Recommendation 4-2. DOE should pay special attention to the transition from the current ICE fuels infrastructure to a nascent hydrogen economy. As part of this attention, the DOE should further focus the achievements of the fuel/vehicle pathway integration technical team by placing greater emphasis on the transition to hydrogen in its systems analysis work and should apply its systems capabilities to analyzing whether the cost goals for hydrogen production, established for a mature hydrogen economy, are appropriate for the transition. Specifically, this analysis should examine whether setting a hydrogen cost goal during the transition that is higher than the cost goal for a mature hydrogen economy would speed or impede the introduction of fuel-cell-powered vehicles.

Recommendation 4-3. The committee believes that significant development efforts should be directed to distributed hydrogen production, including natural gas reforming and electrolysis as well as exploratory work on other distributed generation options.

Recommendation 4-4. Even closer coordination with other DOE programs would be beneficial, including programs in the Office of Fossil Energy (FE) and the Office of Nuclear Energy, Science and Technology (NE). Representatives from FE and NE should be added to the fuel/vehicle pathway integration and hydrogen production technical teams, and FE and NE should be linked closely with systems analysis efforts in the Hydrogen, Fuel Cells and Infrastructure Technology program.

Recommendation 4-5. DOE should create a carbon capture and storage (CCS) system subteam (under the hydrogen production team) in the FreedomCAR and Fuel Partnership and make it part of the overall Hydrogen Fuel Initiative.

Recommendation 4-6. The goal of ±30 percent precision in estimating CO₂ capacity should be focused on geological storage.

Recommendation 4-7. DOE should strengthen the ties between managers of the CCS effort at HFCIT and managers at FE by developing a specific CCS program for hydrogen within FE. In addition, DOE should increase the shared management responsibility of the CCS program between EERE and FE.

Recommendation 4-8. The technical teams working on hydrogen production, delivery, dispensing, and storage should identify the unique R&D needs for hydrogen storage for production, as well as for delivery and dispensing, that are not being adequately addressed by the current project portfolio.