Cleaning up natural gas

Natural gas is set to get a cut in emissions with a new project from Fredericton, New Brunswick's Atlantic Hydrogen.

The Canadian company has announced plans for a large-scale demonstration of its CarbonSaver technology, which it said creates a lower emissions natural gas fuel.

Atlantic Hydrogen said the three year, Cdn$10 million demonstration project would focus on validating the technology at commercial pressures and flow rates, placing a value on the extracted carbon and developing a commercialization strategy.

The company's system, which can be attached to a natural gas fuel line, creates hydrogen enriched natural gas as it extracts solid carbon.

"We take natural gas as a feedstock into a reactor that we bombard with an electrical charge," David Wagner, president and CEO of Atlantic Hydrogen, told the Cleantech Group.

"And what that does, without oxygen present, is it excites the molecules, the carbon and the hydrogen molecules, and methane, and it actually separates. So it disassociates the carbon from the hydrogen."

Wagner said the hydrogen changes the burn characteristics of the fuel, and that when the hydrogen enriched natural gas, or HENG, is burned in an engine that's designed for natural gas, it reduces the heat in the cylinder head.

That helps to cut nitrogen oxide emissions, with Wagern saying the HENG offers a reduction of between 50 percent and 90 percent of nitrogen oxide emissions compared to regular natural gas.

The company, which has already pulled in a total of Cdn$7.35 million in financing, will be getting some funding for this latest project from Calgary, Alberta's EnCana (NYSE: ECA) and from the province of New Brunswick.

EnCana, through its Environmental Innovation Fund, is contributing Cdn$3 million to the project, with New Brunswick, through the Climate Action Fund and Canada's ecoTrust for Clear Air and Climate Change program, contributing Cdn$2 million.

EnCana, an oil and gas producer, is no stranger to renewable energy projects in the Maritimes. The company has already put up a Cdn$3 million zero-interest loan for a tidal power test site in the nearby Bay of Fundy (see Bay of Fundy to get three test turbines).

Wagner said his company has not yet identified a location for the pilot project, but EnCana could end up hosting the large-scale system.

"One of the options would be to consider putting this in a facility like a gas plant or a power plant that would use natural gas as a feedstock.

"It could be in Alberta, it could be somewhere else in New Brunswick," he said. "And we won't make that decision for another year."

Wagner said the company can currently process about 100 cubic meters of natural gas per hour, and is aiming to increase that by ten times as a minimum with the scale-up.

Atlantic Hydrogen closed its latest round of funding last September, with a Cdn$5.4 million investment led by Kyoto Capital Partners and the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation.

The company also received some early help from Sustainable Development Technology Canada, a government-backed, not-for-profit foundation, which put $2 million into the company in 2005.

Founded in 2000, Atlantic Hydrogen said its CarbonSaver system is designed to be installed anywhere in the natural gas system.

"It depends on where you want to produce hydrogen," said Wagner. "It is distributed generation of hydrogen, not an industrial plant."

"Essentially, ours works anywhere you can connect the natural gas."

Wagner said the goal is to get the system to about two times the size of a refrigerator.

"Right now it's a little bigger than that, only because we've designed it to really be a working prototype."

As for the solid carbon byproduct of the system, known as carbon black, that won't be going to waste.

"There's actually quite a large market for carbon black," he said. "It depends on the quality of the carbon you produce."

He said most of the carbon black that is produced worldwide is used in tire manufacturing, with the three Michelin plants in neighboring Nova Scotia an example of large consumers of the byproduct, which Wagner said looks like photocopier powder.

But he said that's the low end of the value chain of carbon black.

"Our characterization of our carbon indicates that there is a much higher value in the carbon that we produce, and it could be used in things like inks, dyes, composites for plastics as a strengthening agent, that type of thing."