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Korea is seeing a ¡°green car¡± development boom, with the government presenting a vision for joining the group of the world's four largest makers of hybrid, biodiesel and fuel-cell vehicles, but there problems are mounting apace. Both technology and cost factors mean it will be some time before the country can develop and produce cars that are not powered by fossil fuel.
Only two or three years ago, fuel cell-powered cars were regarded as the ultimate in environment-friendly cars. But now some experts speculate that it will take a lot of time before they can be commercially produced. Fuel cells produce electricity by using oxygen in the air and hydrogen stored in the car. But it costs hundreds of millions of won per car to store a sufficient amount of hydrogen. And at the moment, hydrogen as fuel has no big environmental advantage, given that it is extracted from oil or natural gas.
This is also the case with hybrid cars. It has been more than a decade since Toyota's hybrid Prius was first produced. But the debate about its practicality is still going on because it is still difficult to supply batteries that can store enough energy at low prices. At the moment, hybrid cars account for a mere 1 percent of all cars sold around the world.
A workshop for the development of automobile technology in Deoksan, South Chungcheong Province last Wednesday under the sponsorship of the Korea Automotive Technology Institute heard from Don Hillebrand, director of the Center for Transportation Research at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory. Hillebrand said the U.S. had concentrated on developing fuel-cell cars only a few years ago, but that now it has completely turned to a variety of other alternative energies such as biodiesel and ethanol fuel.
There has been almost no change in the basic principle of oil engine-powered cars over the past century. Nor does it seem that the situation will change for the next few decades.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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