Researches claim they can produce cheap and clean Hydrogen fuel

[Music] [Applause] [Music] the climate crisis has been described as a race against time [Music] huge protests have swept the globe United in cause demanding action from leaders the world's leading scientists claim there is now less than 12 years global warming to be kept to a maximum limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius and avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change but efforts to cut down on the use of fossil fuels have stalled although there has been investment in renewable energy solar and wind the vast majority of global energy some 80 percent still comes from fossil fuels but one answer to this increasingly desperate problem could be hiding in plain sight [Music] Engineers in Calgary claim they have found a clean and economically viable way to produce hydrogen and it all started with a chance conversation over a breakfast at a Denny's restaurant on the outskirts of Calgary and Alberta Canada I did an engineering master's about 12 years earlier and one of my professors that took a few courses from Ian gates he and I stayed friends for many years and would have fairly regular breakfasts before we went to work we often talked about ideas that we had about how we can go beyond the current how do we go beyond what exists today we talk about all sorts of different interesting theoretical ways to solve problems and that kind of discussion either a breakfast or at a pub leads to a sense of you know and even with only two people or three people can lead to that sense a critical mass which leads to new ideas and new discoveries at one point I wanted to buy a big asset somewhere and our main shareholder at the time didn't want to buy this big resource asset so I was lamenting this to Iain saying oh I wish we could go get this just the size of it is just unbelievable part of this is how do we produce from the euro sources of energy but produce clean energy from these resources and he said you know I was just looking at a paper where there was a bunch of hydrogen produced in a in an old pilot you know the idea was at first well how do we lower the emissions intensity of all sounds but then how do we get to the point of zero emissions and hydrogen is an option for that and then over over the course of breakfast well I think you know there might be a way to just keep everything down there except the hydrogen well you find sometimes the ideas you have the they after the fact they seem so obvious but prior to the that moment when you dream it up doesn't exist why didn't why did no one realise the prize of hydrogen hydrogen is the simplest and most abundant element on earth it consists of only one proton and one electron the gas can be used to generate electricity and power vehicles and it produces water not carbon when burned in the new system that the world trying to move to we really have we have a possibility of creating one big energy system that is much more interchangeable between which has electricity on one side of that system and on the other side hydrogen there are currently numerous drawbacks for hydrogen one of the main challenges it is still relatively expensive to produce but perhaps more importantly the majority of current hydrogen production uses fossil fuels that release carbons into the atmosphere this new process has the potential to address those issues it aims to extract hydrogen from underground resources like oil field deposits while even the carbon emissions below the surface you know when you think of oil its hydrocarbon so you think oh ok this hydrogen there this carbon there and a bunch of other stuff but the thing is if we can access and simply produce the hydrogen out and also get that from the water that's there then you have now an energy production process from heavy oil reservoirs which is completely clean it comes down to two simple premises one is that you can make hydrogen from an oil field and that's been done more than 500 times worldwide so in my mind fully proven not a question and then the other aspect is are there ways to separate hydrogen from a mixed gas stream again we've been doing that for about a hundred years fully proven not really an issue combining them in a new process that works together where you create this hydrogen and you separate the hydrogen that's what we do what's nice about what we're doing we're doing reforming within the underground we're rejecting the carbon oxides in the underground and we're producing hydrogen only at surface so this is hydrogen which is co2 free at surface [Music] in order to prove the technology the team set about building a demonstration in a laboratory at the University of Calgary their aim was to show a system that injects oxygen into the ground producing hydrogen under the ground and keeping the carbon also under the ground and then only extracting the hydrogen another engineer Jackie Wong who was also studying at the university was also brought in for the project from the threat : do we look at we think this work because we can mimic at the high temperature and with the formation water present and we can do a steamie Institute generation once the steam and the mats in the mat together with the contactor region language think of where how everything ready so we got the the parts we needed and in this lab demonstration they didn't all quite work together correctly especially the seals on our unit so I spent a few weeks in the lab with Jackie and we were melting aluminium and trying all sorts of different gaskets to use as a seal and finally one worked so we had our lab results but it was it was an interesting educational thing to prove to ourselves and others that we could do it - we did a blow - simulation work to show that we can get economic hydrogen out of the reservoir so that gives you motivation to move forward with the program where we can gasify oil sands and then test our membranes and show that we can produce pure hydrogen from oil sands a Robert in Saskatchewan Canada is surrounded by oil sands for as far as the eye can see in 2017 proton technologies purchased this oil facility the previous owners had spent two hundred and fifty million dollars on establishing the plant proton picked it up at a fraction of the price in order to carry out the company's vision in demonstrating a clean hydrogen making technology the company first needed income and that meant producing oil to generate funds set up surety is the chief operations officer who had been the plant operations manager under the previous owners first focus was to get the operation up and running because for proton technologies this is a source of cash flow as well obviously is the startup technology company with a patent that's trying to prove the technology usually companies like that they don't not have any source of cash flow where as the beauty of this project by owning this asset we started having cash flow from day one which was true the oil production although the theory of the method had been proven in a laboratory the next step of the operation was to prove the hydrogen technology could work in the field the same potential shareholder who wanted the lab demo said okay I so I see you guys have a lab demo but can you do it in the field because one of my membrane experts thinks that these that h2s will destroy your membrane and we said no no we'll use old-fashioned membranes that can handle h2s and he said okay prove it so we did so the technology was proven at the lab but it was never implemented in the field so in the real-world world that you're dealing with h2s you're dealing with very cold temperatures it's never been tested so they asked me to actually go ahead and come up with a process and build everything didn't you do the project management actually demonstrate that tests that was a great success we proved we can produce 99.9 percent pure hydrogen from those membranes at flux rates which makes sense economically from the lab plumb view we proved the concept from the field demonstration project we proved we can produce 99.99999% purity hydrogen you go through this step of processes where you know its concept taking you and lowering the risk that you can in that step to a set of simulations to lower economic risk and technical risk to then a set of experiments where we lower risks further then to a field trial to even now show oh yeah produce gas no harm to the membranes and so on on the nights that we ended up separating people hide returned from a gas stream and see that blue flame that was the most exciting nights and that's when I believed in it and that's when I ended up putting a lot of money in this business despite the success in the field further major investment fell to materialize more funds were needed to keep the company afloat the operation costs at the plants continued to mount up we barely barely scraped enough together to obtain this asset at an auction for a great price and then quickly realized that this is gonna cost even more we had to fix a bunch of things to operate it safely and properly and everything costs a lot and in the oil patch it seems so we were suddenly trying to through a very challenging time for the price volatility for oil in Western Canada we had to try and hang on to this facility through oil revenues just so we could hold it long enough to be able to get our hydrogen demo done at large scale we tried to actually talk to all of the local investors or banks in Calgary and still we couldn't see we couldn't we didn't get the attention that we need it so but I saw that blue flame with my own eyes and I'm an engineer so I know what I'm dealing with so I ended up any mortgage in my own house and I pull that two line of credits that I had and then I put it into business there was a variety of interesting challenges that we didn't expect for example even just the utility bill sometimes would be how are we gonna solve this within the next five days before they turn the power off and if the power turns off things can freeze and you know there's massive consequences and if production completely halts which it did for seven weeks at one point you know that's you have an op cost to cover and field guys to pay no matter what they're very close to lose everything basically we were gonna lose a power and electricity here we were supposed to use natural gas and then it was I would say we threw a lot of prayers to find more people and then get more money into the business to survive but as the operation began to produce more oil and with the price of oil improving the company managed to hold on the aim for the company now to begin hydrogen production at their facility on a much larger scale the next step is to turn on a lot of air injection and a lot of steam injections so that we can have the maximum amount of steam reforming in the ground in the in the near term with the hardware we have so that'll be we expect between five and ten tons per day of hydrogen and the next step is 500 tons per day producing clean hydrogen is one thing but the cost remains a key challenge currently 95% of hydrogen production produces carbon and requires significant outlay to build a plant but imagine a plant that essentially uses nature instead of a huge above-ground infrastructure proton technologies calculate that the new method has the potential to be a tenth of the current hydrogen production costs the very lowest costs steam methane reformers I've heard of was from a report in the International Energy Agency that suggests that it places with extremely low gas prices and labor costs you can actually get down to about one US dollar per kilogram and we're talking about like 10 cents per kilogram so on a cost basis with no emissions you know that's a dramatic improvement in in hydrogen cost and because the abundance of these resources when you start looking at the volume of oil and water in these systems and you take into account even you know let's say oxygen injection so air separation to get oxygen and compression veins the underground and you power it from the produced hydrogen you're looking at you know cost points of you know 10 cents to 50 cents per kilogram hydrogen I think about the transition for example from whale oil to crude oil it didn't happen because everyone loved whales it happened because crude oil was inexpensive and easy to use and I think if hydrogen is less expensive than crude oil and easy to use and why wouldn't why wouldn't people change if it's six dollars to fuel up your car with hydrogen as opposed to $60 with diesel and one of them is healthy and makes water for you and the other one is gonna kill your neighbors when you're idling your truck you know it seems like an obvious solution to me adding to the appeal of the system is that currents energy producers oil and coal companies also stand to gain from the process one of the promising things about it is it provides an opportunity for the traditional fossil fuel sector to play a major role in the transition to a low-carbon economy that would you know help to stimulate create jobs create economic opportunity and and actually make them the fossil fuel sector a very critical part of a transition to a low-carbon future rather than only being seen as part of the problem welcome to the arc energy ideas podcast for November 22nd I'm Jackie Forrest and I'm Peter transaction but is the discovery simply too good to be true Peter did Zack Ian and Jackie Forrest of the arc energy Research Institute hosts a regular podcast in this episode set to join them to discuss the technology twenty years ago it was still the Holy Grail in a sense for a clean energy system straight from hydrogen the simplest atom I'm just really excited about the potential you know we have these huge reservoirs in Western Canada for oil and gas and we're not alone there's many jurisdictions in the world right that their economies depend on oil and gas and as we think about the transition to a cleaner economy there's some big questions about you know what are we going to do with all the people and the expertise and towns that exist in these areas and it's exciting to think that hey maybe there is a way that these same reservoirs that have produced oil and gas for decades could be transitioned to producing low cost low carbon hydrogen which could really feel the transition you know was have been full view and so the impetus to switch has to come from a combination of different forces of change it has to come from the environmental impetus which is historically been a big impetus it has to come from the technology being available it has to come from the economics being competitive with the status quo energy system in this case fossil fuels so if you can make the planets aligned and the circumstances right for the transition then it has potential to be adopted you know one of the problems with hydrogen in the past has been the only economic way we had to produce it was using ch4 methane and then you know it was zero emission hydrogen when you were using it but the reality upstream we had created co2 so that was the problem I always had with hydrogen and so you know if we could have cheap greenhouse gas emission free hydrogen it would solve a lot of problems in terms of thinking about how the world could transition to low-carbon energy [Music] there are though still some questions that need answering not least whether there is any long-term issue created by the process I think I think a big challenge that proton energy needs to demonstrate and deal with is how secure the the the co2 is in the reservoir after they've done the process that will soon be put to the test but the potential for the technology remains the implications are producing a low-cost carbon free hydrogen or enormous it's exactly the kind of to actually provide the the fuels that the world needs and and drive the kind of investment and growth so I think the folks that will within the energy race will be the ones that find clean solutions because the investment community will support that the social license that's out there right now where people are demanding you know triple bottom line requirements and other things like that will demand that and I think you've got a huge number of young folks that are kind of that thirty and younger who are very aware and are thinking about a cleaner tomorrow and despite what energy and oil companies and other companies are thinking those traditional models don't work and so companies that ones that will win the race will be the ones that adopt clean energy everyone's looking for a large-scale low cost carbon less energy solution and I think we have it you

Channel: CGTN America

Views: 145,348

Keywords: @cgtnamerica, CGTN, China news, China, Global, Television, Network, Clean Energy, Carbon Free Hydrogen, Cheap Hydrogen Fuel, Dan Williams, Cheap and Clean Energy Source

Id: 8_U_ixFO8uw

Length: 20min 5sec (1205 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 17 2020