Businesses urged to adopt hydrogen and fuel-cell systems
Share
The government is hoping to speed up the adoption of hydrogen and fuel-cell technologies to create viable end-to-end energy systems that can be readily scaled up.
A £7.5m funding package, delivered through the Technology Strategy Board (TSB), was revealed today at City Hall in London. Competition for funding is planned to open in January 2012 under the title of Hydrogen and Fuel Cells: Whole System Integration and Demonstration.
Intelligent Energy's fuel cell taxi and ITM Power's refueling station on show at City Hall
David Bott, director of innovation programmes at the TSB, said: ‘The new competition is designed to help business-led consortia develop innovative, large-scale application-led projects that integrate hydrogen and fuel-cell systems with key elements of our energy and transport systems and the wider built environment.’
The latest initiative follows an earlier £7m fund from the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) via TSB for 15 hydrogen or fuel-cell projects launched in September 2009. Two of the finished projects were on display at City Hall at the announcement of the most recent grant.
ITM Power showcased Hfuel, its mobile, high-pressure hydrogen refuelling station for road vehicles and forklift trucks. It requires an on-site water and electricity supply, but is otherwise entirely autonomous.
The unit is made up of two modules — one containing a 15kg electrolyser to split water into hydrogen and a second to store the gas and dispense it to vehicles at 350-bar pressure.
Speaking to The Engineer, Dr Graham Cooley, ITM’s chief executive officer, said the advantage of the system was that it could be transported by road and set up with minimal site preparation.
‘The installation usually takes less than three days and you can then refuel [a vehicle] in around three seconds — and if the electrolyser is powered by a renewable energy source such as wind power, then the whole process of running a fleet is entirely emissions free,’ he said.
The hydrogen can be used for combustion or purified for use in hydrogen fuel cells. Indeed, the other demonstrator project alongside the Hfuel was a hybrid hydrogen fuel-cell black cab developed by Intelligent Energy. It has a novel proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell with an efficiency of around 65 per cent, as well as a lithium-ion battery.
Dennis Hayter, vice-president of business development at Intelligent Energy, said: ‘London is consistently failing to meet particulates targets set by the EU and taxis along with other vehicles are a major factor in this… Our demonstrator is designed with taxi drivers in mind and has a range of 250 miles with rapid refuelling — all with zero emissions.’
A fuel-cell hybrid black cab will be seen on the streets of London in 2012. Click here to read more.
Readers' comments (6)
julian | 20 Jun 2011 1:35 pm
About time to.
The US Sun City Research Project used hydrogen electolysed from water to power cars with the internal combustion engine - the cars had a water tank that was plugged into the mains and the hydrogen pumed into the hydrogen fuel tank.
The cars were dual fuel running on petrol or hydrogen and the hydrogen tank had a range of 250 miles and a 30 minute recharge time when plugged into the mains -The plan was to recharge the cars at night on economy 7 or on roadside coffee shops when cars were pulled in fopr a recharge whilst the driver had a cup of coffee.
The Sun City project was a US research project to see how society would live with cheap nuclear fusion power WITH hydrogen fuelled cars seen as the answer to lead in petrol and the carcinogenic aromatic compounds in car exhausts polluting the roads - Heavy lead dust causing lead poisoning in children and carcinogenic fumes affecting all road users.
Unsuitable or offensive? Report this comment
John Watson | 20 Jun 2011 2:02 pm
I would love to have a Hydrogen powered car, but NOT a fuel cell for obvious reasons of size & weight.
The thing is, if I ran a car on pure hydrogen, could I leave my car at home, go on holiday for a month, and still come back to car with fuel in the tank?
Unsuitable or offensive? Report this comment
Mike Thurgood | 20 Jun 2011 2:11 pm
I have little doubt that the so-called "hydrogen economy" is the energy of the not so distant future.
But it is important that whatever means is used to produce the hydrogen, it must be at minimal cost so that the use of hydrogen is economically sustainable.
Apart the from electrolysis, which uses a lot of energy, the chemical process requires a temperature of around 1000 deg.C. This can be achieved using a solar radiation collector, or a suitable high temperature nuclear reactor, although the recent Fukushima Daiichi near disaster has rather dampened the enthusiasm for nuclear power.
Unsuitable or offensive? Report this comment
Doug Spencer | 21 Jun 2011 9:10 am
The main handicap is hydrogen preparation - I have yet to see a prospectus for a hydrogen mine. The holy grail of the electrochemist is to catalytically dissociate water using sunlight. Other methods at the present have a larger energy input than the useful output. Fuel cells and hydrogen power are wonderful, and have been around for a vey long time, but until the problem of hydrogen generation is overcome, I think htey are niche market ptoducts.
Unsuitable or offensive? Report this comment
KiwiBuzz | 21 Jun 2011 11:45 pm
Hydrogen is a method of transporting energy, not producing it. You could regard it as a particularly expensive and very lossy electric transmission line.
First you have is to make it, then you have to compress it, then you have to store it in a the container that doesn't leak excessively and then you have to burn it in some relatively inefficient engine or fuel cell.
Even if the cost of producing it was essentially zero, the costs and losses of compressing it, the costs of leakage and the losses in producing motive power would make it quite expensive.
But now that the world has an abundance of shale gas, why do we need it? The technology for running cars off compressed natural gas is well-established. Electric cars are moving ahead and there will probably be a steady market for the 10% or so of vehicles that are only used for short distance running in cities. So hydrogen remains a solution in search of a problem.
Unsuitable or offensive? Report this comment
Brian Tucker | 25 Jun 2011 11:57 pm
what is wrong with hydrogen micro beads for storage etc? Making it is a different matter!
Unsuitable or offensive? Report this comment