When 20 buses powered by hydrogen fuel cells were rolled out in time for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, the David Suzuki Foundation pointed to the carbon footprint created by the 4,500-kilometre “green highway” needed to truck hydrogen fuel from Quebec to Whistler.
For an energy sector already embarrassed by hydrogen hype, it was more bad optics the industry didn’t need.
The local hydrogen fuel-cell sector can soon tick that problem off its list and focus on the next one: getting a network of hydrogen fuelling stations built to support the hydrogen fuel-cell manufacturing sector.
A new $15 million hydrogen liquefaction plant to be built in North Vancouver will take hydrogen left over from two North Shore chemical plants that make chlorine for the pulp and paper industry, refine it and liquefy it.
Premier Christy Clark announced earlier this week at the Hydrogen + Fuel Cells 2011 conference in Vancouver that her government is contributing $870,000 to the project.
“We are taking something that would have been wasted and we’re turning it into energy,” said Pierre Gauthier, commercial director for Air Liquide, the company that supplies the Whistler buses with their hydrogen.
Hydrogen Technology Energy Corp. (HTEC) will clean up the waste hydrogen to remove any residual chlorine, and Air Liquide will liquefy it (which makes it easier to transport) and distribute it.
The plant will produce 1.3 tonnes of liquid hydrogen per day, 30% of which will be sold to BC Transit to power the Whistler bus fleet; the rest will be sold in Western Canada, most of it in B.C.
There is already a demand for hydrogen fuel in B.C., and Gauthier expects it to grow. Vancouver is Canada’s hydrogen fuel-cell hub, which is why Mercedes-Benz announced in March it will build a $50 million automotive fuel-cell plant in Burnaby instead of Germany, said Andreas Truckenbrodt, president and CEO of the Automotive Fuel Cell Corp. (AFCC).
“Vancouver is really the cradle of fuel cells,” he said.
Although hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, parsing it from water or hydrocarbon molecules – which frees electrons to create electricity – can be prohibitively expensive.
Ross McKitrick, an energy economist at Guelph University, said hydrogen as a green energy source has been summed up in some science circles with the sarcastic one-liner: “hydrogen is the fuel of the future – and it always will be.”
“The costs,” he said, “are just prohibitive.”
While he concedes that hydrogen fuel is still twice as expensive as fossil fuels, Gauthier points out it’s up to three times more efficient than the latter, which generate waste energy (heat) and carbon dioxide.
Hydrogen fuel cells’ only emission is water.
Although hydrogen can be processed from fossil fuels (natural gas, for example), Gauthier said there are more cost-effective sources.
He pointed out that each day in Canada alone, chemical plants that make chlorine or produce oxygen (for hospitals, for example) produce 500 tonnes of hydrogen as a byproduct. And now there’s a growing market for that surplus hydrogen.
Even so, Truckenbrodt said the hydrogen car industry is still stuck in a “chicken and egg” dilemma: no one wants to buy a hydrogen car when there’s no network of hydrogen “gas stations,” and no company will build those stations if no one is buying hydrogen cars.
“We’re convinced that the technology is ready on the vehicle side,” Truckenbrodt said. “We will have the costs also at a competitive level in the 2015 time frame. The only thing missing is the stations aren’t out there.”
The cost of driving a Mercedes F-Cell (fuel-cell) car is $8 per 100 kilometres, Truckenbrodt said, which he pointed out is “about equitable” to the $7 per 100 kilometres of a regular gasoline-fuelled car.
The fuel stacks that go into the Mercedes F-Cell are being built in Burnaby, although the technology is owned by the AFCC, which was created in 2008 as a joint venture between Daimler, Ford (NYSE:F) and Ballard (TSX:BLD).
Since getting out of the automotive fuel-cell sector, Ballard has been focusing on utility power generation.
The company recently struck a deal with Toyota Motor Sales USA to build a one-megawatt hydrogen fuel-cell power plant for Toyota’s headquarters in Torrance, California, to meet the company’s own peak power demands.
And unlike the hydrogen car business, utility power generation is profitable, said Ballard chief commercial officer Michael Goldstein.
“This is a business that, out of the gate, it’s profitable to us and it’s profitable to our customer.”