The Project
SUPERGEN XIV - Delivery of Sustainable Hydrogen is a research project which brings together 12 of the UK's leading universities who are jointly working on a range of research topics aiming to radically improve the way in which Hydrogen and hydrogen-based fuels are produced and delivered.
SUPERGEN is the UK's flagship initiative in sustainable power generation led by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council in partnership with BBSRC, ESRC, NERC and the Carbon Trust. Its objective is to fund research which will help the UK meet its environmental commitments by radically improving the sustainability of power generation and supply. SUPERGEN XIV - Delivery of Sustainable Hydrogen is one of a cluster of projects funded through the SUPERGEN initiative.
Hydrogen
Hydrogen and hydrogen-based fuels are seen as one of the main pillars of our potential energy future. If however we switch to using fuel-cell devices or power our existing gas-fired equipment using hydrogen, then we need to obtain large quantities of hydrogen from somewhere. Inconveniently hydrogen cannot be drilled for underground, taken from the atmosphere, or otherwise collected - it must be made. And this costs energy.
|
For hydrogen to make sense; the energy used to make the hydrogen must be less than the resulting hydrogen contains - or energy is used that would otherwise be wasted. Britain has more potential wind power than she can use. BUT, wind does not follow a predictable timetable, ... sometimes there is too much, sometimes none at all. If wind energy can be used to make hydrogen at times of excessive wind, then hydrogen offers one route for Britain to tap into her natural energy potential. |
 |
Hydrogen could also be made from some wastes - material that causes us problems and costs us money to dispose of anyway. This is very possible technically, but it has received very little interest historically because ...
... Most hydrogen today is obtained in a relatively simple process called steam reforming - this reacts natural gas with water over catalysts at high temperature. The resulting hydrogen is often referred to as "brown hydrogen". Historically this hydrogen has been required for use (mainly) in the chemical industry with production concentrated in a handful of large chemical production sites. The brown hydrogen made is very often used in chemical processes on the same site with little to no transportation or storage costs being incurred. The process was not designed for the high purity requirements of some of the emergent hydrogen technologies, it was unconcerned with its carbon emissions cost and the raw materials (natural gas and water) have been historically very cheap - in comparison with the high value chemicals being produced. So there has been little incentive to look at alternatives.
If we now want large volumes of hydrogen to use as a fuel:
- Then we'd rather not use the coal or natural gas routes - as the main side product is CO2. [The cost of energy used is worrying and a lot of the energy produced in the UK is carbon-based anyway so it also results in additional CO2 output].
- From an energy security perspective we'd want to have distributed production to avoid over-reliance on a handful of production sites and to reduce transportation to consumer costs.
- And of course if we are using it as a fuel then we'd need more production sites than currently exist in any case.
Being able to efficiently produce hydrogen fuel locally in small and medium scales could prove particularly valuable to small or remote communities who have no access to national grid-type pipelines and who often suffer from high fuel costs due to the need to ship fuel to them. Ideally though the technology would be modular; so that the same technology could be used on different scales to accomodate the needs of communities of different sizes - but, without losing efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
This collaborative research project pools expertise from different areas of chemistry, physics and engineering mainly to work on emergent hydrogen production and related technologies to produce "Green Hydrogen". Green Hydrogen is not produced using petrochemical sources. It comes from renewable bio-carbon based sources or directly from non-fossil based electricity - such as solar, wind, wave or hydro.
Technologies
|
|
This project is working on a range of technologies that can potentially be used to produce hydrogen using less energy, using intermittent renewable energy sources and used on a variety of scales. The main hydrogen production themes centre around high efficiency use of intermittent renewables and carbon cycling and utilisation. When using new means of producing hydrogen chemically or electrochemically rather than the traditionally means which automatically produces CO2, the opportunity arises to convert the carbon component of some fuel sources into something potentially useful in the process rather than simply emitting it as CO2. Project posters being inspected at the All-Energy conference and exhibition held annually in Aberdeen (May 2010). The project was represented by SHFCA, Univ. Strathclyde & St. Andrews, Pure Energy and others. |
Associated Technical Issues
This project looks not only at the fundamentals of novel ways to produce hydrogen, it also looks at some related technical issues involved in delivering hydrogen to the consumer. So it addresses aspects such as the separation and purification of hydrogen from other gases by means of special membranes; it considers what happens when a hydrogen production system is connected to an intermittent power supply such as wind or wave, and at novel means of efficiently converting hydrogen gas to liquid. (It is much easier to transport large amounts of hydrogen in liquid form than as a gas).
Human issues I
As well as purely technical issues, there are human issues to consider when facing a significant change to our energy infrastructure. Our lives are strongly dependent on our energy supplies and these govern many of the things we do and the places we can do the things in. These aspects need to be addressed by social scientists rather than technical scientists and engineers. However for the social scientists to do a good job, they need to have a good understanding of the technical science. Delivery of Sustainable Hydrogen then also has two groups of social scientists investigating some of the socio-technical aspects of what these technologies could mean to us in a wider context. They are doing this in close association with the scientists and engineers developing the technologies in order to be certain that their conclusions are based on the possibilities the actual technology offers. Moreover the project's social science team improve expert feedback into government and other policy/decision making bodies. The project has been involved in a number of high level policy making groups having made contribution to a range of committees, been involved in (see below) and even organised meetings attended by industry, civil servants, members of parliament and government ministers.
|
Making Way for Scotland's Hydrogen Economy - Jim Mather, the Scottish Parliament minister responsible for Entreprise and Environment, addressing a meeting organised by SHFCA one of the project's advisory group members. The project was represented by Univ. St. Andrews, SHFCA, SE, Pure Energy, Bryte Energy and others. At this meeting (September 2010) the minister talked about the urgent need to develop energy storage technologies without which Scotland would not be able to capitalise on a potential renewables capacity some 34 times her peak energy demand. He explained that the Scottish government was now very aware that hydrogen would need to play a major role in that energy storage infrastructure. |
|
Human Issues II
The project also has a direct impact on the lives of some humans now - those working on it! Whilst the funded academics at the various universities are established, much of the actual research work is carried out by early stage researchers who are either:
- Studying for masters or doctoral degrees or/
- They have already obtained their doctoral degrees and are extending their knowledge and experience in this sector.
The project thus serves directly in the training and in the acquiring of experience of a relatively large group of early career workers. Some of these workers will remain in the field and become experts of the future, whilst others will take the transferable skills learned/honed into other sectors.
 |
Project members continue their meeting discussions over dinner under the watchful gaze of luminaries such as Charles Darwin and English poet John Milton in the dining hall of Christ's College Cambridge (September 2010). |
The project creates a group of scientists and engineers of all levels of experience and from a wide range of backgrounds - allowing for the cross-fertilisation of ideas and the formation of professional relationships some of which may go on to last a lifetime. Funding is available within the project to allow exchange of personel for specific cross-group training and for the shared use of facilities.