The future is now at Penn State.

The second annual Hydrogen Day, held yesterday at the Nittany Lion Inn, highlighted advances in hydrogen power and fuel-cell technology, which could provide major benefits to the environment, economy, quality of life and national security.

More than 240 people attended events to learn about different aspects of hydrogen research.

The key events at Hydrogen Day were the posters to display the research and development in hydrogen and fuel-cell technology, the hydrogen and hybrid cars displayed by Toyota, and the research panel sessions, said Bruce Logan, director of the Penn State Hydrogen Energy (H2E) Center.

"The most interesting part for students should be the hydrogen-powered vehicles," Logan said last week.

There were multiple vehicles on display, including research vehicles used by Penn State and two vehicles brought by Toyota. One was the Toyota Fuel Cell Hybrid Vehicle (FCHV), which is based on the Highlander sport-utility vehicle and is fueled by four hydrogen fuel tanks. The other was the new Lexus gas-electric hybrid version of the RX 330 sport-utility vehicle.

"With the new generation of hybrids, we want to show that you not only get better fuel economy, but better performance," said Geoffrey Partain, environmental planning manager for Toyota.

Penn State students will actually be seeing many more hydrogen-powered vehicles in the next year or two, said Joel Anstrom, research associate of mechanical engineering and director of the Graduate Automotive Technology Education Center.

Hydrogen Day speakers and posters highlighted a plan between the Pennsylvania Transportation Institute (PTI) and Centre Area Transportation Authority (CATA) to convert three buses to use a blend of hydrogen and compressed natural gas, in place of just natural gas, as a long-term demonstration.

Along with the CATA buses, a few Office of Physical Plant (OPP) vans will be converted to the hydrogen blend, Anstrom said. One van has already been completed.

"If you burn enough hydrogen with natural gas, you can obtain really good emissions," Anstrom said. "Collier Technologies, one of the companies to fund our research, is able to meet 2007 emissions standards today with this technology."

PTI and CATA will receive a total of $487,656 in funding from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development to produce one bus and one van that run on a 30 percent hydrogen and 70 percent compressed natural gas blend, Anstrom said. Additional requests are being made for the second and third buses, as well as converting up to five OPP vans, he said.

"We will be installing wireless telemetry on all the vehicles so data can be collected and the vehicles can be tracked at all times," Anstrom said.

The grant is also going toward the construction of a hydrogen fueling station and a hydrogen fuel cell car, Anstrom said.

The fueling station was supposed to be operating for yesterday's demonstration, but there was a delay because funding for the reformer will not come through until next year. The system uses the reformer to create the hydrogen from natural gas on site, Anstrom said.

Ben Zile, graduate student and research assistant at PTI, said, "The biggest hurdle for hydrogen-powered vehicles is creating the infrastructure," or method to supply vehicles with hydrogen fuel.

A mobile fueling station was on hand to demonstrate the fueling process.

"We will get hydrogen from a cryogenic holding tank until July of next year," Anstrom said.

The hydrogen fueling station will transform natural gas into hydrogen, Anstrom said, and it will be one of the first in the Northeast.

Besides research and testing of current fuel-cell technology, Penn State is a leader in the development of new ways of producing and optimizing smaller-scale hydrogen fuel cells in laboratories, said Matthew Mench, assistant professor of mechanical engineering.

Mench, the director of the Fuel Cell Dynamics and Diagnostics Laboratory at Penn State, said one of the main sources of funding for fuel-cell research is the automotive industry.

Hydrogen Day brings researchers and the industry together, he said. "We need to be a human resource they need."

Penn State's research in the hydrogen field spreads across multiple colleges and is overseen by the H2E Center. It allows researchers at Penn State to collaborate with each other, Mench said.

"Professors have a tendency to be isolated," said Mench, "but working together, as a university, we can do a lot."

Logan said it is going to be a long road to switching over to clean, renewable energy sources.

"But we need to look and plan ahead if we are going to be working on something as dramatic as changing our supply of energy."