essentially uncontrolled.

The retrofits are considered highly cost-effective, with EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson admitting that every dollar spent eliminates $12 to $13 in future public-health costs. The funds reimburse local governments for costs they incur fitting better emissions-control equipment to those vehicles.

Jackson called the cuts "one of the tough decisions we had to make," though $100 million in funding for the retrofits through the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act currently remains to be spent.

President Obama inspects the 2011 Chevrolet Volt

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Obama's budget also zeroes out the Department of Energy's hydrogen fuel-cell research budget, which received 2010 funding of $49 million. As automakers switched focus from fuel cells to plug-in vehicles, the Government had reduced its commitment to that research from a 2006 high of $84 million.

The world's automakers plan to build more than 300,000 plug-in vehicles during the 2013 model year, including the Nissan Leaf and the Chevrolet Volt. But production of hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles that same year will be measurable in the dozens--at most perhaps in the hundreds.

Putting 1 million plug-in vehicles on U.S. roads by 2015 has been a consistent theme both of Obama's 2008 campaign for president and his Administration's policies. He reiterated that goal in his January State of the Union address.

[Bloomberg]

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