Jan/Feb 2007
Trash Power?
The Professional Edge
Real science is never quite as sexy as the movies. In the James Bond
classic The Man With the Golden Gun, 007 visits nightspots from
London to Bangkok while protecting a solar energy scientist with a
solar focusing array. Engineers working for Saskatchewan's Solar
Hydrogen Energy Corporation (SHEC) are likewise building a powerful
solar focusing array but their travels have frequently taken them to
the Regina landfill.
Based in Saskatoon, SHEC was founded in 1996 to develop and
commercialize hydrogen production technologies that can take advantage
of renewable energy sources and dramatically reduce greenhouse gas
emissions at costs competitive with conventional hydrogen
production.
While the company has a number of important patents and discoveries to
their credit, their breakthrough pilot project came in December 2005
when they announced their goal of building SHEC Station #1, the world's
first solar hydrogen production station fuelled by landfill gas from
the Regina landfill.
Together with their partners at Giffels Associates and Clean 16 in
Toronto, SHEC has set ambitious goals to revolutionize the hydrogen
industry. Company principals are certainly not lacking in confidence
about the project.
"This is a very important piece of a global environment puzzle that will
now be showcased in the city of Regina. This technology is a stepping
stone that can change the way energy will be produced in the future and
ultimately the way we all live our lives," says Ray Fehr, Vice
President of Marketing for SHEC.
Hydrogen Pros and Cons
Some view hydrogen as the fuel of the future due to its abundance and
low environmental footprint. When hydrogen is used in a fuel cell to
create electricity, it combines with oxygen to leave only pure water as
a by-product.
The economics of hydrogen are boosted by its other uses, including as a
component in gasoline production, fertilizer production, hydrogenating
edible fats and oils and a host of others.
However, the potential of hydrogen has so far always been hobbled by
expense and waste. First, in the past it has often been so costly and
energy intensive to produce the gas that it was scarcely worth it. The
most common method of hydrogen production at present is to extract it
from natural gas using steam. This process obviously involves a double
waste of energy resources as well as creating tonnes of greenhouse gas
pollution.
The key to turning hydrogen into a viable energy source is to find a way
to produce the gas from renewable feedstocks using mainly renewable
power and producing relatively little pollution.
Jamie Bakos, P.Eng., Director of Environmental and Alternative Energy
Services with Giffels Associates, thinks he's found the secret hidden
in society's garbage.
Fuel From Garbage
Rotting organic material at landfill sites gives off large quantities of
methane. Although methane is a low-grade fuel source on its own, it
contains energy-rich hydrogen molecules. By combining methane collected
from the dump with carbon dioxide and water in a heat-intensive
reaction, the hydrogen molecules are released.
"Instead of burning fossil fuels to create another fuel, we use arrays
of mirrors to provide the heat for the conversion reaction. The first
law of thermodynamics dictates that you can't get more energy out of a
system than you put into it, but this system allows us to stay within
the bounds of that law while still creating a fuel that has more energy
potential than the original methane from the landfill," says Bakos.
The amount of power created by the mirror arrays shows why the James
Bond villains found solar power such a tempting weapon source. SHEC's
existing demonstration project creates a beam 5,000 times the intensity
of the sun.
The Regina project won't be dependent on the sun and is being designed
to run 24 hours a day. During non-daylight and cloudy hours, the
facility will convert a portion of the landfill methane into heat.
As with any fuel production system, the SHEC project is not without its
flaws. In addition to the hydrogen molecules, the chemical reaction
also releases more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
"It's our view and the view of environmental scientists that carbon
dioxide produced from methane is environmentally neutral since an
equivalent amount of carbon dioxide gas in this case came from the
atmosphere to grow the biomass that ended up in the landfill," Bakos
says.
SHEC also has the ability to sequester the carbon dioxide produced which
would further offset CO2 entering the atmosphere from the
use of fossil fuels.
By Bakos's calculations, the SHEC project will offer a very attractive
ratio of fuel produced compared to emissions. It will have the capacity
of producing 1.2 million kilograms of renewable hydrogen per year and
will prevent 81,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide and other emissions from
entering the atmosphere every year.
If used in an electricity-generating fuel cell, the plant's potential
output would be enough to generate over 3 megawatts, enough to provide
power to roughly 3,000 homes.
The Road Ahead
Site preparation for SHEC Station #1 is nearly complete at Regina's
Fleet Street Landfill. While there are still a few technical and
business challenges ahead, Bakos expects to have hydrogen production
under way by mid to late 2007.
While the project's technical prospects seem bright, its economic ones
are still up in the air. Fehr and Bakos are quick to point out that
there is still a tough row to hoe to create new markets for hydrogen
as a fuel.
"The emphasis in alternative energy development has been in liquid
biofuels, so the consumer and commercial options for hydrogen aren't
as widespread. There isn't a huge market for hydrogen as a fuel, so at
the outset we'll be producing hydrogen for industrial uses," Bakos
says.
"But we're aiming to change that. If we can prove that hydrogen can be
produced cleanly and cheaply, and if governments step up and start
providing more incentives for the technology, then hydrogen could truly
become the fuel of the future."
