Lab Business Magazine | Cover Story

Clean Energy Breakthrough

By: Jason Hagerman



Hydrogen—the single most common element in the universe—fuels burning stars, and if we could harness hydrogen, we could fuel the world’s energy needs.

But there’s a problem. Hydrogen is difficult to come by here, on Earth. Hydrogen doesn’t exist naturally as a gas. We find hydrogen in countless organic compounds, from the fossil fuels we use today to the emissions of bacteria and algae. But in these organic compounds, hydrogen is always combined with other elements.
“Hydrogen is a fuel that is environmentally benign, but the problem lies in how to produce it,” says Dr. Greg Naterer, Canada Research Chair in Advanced Energy Systems and. Associate Dean in the faculty of Engineering and Applied Science at University of Ontario Institute of Technology in Oshawa, Ontario.
 
 
Water, a combination of two hydrogen molecules and oxygen, covers more than 70 per cent of the Earth’s surface, according to the U.S.  Geological Survey. Taking hydrogen from this vast reservoir and turning it into fuel is a difficult process, but one many scientists say is worth exploring.
 
To split the water molecule into hydrogen and oxygen, a scientist needs heat—a lot of heat. “You’re not going to be able to split the molecule until you’ve got a heat source around 2500 C,” says Naterer. “This is just not feasible.”
 
In the 1970s, General Atomics developed the sulphur-iodine cycle for splitting water molecules. Essentially, sulphur and iodine compounds are introduced to the water. This produces a water molecule that only requires temperatures of around 850 C to separate, a temperature current generation nuclear reactors can reach.
 
Countries like Japan, the U.S., and France have used the sulphur-iodine cycle to develop nuclear hydrogen production programs with the aim of one day reaching a point of commercially viable hydrogen production. The Japan Atomic Energy Agency currently supports research into the sulphur-iodine cycle, as does the French Atomic and Alternative Energies Commission and a number of U.S. Department of Energy laboratories. As a result, the world hydrogen market is strong—currently around $300 billion—and expanding. 
 
“Right now the world hydrogen market is already very large,” says Naterer. “But Ontario is not really participating in it.”
Naterer wants in. “It is a tremendous opportunity,” he says.
 
A Canadian breakthrough
To develop the hydrogen market, researchers have been searching for years for more economical ways of releasing hydrogen from water. Naterer has developed a process to split hydrogen from the water molecule at a temperature of only 500 C. Naterer’s process introduces copper and chlorine compounds that react with water in a sequence of steps. This process saves energy, time and money.

 
 
The only net input you need, Naterer explains, is heat and water. All other components, the copper and chlorine compounds, are recycled through the system. At the end of the line you have hydrogen and oxygen and nothing else. Naterer sees this as both an immediate and long-term solution to sustainable energy needs.
 
While the Clean Energy Research Lab is currently working on the world’s first lab-scale demonstration of a copper-chlorine cycle, markets for the hydrogen the lab will produce are already planned.
“In the short term we look to existing industrial markets for hydrogen,” says Naterer. “These markets include, for example, petrochemical industries that use hydrogen for upgrading and refining, like the petrochemical facilities in Sarnia or the Alberta oil sands.”
 
To develop industrial-scale hydrogen production, Naterer wants to upgrade the current lab to a pilot-scale plant within the next five to seven years. This pilot-scale plant would be around 100 times the capacity of the current lab. To make this pilot-scale plant a more immediate possibility, Naterer wants to use solar power to drive the copper-chlorine cycle. A solarium will be the centerpiece of a planned renovation in the near future, including solar photovoltaic cells and solar heat for the production of hydrogen for fuel cell storage.
 
“Our goal is to make the building self sufficient from solar energy,” says Naterer.
 
Over the long term, UOIT has even more lofty goals for the technology developed at the Clean Energy Research Lab. “Our medium- to long-term goals are to use this technology for the transportation industry,” Naterer says.
 
Significant infrastructure improvements are needed to scale up to full consumer applications, but Naterer does not see this as a deal breaker, but rather a hurdle. More hydrogen can be added to existing natural gas pipelines even before future pure hydrogen pipelines are installed. Hydrogen is also currently transported every day by trucks and ships as either a liquid or compressed gas. “Hydrogen is just another industrial gas that can be transported,” Naterer says. To reach a consumer application production capacity, the Clean Energy Research Lab will need to expand the pilot plant by a factor of 100 or more.
 
Capturing wasted energy
We see wasted energy everywhere. Manufacturing plants generate heat to produce materials and vent the heat to the atmosphere. Vehicles produce engine heat, laptops create heat from component friction and battery power, the Earth itself is a ball of heat energy. Even the highly sustainable copper-chlorine cycle creates heat that could be wasted, but is not. Capturing wasted energy—heat—is a recurring theme at the Clean Energy Research Lab. In the copper-chlorine cycle, heat is recaptured with an efficiency of 80 per cent or higher and fed back into the process.
 
“There is a supplementary process within the copper-chlorine cycle that requires this heat, so we transfer it to where it is needed. The system is quite self sustaining,” Naterer says. Other technologies currently under development at the Clean Energy Research Lab are looking to use this waste energy.
 
 
 
“What we have is a piece of engineering that is able to use waste heat at lower temperatures than has previously been possible,” says Ian Marnoch, Inventor and Chief Technical Officer at Marnoch Thermal Power Inc., an industrial partner situated within the Clean Energy Research Lab.
 
With funding from the Ontario Power Authority, the Ontario Centers of Excellence for Energy, the National Research Council of Canada and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, a prototype of the Marnoch Heat Engine has been built using existing technology that can operate in almost any global locale.
 
 
“We can capture and transfer heat through the engine without a change of state,” Marnoch says. This means the engine circumvents the shortcomings of steam generation at lower temperatures. Marnoch believes this engine can thrive with several applications, including solar thermal, where the engine can operate over a much broader range than current solar thermal systems; geothermal, which is currently restricted to locations where temperatures are high enough to create steam; and industrial waste heat, which is largely ignored as a source of energy.
 
“The heat that is being used has already been accounted for, so by reusing that heat with our technology you’d see significant cost reduction,” Marnoch explains. That, and a reduction in carbon emissions as well. “One of the great things about the Heat Engine is that it’s built on existing technology that is used in a novel way,” says Naterer. “It’s a lot of fancy engineering.”
 
From big to small
Marnoch’s Heat Engine addresses the energy needs of factories and communities. At the other end of the spectrum—in the nano spectrum—Adedoyin Odukoya, a PhD student at UOIT, works.
 
Currently, there exist few, if any, power sources that can drive nanotechnology devices. Odukoya knows that waste heat could provide an effective power source for small engines if the small engines can capture the heat energy.
 
Odukoya is developing technology that can capture waste heat and convert it into electricity. The technology consists of a nano-scale pipe, or channel, capped on the end by a flexing membrane. Waste heat available in the surrounding environment causes a droplet inside the pipe to move back and forth within the pipe, almost like a piston. When the droplet hits the end of the pipe, the membrane flexes and produces a charge. This conversion of waste heat into voltage continues in an unending cycle until the heat source depletes.
 
“You turn on your laptop and place it on your lap. After a while it becomes very hot and uncomfortable,” Odukoya says. “We could use this heat to power devices by coating the bottom of the laptop with these tiny particles.”
 
“This could then feed into the system, making power from what is wasted today,” says Odukoya. Several additional projects round out the bulk of the more than $5.5 million in externally funded research projects.
“I’ve been working in this field for the past 20 years,” says Naterer. “I’ve been searching for myself to find what a sustainable future for humankind looks like, and every different type of option that I’ve come across has been a short term patch, a bandage solution that is not sustainable for humankind for the long haul.
 
When I came across these two ideas merging, hydrogen and nuclear, I knew this was it and it got me thinking about what needed to be done to make that happen. Now, we’re really on the fringe of creating a new industrial sector, positioning Ontario on the world stage in clean fuel production.”
 
 
Safety at the lab
Heat and corrosive materials are regular features in the daily lives of the approximately 25 researchers who call the $3+ million Clean Energy Research Lab home.
 
“We regularly interact with very high temperatures and corrosive chemicals, and we’ve had to take special precautions when building the lab,” says Naterer.
 
Touring the lab, visitors see only a handful of fume hoods. This is because the ventilation rate in each of the rooms is extremely high, eliminating the need for fume hoods that would have only slightly better ventilation.
 
“We have had very high safety standards applied throughout the building process,” Naterer says. The hydrogen lab has sensors in the walls and ceilings that keep track of air quality and lab integrity. “Our lab workers wear lab coats and goggles for sure,” says Naterer, “but the way the experiments are designed are so fool proof, so redundantly safetied, that our workers are quite safe.”
 
Inside the Hydrogen Industry
By: Robert Price
 
Canada’s foray into hydrogen fuel fits with the country’s goals to develop a cleaner energy system, satisfy growing energy demands, produce more energy at home, and diversify the energy supply.
In its 2011 budget submission to the Canadian government, the Canadian Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Association placed accelerated commercialization at the top of its list of priorities for the government. Acceleration means giving consumers incentives to purchase hydrogen fuel cells—creating a hydrogen infrastructure so that consumers can fuel up—and funding utility-size hydrogen projects.
 
With the market for hydrogen and hydrogen cells projected to reach $8.5 billion by 2016, the sector’s call for more investment in infrastructure follows a call for greater investment in innovation.
 
In 2008, Canada’s hydrogen sector spent $142 million in research and development—a huge chuck of the $195 million the sector took in as revenue. Most of this funding comes from corporate sources, with just under 20 per cent of R&D funding between 2003 and 2005 coming from public sources.
 
Places of research
The bulk of Canada’s hydrogen industry—about 65 per cent of the sector’s workers—operates in B.C. The next largest cluster—11 per cent of workers—operates in Ontario.
 
The industry has mounted demonstration projects near these hydrogen clusters. The Hydrogen Village in Toronto, operating since 2004, attempts to show how hydrogen and fuel cells can fuel a neighborhood.
B.C.’s Hydrogen Highway, launched in 2004, represented the first large-scale deployment of hydrogen fuel cells—the project offered drivers with hydrogen cell cars stations to fuel up their cars.
 
And between 2005 and 2010, Vancouver’s Fuel Cell Vehicle Program put fuel cells in the cars of selected drivers to show governments, drivers, and the automakers the viability of a hydrogen-fueled automotive sector.
Researchers across Canada investigate hydrogen and hydrogen fuel cells. In addition to UOIT, new research is being conducted at Queen’s-Royal Military College Fuel Cell Research Centre, Hydrogen Research Institute of the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, the National Research Council Institute for Fuel Cell Innovation, the Clean Energy Research Centre at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University, and Institute of Integrated Energy Systems at the University of Victoria. 1004.

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