Startup Plans to Usher in Hydrogen Economy

Posted by: Jack Ewing on September 23, 2009

Every major automaker is investing in development of ways to make cars move without petroleum or at least less of it. But there are also lots of smaller companies looking for breakthroughs that would allow us to keep driving without altering the climate and without propping up the world’s petrocracies.

One inventor working on the problem is Swedish engineer and entrepreneur Nils Kongmark, who with two physicist colleagues has designed a solar-powered device that extracts hydrogen and oxygen from superheated steam. The device would be small enough to fit on the roof of a gas station, producing hydrogen locally for cars powered by fuel cells. Carmakers including Daimler, Honda and Toyota still see hydrogen as ultimately the best way to replace oil.

The process developed by Kongmark’s Britain-based company, H2 Power Systems, sounds promising. Scientists have known how to separate the H2 from the O in water for a century. The problem is that existing methods use more energy to produce the hydrogen than the hydrogen gives back. There’s no net energy gain. Kongmark says that, with the help of materials not available until recently, he has solved this problem.

H2 Power System’s “solar water cracker” uses the sun to generate heat used to separate the hydrogen atoms in water from the oxygen atoms. But any source of heat can be used. Because the device can be made small and installed where it’s needed, it would avoid some of the transport and storage problems that have stood in the way of hydrogen becoming a widespread energy source.

An additional benefit of H2 Power's process is that it also produces pure oxygen. Fuel cells need oxygen as well as hydrogen to produce electricity, and work much more efficiently with pure oxygen rather than drawing from the atmosphere. Kongmark says the solar water cracker potentially could produce energy from hydrogen that would be significantly cheaper than current power sources, helping to usher in the hydrogen economy that was much vaunted a decade ago but never lived up to the hype.

Kongmark, who’s raising money with the help of Convexity, a Frankfurt-based financial advisor, must still prove that his device will work. H2 Power Systems is six months from a working prototype, he says. Kongmark, a heat-exchange specialist who says he has founded more than 30 companies, concedes that, “Making a prototype is one thing, industrializing it is a much different thing.”

So whether H2 Power Systems has found the key to cheap, clean energy is impossible to say at the moment. The encouraging thing is that Kongmark and his colleagues are among thousands of scientists and inventors working on better ways to produce hydrogen or more efficient batteries and the other technologies we’ll need to stay on the road without destroying the planet.

Some are working out of their garages, others in big companies. Germany's Linde, the world's largest producer of industrial gases, has developed a technique to produce hydrogen from waste glycerine. With so many good minds attacking the energy problem, somebody is bound to succeed.