PowerTap Hydrogen Capital Corp has announced a breakthrough, via subsidiary Advanced Electrolyzer Systems (AES), showing the latter's technology can store excess renewable electricity as hydrogen in natural gas pipelines representing a new potential source of clean energy.
Our solution, which applies worldwide, focuses on the "low hanging fruit" as AES technology can store this valuable excess electricity as hydrogen, within existing natural gas pipelines," said Pinakin Patel, who, with his team, developed the company AES.
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"Recovering this hydrogen for reuse is a potentially multi-billion dollar market," he added.
Bench testing over 5,000 hours (now being scaled up) has so far shown the efficient extraction of hydrogen stored in the pipeline is commercially viable with the technology, said PowerTap.
Currently, there is no cost-effective solution to recover this hydrogen for commercial use, it highlighted.
In many part of the world, grid instability is caused by excess solar and wind power.
"The current solution is 'curtailment' of production. This is a very inefficient and expensive means of managing grid stability. The State of California alone has seen over US$100 million in lost revenue due to the need to manage excess power within its electricity grid," said the company.
It also noted that every billion cubic feet of natural gas containing 10% hydrogen translates into 100 million cubic feet of hydrogen.
"This represents enough hydrogen to drive a local economy of electric cars, buses, trucks, and trains. Our technology provides a modular, scalable, low-cost solution to extract this hydrogen safely and efficiently from existing natural gas infrastructure."
PowerTap Hydrogen Capital Corp, through its wholly-owned subsidiary, PowerTap Hydrogen Fueling Corp is focused on installing hydrogen production and dispensing fueling infrastructure in the USA.
Contact the writer at giles@proactiveinvestors.com