Fuel cell firm turns to chemicals industry to tear down hydrogen barrier

One of the largest barriers to the adoption of fuel cell technologies could soon be overcome, according to a UK firm which claims to have successfully tested a new system capable of capturing waste hydrogen from the chemical industry.

Despite their credentials as a zero emission technology, the commercialisation of hydrogen fuel cells has been consistently hampered by the energy intensive and costly nature of hydrogen production.

However, UK-based AFC Energy is confident it has identified a low-cost and sustainable source of hydrogen in the form of the waste gases produced by the chlorine industry, and following successful trials at a chlor-alkali plant at Bitterfeld in Germany the company is now working on a 50kW commercial-scale version of its fuel cell technology.

"The chlor-alkali process is used to create chlorine, but one of the side effects is the production of relatively clean hydrogen," explained Terry Walsh, commercial director at AFC Energy. "Rather than produce hydrogen, compress it, transport it to the fuel cell and then decompress it, we have instead decided to take the fuel cell to the hydrogen."

He added that the modular design of the company's fuel cells meant that it could theoretically provide chlorine plants with large-scale systems capable of generating between five and 25MW of power.

"Around 70 per cent of the production cost of chlorine is electricity, so taking a waste product and turning it into energy on site is a very attractive proposition," Walsh said. "We are looking to buy the waste hydrogen from the chlorine producers, providing them with a new revenue stream, and then sell the energy back to them or to the grid."

Chlorine is the tenth most prevalent product in the global chemicals industry, and according to figures from AFC the scale of the chlor-alkali sector means that around 2,650MW of energy could generated globally using waste hydroge n.

Walsh said that the same model could be applied to other parts of the chemicals industry that produce waste hydrogen such as chlorates and ammonia.

"Chlorine tends to offer the cleanest hydrogen, but there are plenty of other parts of the industry where hydrogen is produced as a waste product that could be exploited," he said.