Time at the molecular benchtop and a revolutionary hunch has turned an inventive idea into a hydrogen production reality for a team of University of Alberta researchers.
The smallest molecule, and arguably the most important, hydrogen is used in many ways — and Albertans need it.
It can clean up oil and get rid of nitrogen and sulphur.
It shows up in fuel cells. It’s used to make carbonless steel, the so-called “green” steel.
It’s even added to vegetable oil.
And then there’s fertilizer, said Steve Bergens, a professor of chemistry at the University of Alberta.
“Alberta’s got one of the biggest fertilizer factories or companies on the planet, and they use hydrogen,” Bergens said.
“People are even thinking about mixing it with heating gas, like natural gas, to heat homes and cut down the co-emissions. It’s used everywhere in the province, it’s a huge part of the province’s economy — in everybody’s economy.”
Presently, hydrogen is often produced in a large factory process — “steam reforming” where hydrocarbons and water are reacted at very high temperatures over several steps, and that produces hydrogen and carbon dioxide.
With electrolysis, which uses electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, Bergens’ team eliminates much of the muss and fuss.
The trick is making the mechanism very active, inexpensive, and easy to manage. No special molecular beam or glassware or precise architecture or even a Back to the Future-style nuclear flux capacitor.
“Our project is all about making a water-reacting electrode with those criteria,” said Bergens.
The stakes are high: the amount of hydrogen you can get from water is something of an scientific Holy Grail, the dream of labs around the world — adaptable, green, efficient — but so simple it can be run with a bit of spare electricity.
And the U of A has done it.
When a student hurried to tell him it worked, Bergens had a “No way!” moment.
“I said, ‘No, it doesn’t. Nothing works that good,’” he recalled.
Green is good
In a world where fresh water is an increasingly scarce commodity, projects calling for it aren’t always met warmly.
On the other hand, 95 per cent of the planet is salt water, Bergens said.
A friend of his brought ocean water from Vancouver. They tried it in the lab, and the news was good.
“We tossed it in there, and it worked just fine. So we don’t need to desalinate the water in this process,” he said.
“I sit at the ocean, I see the wave energy, I see tide energy, wind energy, sunlight, and all that salt water, and I think, ‘That’s a lot of hydrogen!’
“If you can use this to clean dirty water, it’s so important to get this to work.”
The power problem
And then there’s the problem of the electricity it takes to make hydrogen.
No problem, Bergens said.
Got some spare watts?
“We can run this with a windmill, we can run it with a solar panel, we can run it with a dam, we can run it with a conventional power source at off hours. The whole idea here is to take electricity, green or off-grid stuff, and turn it into hydrogen and oxygen, so we can use that hydrogen wherever it’s needed,” Bergens said.
“Our approach was to keep it simple, to keep it scalable, and so we have a system where we coat conventional electrodes with our stuff, and we do it in one step in a beaker on the benchtop in the air.
“We can do this at any size, and then we can put whatever catalyst people want on it. And so we’ve been working on this water electrode to begin with, and it turns out that our stuff costs less and is more active than just about anything out there, and so we patented the technology,” he said.
From U of A to you
The technology was assigned to the University of Alberta, who patented it, and then the team approached companies working on hydrogen projects.
Cipher Neutron, a company in Ontario, was the first one to return the call.
Curious, they sent out one of their conventional electrode systems.
“We coated it with our technology here, and that took a week, because it’s so simple. We sent it back to them. They plunked it in their prototype unit and tried it, and called us back and said, ‘How did you do this?’
“This was performance that they haven’t seen before. It was really good,” Bergens said.
Cipher Neutron has licensed the technology, and is now in the process of manufacturing units with the invention. Next up, commercial units.
The thrill of positive, reproduceable results can hardly be overstated.
“You know, we’re scientists, we’re lab people, right, with lab coats and stuff like that. For scientists in general to invent something in an academic lab that goes so quickly into a company and helps the Canadian economy so quickly is really quite remarkable, it’s really quite rare, and so it is kind of a big deal, which is why we’re talking to folks about it,” he said.
Patience pays off
Simple as it is, the project is no overnight success. It got funding from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund, and then the University of Alberta set up a Future Energy System program to fund research.
That all started right before that great disruptor.
“We started all of this a year or so before COVID hit, and then we were shut down, and then people graduated, and we had to restock the lab and get it going, so I would say the project started eight years ago, but the actual invention was discovered about three years ago.
“Then we spent a couple years with it, refining it, making sure it’s real, not believing it, convincing ourselves that it is real.”
Now it’s patented and published and trialed, the invention’s been scaled into bigger demonstration units, coating huge electrodes.
Bergens emphasized the importance of the work of his students and project partners.
“The Future Energy Systems in the University of Alberta have been amazingly supportive and helpful during this process, and we couldn’t have done it without them. There’s just no doubt,” he said.
“When you try something new, you have 30 failures before you find the hit. We had 45 and they were very patient with us. That organization has been really wonderful for us, and we’re glad that their trust in us worked out.”
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