FuelCellsWorks

Ceres Power (’Ceres’, the ‘Company’, the ‘Group’) today announces that it has signed an agreement (the ‘Agreement’) with Bord Gáis Éireann (’BGE’) for residential combined heat and power (’CHP’) products operating on natural gas for the Irish market (including the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland). This marks the first international contract for Ceres Power outside mainland UK and forms part of the Group’s expansion plans into Europe, initially targeting highly adjacent growth markets.

The Agreement with BGE builds upon Ceres Power’s existing natural gas CHP programme with British Gas, and will use the same core technology platform, allowing the Company to exploit economies of scale. Under the Agreement, Ceres and BGE aim to establish CHP as the low carbon residential energy system of choice for Ireland. There are more than 2.5 million homes in the island of Ireland and Bord Gáis Energy, the retail arm of Bord Gáis, is Ireland’s leading dual fuel energy supplier selling natural gas and electricity to all market segments. Bord Gáis also provides appliance servicing of products to customers focusing on boiler service and repair and has recently announced a major energy efficiency Home Services Initiative in 2010 offering homeowners a full-scale energy efficiency service.

Under the terms of the Agreement, BGE will pay Ceres £1.6 million in milestone payments during the development and trialling of the CHP Product (the ‘Initial Phase’), including an up-front payment of £1 million. In addition, BGE has agreed to place a call-off order for 16,000 CHP products in aggregate over a four-year period for the Irish market, conditional upon successful completion of the Initial Phase and agreement of standard commercial terms, including the price, for the supply of CHP products. Subject to BGE meeting minimum order volumes, Ceres has agreed to sell the CHP product to BGE for the Irish market on an exclusive basis for a four year period anticipated to begin in early 2012.

Ceres and BGE intend to maximise sales of the residential CHP Product by addressing both the installed base of existing homes that would benefit from an upgrade as well as the annual boiler replacement market. Both of these customer groups will be able to enjoy convenient, low carbon, cost-competitive energy with this environmentally friendly product.

Peter Bance, CEO of Ceres Power, said:

“We are delighted to have formed this relationship with Bord Gáis Éireann which builds on Ceres Power’s leadership position in the residential CHP market and marks the beginning of our expansion plans internationally. Our technology has the potential to address exciting markets across Europe as well as North America and Asia. This new contract helps further underpin our investment in the Horsham factory that will create new skilled ‘green collar’ jobs in the UK and in our extended supply chain.”

John Mullins, Chief Executive of Bord Gáis Éireann, said:

“Working with Ceres Power on this revolutionary technology further highlights Bord Gáis’ position as a market leader and green energy innovator in Ireland. The Ceres Power residential CHP product will help accelerate a transition to a low carbon economy and make much more efficient use of precious energy resources. The CHP product has the potential to deliver significant energy savings, carbon emissions reductions and improved overall energy efficiency for the retrofit residential market in the Island of Ireland. We look forward to bringing this product to our customers as part of our strategy to be Ireland’s sustainable provider of customer-led energy solutions. “

Bord Gáis Éireann is Ireland’s leading dual fuel energy supplier, providing customers with natural gas and electricity in Ireland and providing residential customers with gas appliance service and repair products. The company built and owns over 12,000km of gas pipeline, including two sub-sea interconnectors with Scotland from where Ireland gets over 92% of its gas supplies. Bord Gais has both a transmission pipeline business and a gas supply/distribution business in Northern Ireland.

The company is majority owned by the Irish government. The company is currently investing €400 million in the construction of a 445MW gas fired power plant in Co. Cork which will achieve commercial production in 2010. Bord Gais is also committing an investment of up to €250 million in the development of four 100MW gas cycle turbines and has committed over €250 million to renewable energy developments. These investments underpin the company’s developments as a full service dual fuel provider in Ireland.

University of Sunderland’s Dirk Kok, Mark Armstrong, Maggie Ren and Adrian Morris with the green bus

Experts from China are helping prepare the North East for a low-carbon future with the creation of the region’s first petrol-free passenger bus.

The University of Sunderland has joined forces with Shanghai’s Shen Li High Technology and local experts ComeSys Europe and AVID vehicles from Cramlington to create ECO₂Trans, a ground breaking project to convert two buses to a fuel cell, battery and capacitor combination.

One North East have sponsored the £314k project to convert the two Gulliver U500EUK buses bought from Mersey Travel, using expertise from leading edge companies in China, Germany and the UK.

Sunderland’s team is led by Dirk Kok and Adrian Morris from the Institute of Automotive and Manufacturing Advanced Practice (AMAP), who last year successfully adapted a Nissan Almera to run on hydrogen so that it only emits water from its exhaust.

The aim of ECO₂Trans, says researcher Dirk Kok, is to educate people about the possibilities of hydrogen as a fuel, by demonstrate the efficiency of fuel cells. The University of Sunderland is also looking to develop the next generation of engineers and technicians who are ready for a low carbon future, and puts Sunderland right at the forefront of current developments in green vehicles.

Dirk Kok says: “The visitors from Shen Li were here to help us understand the fuel cell operation, train us in its use and to help mount the fuel cell in the buses. Now, we want to get one fully driving, and one will be completely revamped with a new motor and new electrics.

“These vehicles will act as a test bed to evaluate novel hydrogen technologies in vehicles and will enhance the region’s status as an important automotive research and development centre.

Washington, D.C. — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has signed a cooperative agreement with Hydrogen Energy California LLC (HECA) to build and demonstrate a hydrogen-powered electric generating facility, complete with carbon capture and storage, in Kern County, Calif. The new plant is a step toward commercialization of a clean technology that enables use of our country’s vast fossil energy resources while addressing the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

HECA, which is owned by Hydrogen Energy International, BP Alternative Energy, and Rio Tinto, plans to construct an advanced integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) plant that will produce power by converting fuel—a blend of 75 percent coal and 25 percent petroleum coke—into hydrogen and carbon dioxide (CO₂). The hydrogen will be used to fuel a combustion turbine, enabling net generation of 250 megawatts of electricity, enough power for more than 150,000 homes.

Approximately 90 percent of the CO₂ produced from the gasification process, or about 2 million tons per year, will be transported via pipeline to the Elk Hills oilfield, less than four miles away. There it will be sequestered in the same underground formations that have trapped oil and gas for eons. By choosing oilfields as the CO₂ injection site, oil production will be increased in a process known as enhanced oil recovery (EOR), and the CO₂ will be safely sequestered from the atmosphere. According to the California Governor’s Office, “This project . . . will not only create green collar construction jobs, but it will avoid greenhouse gas emissions and further propel us toward a clean energy future.”

Still other benefits will be realized from the new-concept plant:

• The proposed plant will maximize use of non-potable water for its power production needs, preserving California’s limited fresh water sources.
• The EOR operation will enable additional domestic oil production, which contributes to our national energy security.
• The new plant will boost the local economy by creating 1,500 construction jobs and 100 permanent operational positions.

The project is part of the Clean Coal Power Initiative (CCPI), a cost-shared collaboration between the federal government and private industry to increase investment in low-emission coal technology by demonstrating advanced coal-based power generation technologies prior to commercial deployment. The project will be cost-shared and administered by DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy and the National Energy Technology Laboratory.

The estimated capital cost for the project is approximately $2.3 billion. The federal cost-share is limited to $308 million, or just under 11 percent of the total project costs. The project consists of three phases: project definition (phase I), design and construction (phase II), and demonstration (phase III). Sequestration of 2 million tons per year of CO₂ is slated to begin by 2016.

NRC-Powertech-UBC partner resources to better serve Canadian technology companies

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA-- Three leading Canadian organizations that advance the development and commercialization of cutting edge clean energy technology will join forces tomorrow to coordinate their service offerings for British Columbia clean energy technology companies.

The National Research Council Institute for Fuel Cell Innovation (NRC-IFCI), Powertech Labs (a clean energy subsidiary of BC Hydro) and The University of British Columbia (UBC) are signing a Letter of Intent to work together in a BC Clean Energy Technology Cooperative. The Cooperative plans to act as a unified source of talent, knowledge and expertise for the clean energy sector.

“This partnership of leading organizations will focus resources and build a critical mass of expertise and infrastructure in the province of British Columbia,” said Eamonn Percy, President and Chief Operating Officer of Powertech Labs. “This Cooperative will accelerate the commercialization of clean energy technology, bringing BC solutions to world markets faster, resulting in an expanded clean energy sector.”

“Global success relies on coordinated knowledge-support that nurtures the innovation process from development, through validation, to deployment and commercialization,” explained John Hepburn, Vice President Research & International at UBC. “The Cooperative will address current gaps to ensure our public and private investment leads to stronger commercial success.”

Each founding member brings unique value to the Cooperative, including research capability, market access or leveraged funding.

“This Cooperative builds on the established strength of the Vancouver-based fuel cell technology cluster, which is part of BC’s growing network of clean energy companies, investors and cutting-edge research facilities,” said NRC-IFCI Director General Maja Veljkovic. “By working together we can tap into national capabilities and international networks to help small companies grow, creating more jobs, exports and GDP from the development of integrated clean energy solutions,” she added.

Over the coming months the Cooperative’s founding members will be consulting closely with industry and other research partners to identify and develop joint service offerings and project plans, which may include a shared inventory of technology evaluation facilities and equipment, joint training and expertise development and commercial-scale demonstration programs. New members will be invited to join the Cooperative on a value-added basis.

University of Utah chemistry Prof. Scott Anderson and doctoral student Bill Kaden work on the elaborate apparatus they use to produce and study catalysts, which are substances that speed chemical reactions without being consumed. The world economy depends on catalysts, and the Utah research is aimed at making cheaper, more efficient catalysts, which could improve energy production and reduce emissions of Earth-warming gases. Photo Credit: William Kunkel

University of Utah chemists demonstrated the first conclusive link between the size of catalyst particles on a solid surface, their electronic properties and their ability to speed chemical reactions. The study is a step toward the goal of designing cheaper, more efficient catalysts to increase energy production, reduce Earth-warming gases and manufacture a wide variety of goods from medicines to gasoline.

Catalysts are substances that speed chemical reactions without being consumed by the reaction. They are used to manufacture most chemicals and many industrial products. The world’s economy depends on them.

“One of the big uncertainties in catalysis is that no one really understands what size particles of the catalyst actually make a chemical reaction happen,” says Scott Anderson, a University of Utah chemistry professor and senior author of the study in the Friday, Nov. 6 issue of the journal Science. “If we could understand what factors control activity in catalysts, then we could make better and less expensive catalysts.”

“Most catalysts are expensive noble metals like gold or palladium or platinum,” he adds. “Say in a gold catalyst, most of the metal is in the form of large particles, but those large particles are inactive and only nanoparticles with about 10 atoms are active. That means more than 90 percent of gold in the catalyst isn’t doing anything. If you could make a catalyst with only the right size particles, you could save 90 percent of the cost or more.”

In addition, “there’s a huge amount of interest in learning how to make catalysts out of much less expensive base metals like copper, nickel and zinc,” Anderson says. “And the way you are going to do that is by ‘tuning’ their chemical properties, which means tuning the electronic properties because the electrons control the chemistry.”

The idea is to “take a metal that is not catalytically active and, when you reduce it to the appropriate size [particles], it can become catalytic,” Anderson says. “That’s the focus of our work – to try to identify and understand what sizes of metal particles are active as catalysts and why they are active as catalysts.”

In the new study, Anderson and his students took a step toward “tuning” catalysts to have desired properties by demonstrating, for the first time, that the size of metal catalyst “nanoparticles” deposited on a surface affects not only the catalyst’s level of activity, but the particles’ electronic properties.

Anderson conducted the study with chemistry doctoral students Bill Kaden and William Kunkel, and with former doctoral student Tianpin Wu. Kaden was first author.

The Economy Depends on Catalysts

“Catalysts are a huge part of the economy,” Anderson says. “Catalysts are used for practically every industrial process, from making gasoline and polymers to pollution remediation and rocket thrusters.”

Catalysts are used in 90 percent of U.S. chemical manufacturing processes and to make more than 20 percent of all industrial products, and those processes consume large amounts of energy, according to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

In addition, industry produces 21 percent of U.S. Earth-warming carbon dioxide emissions – including 3 percent by the chemical industry, DOE says.

Thus, improving the efficiency of catalysts is “the key to both energy savings and carbon dioxide emissions reductions,” the agency says.

Catalysts also are used in drug manufacturing; food processing; fuel cells; fertilizer production; conversion of natural gas, coal or biomass into liquid fuels; and systems to reduce pollutants and improve the efficiency of combustion in energy production.

The North American Catalysis Society says catalysts contribute 35 percent or more of global Gross Domestic Product. “The biggest part of this contribution comes from generation of high energy fuels (gasoline, diesel, hydrogen), which depend critically on the use of small amounts of catalysts in … petroleum refineries,” the group says.

“The development of inexpensive catalysts … is pivotal to energy capture, conversion and storage,” says Henry White, professor and chair of chemistry at the University of Utah. “This research is vital to the energy security of the nation.”

Catalyst Research: What Previous Studies and the New Study Showed

Many important catalysts – such as those in catalytic converters that reduce motor vehicle emissions – are made of metal particles that range in size from microns (millionths of a meter) down to nanometers (billionths of a meter).

As the size of a catalyst metal particle is reduced into the nanoscale, its properties initially remain the same as a larger particle, Anderson says. But when the size is smaller than about 10 nanometers – containing about 10,000 atoms of catalyst – the movements of electrons in the metal are confined, so their inherent energies are increased.

When there are fewer than about 100 atoms in catalyst particles, the size variations also result in fluctuations in the electronic structure of the catalyst atoms. Those fluctuations strongly affect the particles’ ability to act as a catalyst, Anderson says.

Previous experiments documented that electronic and chemical properties of a catalyst are affected by the size of catalyst particles floating in a gas. But those isolated catalyst particles are quite different than catalysts that are mounted on a metal oxide surface – the way the catalyst metal is supported in real industrial catalysts.

Past experiments with catalysts mounted on a surface often included a wide variety of particle sizes. So those experiments failed to detect how the catalyst’s chemical activity and electronic properties vary depending with the size of individual particles.

Anderson was the first American chemist to sort metal catalyst particles by size and demonstrate how their reactivity changes with size. In previous work, he studied gold catalyst particles deposited on titanium dioxide.

The new study used palladium particles of specific sizes that were deposited on titanium dioxide and used to convert carbon monoxide into carbon dioxide.

The study not only showed how catalytic activity varies with catalyst particle size, “but we have been able to correlate that size dependence with observed electronic differences in the catalyst particles,” Kaden says. “People had speculated this should be happening, but no one has ever seen it.”

Anderson says it is the first demonstration of a strong correlation between the size and activity of a catalyst on a metal surface and electronic properties of the catalyst.

How the Study was Conducted

Using an elaborate apparatus in Anderson’s laboratory, the chemists aimed a laser beam to vaporize palladium, creating electrically charged, palladium nanoparticles in a vapor carried by a stream of helium gas.

Electromagnetic fields are used to capture the particles and send them through a mass spectrometer, which selects only the sizes of palladium particles Anderson and colleagues want to study. The desired particles then are deposited on a single crystal of titanium oxide that measures less than a half-inch on a side.

Next, the chemists use various methods to characterize the sample of palladium catalyst particles: specifically the palladium catalyst’s electronic properties, physical shape and chemical activity.

ALGIERS– The meeting of Arab experts on hydrogen and the future of energy and climate in the Arab world wrapped up on Thursday in Algiers by the adoption of recommendations emphasizing the need to intensify hydrogen production techniques and encourage scientific research in the field.

According to a statement by the Ministry of Industry and Investment Promotion, the participants in the scientific meeting, the first of its kind devoted to this theme in Algeria, advocated “the drawing up of a joint programme in hydrogen research and development with a view to achieve an inter-Arab complementarity, the resort to Arab skilled experts who will work together through a network, for a better mastery of hydrogen technologies and applications.”

KUALA LUMPUR-- The government is carrying out research to study the use hydrogen for the production of electricity and to be used as a fuel source for the automotive industry, the Dewan Rakyat was told on Monday.

Deputy minister of Science, Technology and Innovations Fadillah Yusof said a study known as Hydrogen powered engine, hydrogen generation and diesel engine efficiency enhancement was being carried out to determine its use for static engines like generators to produce electricity and for engines used by fishermen for their boats.

“The first test had shown that the use of Hydrogen can help reduce the dependence on diesel by 25 percent. The project, being carried out through a RM1.489 million allocation that was approved in 2008, is expected to be completed by next year,” said Fadillah when answering a question by Dr Mohd Hayati Othman (PAS-Pendang) who wanted to know the development in efforts to use water as an alternative energy source.

Fadillah also said that the new technology being studied was to separate the Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms from the air Hydrogen gas to reduce the use of diesel energy.

He added that however, a prototype car using energy from water, cannot be developed into a commercial scale due to certain constraints that need to be addressed and studied carefully.

“Among the constraints are the storage system for the hydrogen, plus the production and distribution of Hydrogen for vehicles using hydro-fuel.

“It also involves the setting up of standards and infrastructure for vehicles using hydro-fuel and the electric system that can be used for hybrid vehicles,” said Fadillah.

Fadillah added that similar obstacles were also faced by countries like the United States and Europe.

“We must first overcome the obstacles before hydro-fuel can be widely used.

Hydrogen is the most versatile of renewable energy resources — a universal fuel that can be burned in an engine or used in a fuel cell to power vehicles, utility power plants and anything else that uses electrical energy. It will eliminate our dependence on other energy source,” he said.

When burned in an engine, hydrogen is about 30 percent more efficient than gasoline and when a fuel cell is used to power a vehicle, the fuel cell is 100 percent to 200 percent more efficient than gasoline.

Hydrogen engines do not emit carbon dioxide, and the only byproduct of fuel cells is clean water.