Merci.
We have worked on hydrogen a considerable amount. We've done hydrogen-natural gas blends on buses in Vancouver, British Columbia. We've blended a certain amount of hydrogen into the natural gas to get improved combustion of the engine, but on a spark-ignited engine. We've also run hydrogen, in collaboration with BMW and Ford, in internal combustion engines—these are internal combustion engines, not fuel cells—with great success.
Our challenge with hydrogen has been infrastructure, supply of the fuel, and cost of the product. Today, it's not economically feasible, other than with hydrogen coming from waste or fugitive sources, to deploy hydrogen vehicles in significant numbers. That's what our evaluation tells us. But we think hydrogen has a bright future once we know how to produce it in sufficient quantities to support the automotive sector.
The benefit of natural gas today is that it is being produced in sufficient quantities to offset petroleum consumption. Hydrogen, in many instances, just doesn't have that advantage today, until we find economical and energy efficient ways to produce hydrogen. Today, hydrogen comes from two sources. It's either from the electrolysis of water or from basically splitting natural gas molecules, which is called “reforming”. Those two processes are quite energy intensive, and they come at a high cost.
We don't work on fuel cells. We work only on internal combustion engines. But we've had great success making injectors that can inject hydrogen effectively into an internal combustion engine, with great emissions results and great performance results.