Coal and hydrogen

Hydrogen has been identified as a promising energy carrier for our climate sensitive world because when used for combustion or in fuel cells, it can generate electricity or power cars without producing any greenhouse emissions.

Its potential prompted the International Energy Agency to establish the Hydrogen Implementing Agreement in 1977 – an organisation that now coordinates the research of 21 countries in a bid to develop the technologies needed to switch to a hydrogen economy. New Zealand joined the group in 2005 and is represented by Solid Energy gasification engineer, Dr Steven Pearce, who is now the Vice Chair of the Hydrogen Implementing Agreement.

Why hydrogen?

• When hydrogen is used to generate energy, there are no greenhouse emissions.
• Hydrogen is one of the world’s most common elements, which means it could provide an almost inexhaustible carrier of energy.
• It is versatile and can be used in a variety of ways to generate electricity or power cars.
• When used to generate energy, hydrogen turns into nothing more than pure water.

Can hydrogen work?

Hydrogen looms as a clean and potentially plentiful high quality energy carrier, but there remain some obstacles to the technology’s wide scale commercial adoption. Among them are challenges associated with purifying the quantities of hydrogen needed to feed these energy systems.

Several technologies are being investigated for producing hydrogen, such as electrolysis to make it from water and techniques for refining it from fermented algae. Another way the world could produce large quantities of hydrogen is by purifying it from gasified coal.

When coal is gasified, the resultant syngas can be run through a ‘shift converter’, which turns it into a mix of CO₂ and hydrogen. The CO₂ can then be extracted from the hydrogen in much the same way as modern day refineries remove CO₂ from natural gas.

What is Solid Energy doing?

Solid Energy is investigating coal gasification – above ground and below ground – to produce syngas that could then be refined into hydrogen. By building that technical capability in New Zealand, we are equipping the country to produce an affordable and consistent supply of hydrogen, should hydrogen energy systems become viable. 

Some of our New Energy research projects include:

• Coal seam gas
• Coal gasification
  • Lignite Conversion
  • Underground coal gasification
• Carbon Management
  • Carbon capture and storage
  • Biosequestration
• Hydrogen