Quebec university leads the charge for fuel cells
More than two decades of experience
T ROIS-RIV IÈRES,QU E
BEC •“Gasoline is not really on the way out in the near future ,” admits Richard Chahine, executive director of the Hydrogen Research Institute at the Université du Québec à Trois- Rivières. “Because gasoline has something that no other energy has; it has energy density.”
Chahine is a person who would know, but that isn’t stopping him from exploring the uses of hydrogen for passenger cars. He founded the institute in 1994 and has been looking into ways to produce, store and use the invisible, odourless and non- toxic gas as a sustainable energy source. It is the more than two decades of expertise in the field, as well as cold- weather research, that led to collaborations with both Hyundai and Toyota. Chahine a nd hi s team helped develop the hydrogen storage system in the Hyundai Tucson Fuel Cell, and assisted Toyota with storage system testing.
Chahine says hydrogen has four times the energy of gasoline by weight, but it takes much more hydrogen by volume to produce the same amount of energy as gasoline. “And for mobility applications,” he says, “volume is of the essence.”
About 200,000 tonnes of the gas is produced a year in Canada as a by-product of various industrial processes. In terms of energy potential, that’s the equivalent of about 800 million litres of gasoline, which is why it is being looked into as an alternative fuel source for cars, homes and industry. And it can be very clean, producing no emissions other than water when combined with oxygen in a fuel cell to produce electricity.
Hydrogen can also be used to fuel an internal combustion engine, but burning it is neither as clean ( high combustion chamber burn temperatures produce some nitrogen oxides) nor as efficient as using it to produce electricity. And it’s that electricity that propels fuel cell electric vehicles ( FCEVs), such as the Tucson, the Honda Clarity and the Toyota Mirai. The advantage an FCEV has over its battery-operated equivalent is a longer range ( about 425 kilometres on a tank for the Hyundai), and refuelling times of about five minutes.
Hydrogen is the most abundant chemical element in the universe. However, it is hardly ever found in its natural state on Earth, and must be e xt r acted from other sources, such as water or natural gas, among others. And extracting it consumes energy, a process that itself is not always entirely free of emissions.
You can extract hydrogen from water using electricity through a device called an electrolyzer, but for the hydrogen to be considered truly clean, the source of the electricity powering the device must also be clean, and not, say, electricity produced by burning coal, which releases a lot of carbon dioxide into the air. CO2 is the pri- mary cause of global warming. However, even hydrogen produced by coal energy is at least 30 per cent cleaner than gasoline when measuring grams of CO2 emitted per kilometre driven.
One of t he problems automakers face when designing a fuel cell vehicle is packaging. One kilogram of hydrogen equals the thermal efficiency of 3.8 litres of gasoline, yet that same kilogram displaces more than 11,000 cubic metres. That’s why it must be compressed at pressures reaching 10,000 psi when used in FCEVs.
The other problem is the lack of commercial access to the ( ironically) infinitely available gas. While EV owners can conveniently recharge at home, finding a hydrogen refuelling station in Canada is currently next to impossible. There’s only a handful of refuelling stations in the country, all of them at research facilities like the one in Trois-Rivières.
Sourcing hydrogen commercially might become easier in the distant future, but it will take decades to build an infrastructure to support its widespread use. Quebec’s minister of Energy and Natural Resources, Pierre Arcand, announced last year a project that will introduce four multi- fuel filling stations across the province that will include hydrogen. The first station should be operational late in 2018.
The Hydrogen Research Institute produces its own hydrogen using an electrolyzer powered by a wind turbine, though Chahine confesses that even it is not produced entirely without a carbon footprint; at some point some kind of fossil fuel was used in the production of the wind turbine, storage tanks and other related hardware. The institute also sources hydrogen from a nearby chlorine plant, as hydrogen is a by-product of the production of chlorine.
Of course, one of the biggest hurdles in the development of FCEVs is cost. The aptly named Fuel Cell Store, located in Texas, lists a 1 kW fuel cell for US$ 6,300. The hydrogen-powered Hyundai Tucson is powered by a 100 kW fuel cell.
“Nothing is f r ee,” affirms Chahine. “But now with solar and wind energy prices falling very low, from 12 cents per kilowatt hour a few years ago to three to four cents, extracting hydrogen from renewable energy is more realistic than ever before.”