Hydrogen gets new lease on life


What if we could take a waste product and use it to run buses, trucks and even a car wash?
Thanks to a few North Vancouver companies, with some help from the government, this dream will be possible using hydrogen that until now has been wasted.
Come this fall, the North Vancouver-based Hydrogen Technology and Energy Corporation (HTEC) will be cleaning and compressing hydrogen captured from two North Vancouver chemical companies, Nexen and Erco. The chemical companies create the hydrogen as a byproduct when making sodium chlorate, an element used for pulp and paper bleaching and water purification.
Normally using hydrogen as a fuel carrier (it is not a source of fuel like petroleum) requires an injection of fossil fuels to create the hydrogen. Two of the common practices - heating up natural gas or running an electrical current through water - need energy to make energy.
Capturing the waste, on the other hand, doesn't eliminate the fossil fuels from the equation, but their use is not primarily for making hydrogen.
"It's a new process - it's a very neat process - it's why our purification plant is a lot better than others," said HTEC site manager Alex Moret. "There is enough hydrogen on the North Shore to run 20,000 cars and it's being wasted."
Colin Campbell, marine campaign co-ordinator for the Sierra Club of Canada, is cautious about the project. He would like the pulp and paper industry to move away from pulp bleaching towards the less polluting option of ozone bleaching.
"While we applaud the capture of otherwise wasted hydrogen for transportation uses, we would be unhappy to see a dependence grow on this pathway of production," said Campbell.
Nevertheless, using sodium chlorate to make chlorine dioxide is considered a best practice in the industry and is much more environmentally friendly than previous practices, but it still forms a part of the toxic effluents released by the pulp and paper industry.
Meanwhile back at HTEC, once they scrub the hydrogen 99.995 per cent pure, they'll compress it and store it to be used for eight hydrogen-burning pickup trucks, four TransLink-run hydrogen/natural gas-burning hybrid buses and a hydrogen fuel cell carwash located at Main Street and Mountain Highway in North Vancouver.
The carwash fuel cell produces heat as a byproduct when converting the hydrogen into electricity.
(Fuel cells are a lot like a battery, but the main difference is that their energy can be replenished with fuel.)
The heat will then be recycled back into the carwash to heat up the water used for cleaning, says Hydrogen Highway manager Alison Grigg.
The $18-million dollar Integrated Waste Hydrogen Utilization Project is a three-year project run by Sacr‚-Davey Innovations Inc., and is made up of $12.2 from government and $7.8 million from industry.
The project is under the umbrella of the Hydrogen Highway project, which is run through the industry association Hydrogen and Fuel Cells Canada.
The Hydrogen Highway will be on full display during the 2010 Olympic Games to demonstrate to the public the power of hydrogen, says Grigg. The highway will also give industry the opportunity to try out new products and get feedback from real-world practice or "where the rubber hits the roads," says Grigg.
Moret said the technology they are developing and using will have great future benefits and applications, especially since there are 20 plants across Canada that are currently flaring up their hydrogen instead of harnessing it.
"This is potentially helping to save the world. I went into engineering to do something worthwhile," said Moret. "This feels amazing.