Tongji University plans to establish Shanghai's first hydrogen filling station for fuel-cell vehicles in suburban Jiading District this year.

Tongji officials said the station, scheduled to be completed by the end of this year, will be built at Shanghai International Automotive City near Tongji Jiading campus.

The public station will store locally produced hydrogen and apply pressure to the gas to make it suitable for filling car fuel cells.

"The station will feature an information center on the hydrogen economy and mark an important step towards realizing the city's hydrogen vision," said Ma Jianxin, professor at Tongji's hydrogen energy research institute.

By the end of last year, 10 fuel-cell vehicles invented by Tongji University were operating in the city. The number is scheduled to grow to 100 in the next one or two years.

The city's total fuel-cell vehicle number is expected to reach 1,000 by the World Expo in 2010. That will include three to six fuel-cell buses sponsored by the United Nations Development Program.

Tongji now has only one mobile hydrogen filling station to fuel those cars.

"The hydrogen supply is sure to lag far behind the huge demand created by the fast fuel-cell vehicle development," Ma said.

He said the city planned to set up a network of 10 to 20 hydrogen stations.

Meanwhile, Shanghai Maritime University said yesterday it had invented the country's first fuel-cell boat.

Also relying on 50 liters of hydrogen fuel, the boat named "Tianxiang No. 1" could sail for three consecutive hours at a speed of 7 kilometers an hour.

The clean-energy boat is especially suitable to be used as cruise boat in natural-protection zones as it discharges only water.

The pilot boat can hold only two passengers, but capacity is expected to reach 40 people when the boats are formally launched.

Huang Yunqian, the research program director, said the university was contacting tourism sites such as Taihu Lake in neighboring Jiangsu Province and West Lake in Hangzhou to put the invention to use.

(Shanghai Daily January 17, 2006)