Power and the glory

Home, highway and hand-held – hunt hard enough and you could be experiencing the hydrogen revolution sooner than you think. Roger East and Hannah Bullock explain the basics – and explore the innovations catalogue.

Fuel of the future, technology of tomorrow – the clichés of hydrogen hype all seem to set the timeframe tantalisingly just out of reach. In our ‘do it now’ world, however, there’s usually some scope for the early adopter to shell out over the odds for the chance to ‘experience tomorrow today’. And the fuel cell world is indeed no exception – though you’ll have to be prepared to put in some pretty carboncostly travelling time, if you really can’t wait for things to come to you.

For instance, right now it probably involves a transatlantic shopping trip if you are determined to power your home from a stationary fuel cell stack. But Plug Power, the New York and Washington based company that has about 100 customers for its fuel cell heating systems, is currently doing some test marketing in Germany, the Netherlands and some other European countries too. Stationary applications in combined heat and power are also beginning to appear in industrial premises in Japan and Europe as well as North America. There’s even one in Woking.

Bus journeys powered by hydrogen fuel cells could be close to hand in a number of cities. For Europeans, the best early bets outside Iceland are probably Amsterdam, Berlin, and maybe Munich airport, where a fuel cell bus is set to join the internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles that have been running on hydrogen there for several years.

A chance to drive a fuel cell car could be harder to track down. It’d have to be Tokyo or California, for one of the only models yet made available commercially – in a strictly limited way – by Toyota and Honda in fleet leasing agreements. But the imminent installation of hydrogen pumps at one of Shell’s filling stations in Washington DC should be spiced up by the availability of a fleet of six fuel-cell Zafira mini vans, developed by General Motors at a cost of at $1m each, for people to test-drive. The companies expect about 10,000 people to ride in them over the next two years.

Hydrogen won’t only be heating homes and powering the traffic – it could be the juice on that information and communications technology (ICT) highway too, as applications start to appear in the first mobile phones and laptops. Methanol fuel cells, which use a catalyst to break down alcohol into oxygen and hydrogen, could be set to replace inefficient and toxic lithium batteries. And unlike large-scale hydrogen projects, which require new infrastructure, this ‘low hanging fruit’ of the hydrogen economy is attracting big bucks from microelectronics companies.

Manhattan Scientifics have designs for a fuel cell providing a week’s talk time and six months’ standby for mobile phones. Japanese electronics giants Toshiba and NEC are working on their own hydrogen laptops that should last 40 hours between cartridge refills. Ballard are busy testing the world’s first hydrogen go-kart. An invention that could make a real difference to quality of life, though, is Aprilia’s Hydrocycle, whose only emission is water vapour – an ideal replacement for the auto-rickshaws that choke Asian cities. And Toru Hasegawa, president of Yamaha Motor, Japan’s second largest motorcycle manufacturer, said on 2 July that the company has plans to develop the world’s first methanol fuel cell for small motorcycles.

Just when you thought that rechargeable batteries had finally delivered a cordless drill that really works, here we are apparently on the threshold of another handy household appliance boom – this time fuelled by hydrogen gas canisters. Electrolux’s cordless vacuum cleaner would mean no more getting wound up in wires. Hydrogen-fuelled barbecues are already on sale in the USA. (Alas, that a revolution should come down to this.)

So far, scientists haven’t yet cracked how to create tiny and powerful hydrogen-powered gadgets. You’d only get two hours’ vacuuming done before needing another canister. NEC’s laptop fuel cell currently adds 2kg to the weight of the machine, and so far it only lasts a small fraction of the promised 40 hours before it craves its next half pint of methanol. So even though hydrogenpowered laptops should be on the shelves next year, it may be a while before they’re on our shopping lists.

But could this be the gift for the geek in your life? A small company in Weybridge is trying to trade on the enthusiasm of hydrogen aficionados to get their hands on the technology from which they expect so much. Hydrocell Fuelcells, proclaims its website (www.fuelcells.co.uk), “actually sells the fuel cells which others only talk about”. For those who want a little electrolyser to make their hydrogen too, the company should be able to oblige. Its small proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells, with an output of just a few watts, are designed mainly for educational purposes, although the company says intriguingly that it has supplied them to the Ministry of Defence as well as to universities.

HYDROGEN - THE BASICS

Locating the source. Hydrogen may make up three-quarters of the known universe, but we can’t access it as a natural energy resource like the sun, the wind or wood and fossil fuel. Think of it more like electricity – a ‘carrier’ of energy which must first be produced. For hydrogen, this involves releasing it from the compounds in which it occurs – most commonly in water, but also bound together with carbon, for example, in hydrocarbon compounds such as natural gas and methanol.

Powering the production process. To achieve this release you need a source of power. The hydrogen won’t mind where you get this power from, though the planet might. The nuclear energy lobby, for example, is keen to get into contention for a part in the hydrogen revolution. And you can make hydrogen in a process powered by fossil fuels. But, as with electricity generation, reliance on fossil fuels means releasing significant amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, usually along with other pollutants too. Hydrogen released from water by electrolysis (a process in which an electric current 'splits' water into its basic elements: hydrogen and oxygen) is pollution free if the process is powered by renewable energy such as hydro, geothermal, wind or solar power. This renewable hydrogen is the ideal.

Storage and distribution. Producing hydrogen where your original power source is located, for example at a wind farm, is a way of capturing the energy either for use there – when the wind dies down – or so you can use it elsewhere. Hydrogen can be stored and transported as gas (although it is bulky, even under pressure) or liquefied at very low temperatures. Creating adequate infrastructure for transportation (typically by tanker or pipeline) and storage is one of the biggest hurdles in bringing hydrogen power to market.

Extraction from hydrocarbons. Most of the hydrogen produced today (in large quantities, mainly for industrial use) is extracted from hydrocarbon ‘feedstocks’. If hydrogen for fuel is produced in this way, you have the option of transporting the feedstock, rather than the hydrogen, to the point of use, and then using an ‘onboard reformer’. This releases the hydrogen you need, but also the carbon dioxide you don’t – and it also uses up fossil fuel resources.

Use in fuel cells. Hydrogen can be used as a combustible fuel, but it is the emergence of fuel cell technology that has created the great excitement about its potential, for driving road vehicles, running local fuel cell generators and even powering portable devices. Fuel cells function in a similar way to batteries in that they have no moving parts and convert chemical energy into electricity very efficiently and silently. But, unlike batteries, they don’t have a fixed amount of charge that runs down as they are used. Keep providing the hydrogen they need as fuel, and they keep on producing electricity – and no exhaust, just small quantities of pure water. 

31 July 2003

Hannah Bullock and Roger East