CBCnews (Canada) has an interesting story about how the Integrated Waste Hydrogen Utilization Project (IWHUP) uses hydrogen from two chemical plants to power pickup trucks, shuttle buses and a car wash.
The chemical plants produce more than 1000 kg/hr of hydrogen resulting form the production of sodium chlorate and clor-alkali by electrolysis of salt water. The waste hydrogen contains "chlorine, water vapor and other nasties," which have to be removed before it can be used.
Sacré-Davey Engineering saw that the hydrogen was being wasted by venting the hydrogen to the atmosphere and designed a C$18.3 million facility to treat, compress and deliver the hydrogen to two fueling stations— one in North Vancouver and the other in Port Coquitlam, a nearby suburb.
Fuel cells were deemed too expensive for the IWHUP project, and the existing internal-combustion technology was already available through Ford.
"Ford supplied the trucks and they asked us to use them as much as we can. They wanted to know how their technology would work in real-world circumstances."
-- Hamid Tamehi, senior engineer and project manager at Sacré-Davey Engineering
The station in North Vancouver fuels the project's nine pickup trucks, two small shuttle buses and a car wash. Basically stock ICE vehicles were modified slightly to run on compressed hydrogen gas instead of gasoline.
Other than routine maintenance, the only problems with the engines have been fuel injectors that have to be replaced more frequently than those on more conventional vehicles.
The North Vancouver Easywash facility is powered and heated by a 150 kW hydrogen fuel cell procured from Cambridge, Mass.-based Nuvera.
"The fuel cell not only powers the car wash, but also heats the water. We don't use all the power that's being produced, so we actually turn the switch and actually send power to the B.C. Hydro power grid."
-- Geoff Baker, co-founder of Easywash.
At the Port Coquitlam station four full-sized buses, operated by TransLink, the greater Vancouver transportation authority, that run on a mixture of compressed hydrogen and natural gas are utilized. The buses behave very much like those powered by natural gas alone, but with a 50-per-cent reduction in nitrogen oxide emissions and much lower greenhouse gas emissions.
"After the conversion, there was virtually no performance difference whatsoever, the power and torque remained the same."
-- Jack Lees, maintenance manager for Translink’s Port Coquitlam station
While IWHUP currently powers 15 vehicles, Tamehi estimates that the amount of hydrogen obtained from the two plants could power 20,000 vehicles and, if all the similar plants in Canada were tapped, there would be enough to run 250,000 vehicles.
Sacré-Davey raised 25 per cent of the funding for the project from a consortium of 12 corporate partners — including Ford Canada — and the rest from the federal government.
This sounds like a great use of hydrogen. However, it might not be economical it the Canadian government had not subsidized the project. It would be a worthwhile addition to the fuel available to fleets if most of the waste hydrogen generated by industry could be utilized. Only by avoiding the use of fuel cells in vehicles, at their present state of development, does this project make any sense. Some estimate of the cost of the hydrogen at the point where it is delivered would be necessary to assess the potential of future projects.