Researchers and industry optimistic about hydrogen from aluminum

Engineers at Indiana-based Purdue University are celebrating a new aluminum alloy that they think could help bring the hydrogen highway one step closer to reality.

The work was led by electrical and computer engineering professor Jerry Woodall, who first announced his new method of generating hydrogen on demand from water using aluminum and gallium catalysts last year (see the Cleantech Group's Gallium and aluminum tigers in your tank?)

Since then, the Woodall lab has increased the amount of aluminum in the alloy, finally producing a material made of 95 percent aluminum and 5 percent gallium, indium and tin combined, with only a very small amount of the expensive gallium.

And that's got the researchers, and some industry observers, excited.

Here’s how the reaction works: the aluminum in the alloy reacts with water at room temperature to give off hydrogen, leaving behind aluminum oxide or alumina. The material can then be recharged several dozen times back into aluminum using a process that Woodall described as more “competitive with other energy technologies,” with a cost of just 10 cents per kilowatt-hour.

Originally the process was thought to require a small puddle of gallium alloy as a catalyst; Woodall’s lab found out last year this wasn’t the case.

"That was a fantastic discovery," Woodall said. "What used to be a curiosity is now a real alternative energy technology."

The research is to be presented for the first time at the Feb. 26 session of the Materials Innovations in an Emerging Hydrogen Economy conference in Cocoa Beach, Florida.

Visitors to this weekend’s REMC national convention in Anaheim, California, however, will get to see a demonstration of the 95/5 alloy in action.

Water will be carefully added to small plugs of the material arranged in serial form to produce enough hydrogen to power a one-kilowatt generator purchased from Wal-Mart for 4-5 hours.

“This is like the Holy Grail,” Kurt Koehler, co-founder and CEO of the Indiana-based company AlGalCo told the Cleantech Group.

“95/5 is huge. With the 95 alloy, we hit all the U.S. Department of Energy energy density standards. That was always Jerry [Woodall]’s goal.”

AlGalCo has exclusive rights to commercialize the process developed by Woodall.

Koehler said a model of the 95/5 alloy will be on sale within three or four months. “We can control the old reaction,” he said, referring to the previous 50/50 alloy developed by Woodall. “We want to make sure we can control the new one as well.”

He said the alloy would be encased in something like a battery pack, though there are plans to scale up. When the charge runs out, the battery pack could be removed and sent to a central facility for recharging using the Hall-Heroult process, the major industrial process for the production of aluminum.

Koehler said AlGalCo is even testing the possibility of using wind power to recharge the battery packs.

Dr. James Spearot, director of the chemical and environmental sciences laboratory at General Motors’ Research and Development Center, told the Cleantech Group Woodall’s technique has “interesting safety benefits” because the aluminum alloys alleviate concerns about storing and transporting hydrogen.

Spearot voiced concerns about recycling the reaction products generated, however.

“Although we think this technology has significant potential for future applications, we also believe strongly that a plan needs to be developed for the waste products,” he said.

“We need to do a full lifecycle analysis. It may be positive, but we haven’t seen that yet.”

Tom Churchwell, managing partner of the seed-stage VC fund ARCH Development Partners, L.L.C., was more enthusiastic about the new Woodall lab development. “This could be big,” he said.

“Logically, there’s no reason that I can think of why a combination of aluminum and water would create any kind of toxic storage issue unless there’s a dangerous chemical byproduct.”