New Hydrogen Production Method Promises 80-90% Efficiencies

­We’ve…been down this road before. Not this specific iteration, but getting excited over hydrogen energy. Though CoorsTek – yes, that Coors – has a new approach that could reignite passions.

Course, the reason why hydrogen isn’t as big a mainstay as solar or wind is obvious – hydrogen might be the most abundant element in the universe, but it doesn’t occur naturally on Earth, so we have to painstakingly create it.

And we do that through electrolysis, or by splitting H2O into hydrogen and water, which even under the best of circumstances, is only about 70% efficient. More likely, it’s in the 30-40% range.

As Volkswagen’s Rudolf Kreb noted back in 2013, when you initially convert it into hydrogen, "you lose about 40 percent of the initial energy," he said. “Then, you have to compress the hydrogen to 700 bar and store it in the vehicle, which costs more energy. And then you have to convert the hydrogen back to electricity in a fuel cell with another efficiency loss."

But the great-grandchildren of brewery founder Adolph Coors are working on a new method of hydrogen production which uses a nickel-based glass-ceramic proton membrane in place of electrolysis to produce hydrogen with supposed efficiencies in the 80-90% range.

In a piece for Science.org, CoorsTek notes how “Proton ceramic reactors offer efficient extraction of hydrogen from ammonia, methane, and biogas…a 36-cell well-balanced reactor stack enabled by a new interconnect…achieves complete conversion of methane with more than 99% recovery to pressurized hydrogen.”

CoorsTek is a bit more bearish in its overall assessment of their new hydrogen method, telling Forbes it expects efficiencies of 80-90%, but their process apparently works with existing energy infrastructure, and “you’re actually using less natural gas in creating a very pure stream of hydrogen that is already pressurized coming out of our system.”

CoorsTek hopes to commercialize their new technology in the next few years.