meeting report
“Never Say Never Hydrogen” - 2003 Hydrogen and Fuel Cells Conference and Trade Show
Vancouver, BC, Canada
- Acquire Innovations Corp.
Vancouver, BC
At the 2003 Hydrogen and Fuel Cells Conference and Trade Show, June 8-11 in Vancouver, with joint Honorary Chairs Geoffrey Ballard and Alexander (Sandy) Stuart as well as Chair Paul Howard, many of the original hydrogen fuel cell players reassembled. They included two key people behind a 1983 Canadian Department of National Defense (DND) request which triggered the Ballard polymer fuel cell development – Martin Hammerli and Chris Gardner. In 1983, if we add in Sandy, whose father had started a company (now Stuart Energy) to produce hydrogen electrolyzers and also a group at the University of Toronto led by attendee David Scott, the number of people familiar with fuel cells in Canada would have been less than twenty. Today it would be hard to find a person on the planet who is not aware of the fuel cell.
At a time when fear of terrorism and SARS resulted in the cancellation of conferences, they were joined by more than 1,100 registered delegates and by a fascinated public who attended the “ride and drive” events. With the world’s fuel cell experts gathered, I wondered whether, after two decades, we were simply seeing the result of global government funding or whether there had been sufficient progress for true commercialization to take place.
At the opening of the conference reception, while attendees queued to sign on to PCs powered by Ballard generator sets, the Minister of Natural Resources announced the deployment of the world’s first fleet of five Ford Focus hybrid fuel cell vehicles and other major funding awards, present and future, that on a per capita basis put Canada on a par with the U.S. That the gensets retail at an entry market price and vehicles are some way from being affordable did not daunt enthusiasm. I reminded myself that I bought my first calculator at $3,000 in today’s dollars!
The Plenary sessions featured distinguished speakers, including kindly driving force Alan Lloyd, chairman of the California Air Resources Board (CARB), who told me he hails from Pembroke in South Wales. Dr. Lloyd made the case for hydrogen for the conference with air quality and health detail. I found intriguing his evidence that California could be impacted by emissions from Asia. He was followed by Timothy Vail of General Motors, who admitted his legal background, and made a case for commercializing stationary generator sets as a stepping stone to vehicles. Vail felt that the key issue to be solved was that of hydrogen storage, and that a target of $50/kW for the fuel cell was achievable in the future. We will return to why we may not need to go so low when we hear what Amory Lovins said on the third day.
On Monday I wasn’t at all sure that a gem of commercial and technical progress would be found until in the last paper, in one of six parallel sessions, on the stationary power side I found a new development by a company called Questair. This only clicked in discussion after Mark Kirby had presented a paper, “Gas Management Technology for Solid Oxide Fuel Cells.” Questair (partially owned by Shell, British Oxygen and Ballard), can show that recycling the internally produced hydrogen in a SOFC raises its efficiency to >70 %. After the meeting, coauthor Dr. Bowie Keefer (keefer@questairinc.com) tells me that the approach can also be considered as a way to improve a polymer fuel cell.
Creating fuel cell vehicles from the ground up is Anuvu, expecting to have a non-polluting, economically competitive car in 2004.
The week before the conference, Fuel Cell Technologies of Kingston, Ontario (www.fct.ca) had shipped a solid oxide fuel cell to Germany and I was anxious to hear about it. FCT’s CEO John Stannard (whose Ph.D. is in aeronautical engineering) and I shared a high temperature Madras curry, appropriately in Vancouver’s Gastown. John compared the relative efficiency of his 5kW CHP product with that of a comparable natural gas reformer coupled with a polymer fuel cell. Even without the Questair development above, his system yields some 25% more electricity than the polymer cell/reformer combination and, of course, the waste heat is a higher grade. FCT has just opened a manufacturing plant and costs are projected to fall to what the market is asking for in two years. The SOFC can use hydrogen or hydrocarbons and there was a poster presentation from the Royal Military College of Kingston where one could see that they were experimenting with diesel fuel in anticipation of providing a feed to a SOFC. (The posters at the conference were generally of high quality and many addressed fundamental issues of hydrogen storage and catalyst life.)
At the 5kW and above level, (Kinetrics, www.kinetrics.com, is just commissioning a 250kW SOFC system in Toronto) there are fuel cells on the horizon that will provide a more efficient hare for GM’s Tim Vail to chase, but his hydrogen-dedicated fuel cell could more easily transition to a vehicle.
Tuesday I resolved to look for more of what Mr. Vail needed and plunged back in, looking for the gems that would lead through the brick wall of hydrogen storage for vehicles and avidly questioned workers on methanol, adsorption, metal hydrides, chemical hydrides and compressed gas.
For storage the winner depends on the application. Hydrides (and you can get systems delivered) will do well for mining vehicles, zambonis, and, indeed, submarines. They do well on full-cycle climate change emissions provided you use the heat of the fuel cell. They are challenged for vehicles until we get to higher percentages. People at Hera, (www.herahydrogen.com ) say they are a year away from tripling the percentage of gas they store. This still means that 1kg of hydrogen (equivalent to a gallon of gasoline) will weigh in at 33kg but that’s close to matching what you can get with 240bar pressure storage where you can throw away up to 12 % of the lower heating value of the fuel with rapid filling.
Chemical hydrides are well known to be challenged on climate change, so I passed on a borohydride presentation. I’ll mention their defense niche later, but they are not for Mr. Vail, I think, except as a temporary expedient.
Methanex people (www.methanex.com) were handing out some tables on the energy benefits of using methanol to transport hydrogen. They told me a postal delivery vehicle could work with methanol (even allowing for a reformer) as would forklift trucks and, potentially, laptop computers. Elsewhere it was nice to see that there is now good fundamental work exploring catalysts for the direct methanol fuel cell, e.g., “Methanol Oxidation on Pt/Ru Supported Electrocatalysts,” (Birss@Ucalgary.Ca). Although some way from being a vehicle fuel cell, this is a route to “make it so” for a number of lower power applications.
It was the regular “reformer-free” road vehicle that is presently the most challenged for fuel storage. Technically it could be done by the next generation hydrides, and was being done outside the conference by Ford with Dynetek, (www.dynetek.com) compressed gas cylinders, but to get full range they were going to go to 700bar and will be clipping enough off the lower heating value of the fuel to damage the climate change argument for hydrogen. Here is where the breakthrough is required then; there is hope that low temperature carbon nanotubes can make the required storage leap without excessive energy use, but it is yet to be done. The Hydrogen Research Institute (www.uqtr.ca/IRH) exhibitors told me that an 8% storage target, for example, cannot be reached unless the carbon storage system is held at liquid nitrogen temperatures. Obviously there will be niches where this is feasible but it’s not going to appeal to Mr. Vail; GM has been looking at reforming gasoline, but I move on to production
Attendees check out the Focus fuel cell car, which Ford will deploy in 2004 as a fleet of five in Vancouver, a world’s first for Canada.
Hydrogen production has no brick wall ahead. There is, for example, a superb new fluidized bed reformer technology from MRT (www.membranereactor.com) that was on the Wednesday tour. It is for those who want large volumes of natural gas converted to 99.99% hydrogen with lower cost and higher efficiency, which many do. This, of course, can be applied to biomass methane pending, for example, a hard-to-bring-to “commercial scale” bypass in a poster, “Hydrogen Production from Garbage of Restaurant by Fermentation” (Tanisho@Ynu.Ac.Jp).
John Ritch, director general of the World Nuclear Association, gave a case for a safe nuclear approach which, wherever one stands, certainly has an economic basis. New developments, under discussion globally, were described in the conference by Alistair Miller (millera@aecl.ca), “Pollution Free Hydrogen from Nuclear Power,” that can bring nuclear power costs down to 3 cents/kWh. In any case there are a vast range of projects that include its production from biomass and coal bed methane with simultaneous sequestration of carbon dioxide. More than one speaker showed that the early penetration of fuel cell vehicles identified by Dr. Lloyd of CARB could be readily handled without disrupting the present supply of hydrogen.
Then on the third and final day, guru Amory Lovins (ablovins@rmi.org) with a filing cabinet of references up there with him, gave us an updated version of his Hypercar presentation. After the talk he was surrounded for 30 minutes or more. Though Amory had digressed to the production of bananas with solar energy and stationary power, he does take us towards the solution that Mr. Vail needs and which will conclude this article.
To rally my thoughts I went for lunch on the final day with Matthew Fairlie, vice president of Stuart Energy Systems (www.stuartenergy.com). We talked, of course, about electrolysis and Stuart’s interest in building a hydrogen distribution system which Matthew had described to a fairly full room in the last paper of a session. With questions it must have ended up being the final presentation of the conference.
Stuart’s barrier can be summarized as the absence of vehicles for his company to refuel. In common with a natural gas infrastructure, a hydrogen fueling system is most cost effective if utilized to its capacity. Stuart is exploring the use of a Ford hydrogen engine for stationary power generation, and Matthew had presented its costs. In the question period he had given $50/kW for the engine. Thus a bridging solution to the fuel cell “chicken and egg” is to build the hydrogen infrastructure to an economic volume for hydrogen power systems with a hydrogen engine, while fuel cell costs fall and technologies improve.
Meanwhile, small fuel cells are becoming commercially viable. There are 100 companies targeting the potentially lucrative micro fuel cell market, according to Dr. Ged MacLean of Angstrom Power (www.angstrom power.com), who gave his talk using a laser pointer powered by a fuel cell.
Waiting to take conference-goers for a ride is a Mercedes-Benz Citaro fuel cell bus, many of which are now in use in Europe.
There may be electrical applications where we won’t use a fuel cell, but there will be those that will. In some cases we will make the hydrogen inside the fuel cell and sometimes outside. Sometimes we will use a low-temperature polymer cell and sometimes a high-temperature ceramic. As turbines and both externally and internally combusted engines work well with hydrogen, we will sometimes use those too, where hydrogen makes sense as a fuel. If we use hydrogen in medical devices it won’t be more complex than a medical oxygen cylinder– just a different color – and it may even be made from some chemical pellets thrown in a canister as we saw in a paper from the U.K., “Portable 25W Hybrid Fuel Cell System,” presented by Kevin Green (www.Quinetiq.com), where their Ministry of Defense is tired of soldiers carrying batteries to the front.
Above all we will have more breakthroughs. Note that Questair identified a new means to significantly improve the SOFC and PEM. As we hit the physics we will find more solutions and we will pass through the brick walls we see today.
We may even leap over the brick wall of hydrogen storage in another way. This is the route proposed by Amory Lovins and may help Mr. Vail’s GM. You give the consumer who wants an SUV (or as Amory said, a Suburban Assault Vehicle) a car that looks the same. First, though, you make it out of a stiffer, safer material and make a dramatic weight reduction. Then you hybridize the vehicle to bring down the engine or fuel cell size.
Is Amory talking “pie in the sky” when he says you give the customer the shape of vehicle he was looking for and cut the weight? No, he is not. As it happens, on May 29, 2003, the first all-aluminum Jaguar (Ford) XJ8 was delivered in Vancouver. The new Jaguar vehicle is stiffer, crashes well and is 440 pounds lighter than its predecessor. It looks the same.
Amory is not proposing rocket science for the Hypercar structure; it is a reasonable extrapolation of the XJ8 structure. Do this and you do not need to store as much hydrogen. You can also use a smaller fuel cell for a car. Maybe the fuel cell will not be as small as that shown at the conference in a vehicle by Anuvu Fuel Cell Products (rexhodge@anuvu.com) but as size means costs, it may well be, with the Amory Lovins’ approach, that a long-term $200 target can replace the $50 target suggested by GM’s Tim Vail. Perhaps it is being quietly and vigorously pursued by GM’s ally Hydrogenics (www.hydrogenics.com) who announced during the conference the sale of six 10kW fuel cell power modules – the HyPM-LP2 – to Deere & Co. for integration and evaluation in off-road vehicle applications, including grounds equipment and utility vehicles.
Often, if you have only one company in market you don’t have a market, so to this last off-road example add Geoffrey Ballard/Paul Howard’s new General Hydrogen (www.generalhydrogen.com) and Chris Reid’s Cellex Power (www.cellexpower.com). They were present to tackle the forklift truck market in parallel.
After all, Alan Lloyd, speaking for California and, no doubt, South Wales, possibly doesn’t mind us starting with commercially viable products to solve air quality. He really just wants us to be able to breathe and be healthy.
My conclusion was that the storage question for vehicles, cited by opening speakers as an issue, can be dealt with by intelligent systems integration. Although there is still some way to go for road vehicles, there is definite progress to commercialization of near-term products. The conference was a success.
“Hydricity Pack,” a lead-acid replacement for fork-lift trucks, is Dr. Ballard’s latest venture, on display in General Hydrogen’s booth.