Defense Dept. awards FuelCell $1.3M contracts

FuelCell Energy Inc. in Danbury has been awarded a $1.36 million U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) contract to further develop its proprietary method of separating hydrogen from natural gas that could lower hydrogen’s price to be competitive with gasoline.

The technology could create markets for fueling hydrogen vehicles as well as producing reliable, cost-efficient on-site supplies of the gas for industrial purposes, doing away with the need to create a complex hydrogen-delivery infrastructure or trucking bottled gas to customers.
The technology will be combined with the company’s fuel cells, creating an energy system that will generate both electricity and hydrogen on site, making it an ideal system for refueling stations and industrial applications requiring hydrogen, the company said.
“It will do away with the storage of hydrogen, instead generating hydrogen just as you need it,” said Steven P. Eschbach, director of investor relations and communications at FuelCell Energy. “Industrial gas companies see a better market for industrial applications of hydrogen than for cars at this point. An infrastructure for hydrogen cars hasn’t been established, but hydrogen is already widely used for industrial applications.”
Eschbach said there is a significant market for FuelCell’s new technology among industrial customers such as chemical and petrochemical manufacturers, heat treaters, pharmaceutical companies, glass manufacturers and refiners that could benefit from producing on-site power and hydrogen. But the technology could also create a more viable future for hydrogen vehicles. Hydrogen is currently three to four times as expensive to produce as gasoline, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
“This is a new market application and part of our future production and commercialization with our fuel cell,” Eschbach said.
The new technology, called the Electrochemical Hydrogen Separator, has no moving parts and does not rely on compression to separate the gas, so should be more reliable and efficient than conventional methods, saving up to one-half the energy required when compared with conventional compression-based methods of hydrogen separation, the company said.
The Electrochemical Hydrogen Separator project was developed under a $600,000 grant from the Connecticut Clean Energy Fund under its operational demonstration program. It is operating at the University of Connecticut’s Global Fuel Cell Center in Storrs. The subscale EHS system produces 1,200 liters of pure hydrogen an hour, and will be scaled up by a factor of 25 to operate in conjunction with a submegawatt Direct FuelCell power plant in Danbury for testing under the DOD contract. That system could produce enough hydrogen to power a fleet of about 300 cars while providing enough electricity to power more than 100 homes.
“The subscale system that’s operating at the University of Connecticut took between one and two years to develop,” said Christopher R. Bentley, executive vice president for government research and development operations at FuelCell. “The next phase will take another one or two years as well.”
“The synergy seems to look pretty good, producing electricity with an extremely efficient and clean technology and at the same time creating hydrogen as a byproduct,” he said. “That’s something the United States is looking for.”
Bentley said, “It’s anyone’s guess about how soon the market for fuel cell operated vehicles or for vehicles that use hydrogen engines will develop, but if it does, it will be an enormous market.”
The closer market, he said, is the “many, many industries that use hydrogen gas as part of their process” and “buy from an industrial distributor of gases, which is fairly expensive.” But the FuelCell Energy system that produces both electricity and hydrogen gas would reduce that cost by using direct methodologies.
“It’s fair to say the big issue here is cost,” he said.

FuelCell Energy’s new electrochemical technology should produce hydrogen gas more cheaply than the existing mechanical separation technologies, he said, a view apparently also held by the Defense Department, “which is willing to spend some money” to prove it.