In hydrogen he trusts

Courier Mail
Tuesday 23/12/2008 Page: 28

"I LIKE coal it's a fascinating material," says Evan Gray. "I just don't like burning it." The affable Associate Professor has occupied the same box-like claustrophobic office at Griffith University for the past 20 years or more. For more than three decades, he has been working with hydrogen, the most universal of all the elements in the universe, to learn how to harness its potential.

But after years of scratching around for funding to continue his work, it appears his epoch may be fast approaching. And where environmentalists see Queensland's abundant coal resources as a liability, Gray and others in his field are seeing it as an asset.

The world's populous growing ever larger by the day needs power and coal provides about a quarter of our energy. But the world is searching for ways to produce energy that doesn't pump out gases that are changing the planet's climate. In hydrogen, Gray firmly believes he has the answer.

"Hydrogen is so universal you get it from water and it turns to water. It's a beautiful solution," he says. "We are working not towards the ultimate solution, but the most sustainable solution for the world." In the US last week, President-elect Barack Obama named his environmental and energy team, giving it a mandate to wean the super-power of its addiction to oil and coal.

At the same time the Rudd Government launched a White Paper for its carbon pollution reduction scheme Australia's first card drawn from the climate change mitigation deck. With the trading scheme the Government is pinning its hopes on an economic ideology which, when a price is put on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, forces markets to create less of it.

"There's enough coal at the moment for at least 300 years," says Gray, "Australia has about 9% of the known reserves of coal. What I see when I look at coal... well, it's several things... but I see the reality that we can get hydrogen from it. And if you burn hydrogen carefully, you get nothing but water. "I do believe hydrogen is the logical end point in fuels that started with wood and went to, peat, then oil, coal and natural gas. I believe that's where we can go. The missing key is a government that says we can go there.

"Kennedy said we would go to the moon by the end of the '60s and because he said that America went there in July 1969 when I was a sixth-form school student sitting watching it on my TV." Last week, the Australian Research Council announced it had given Griffith University $350,000 to establish a facility to "underpin the nation's research into hydrogen energy technology" with Gray leading the project. Those funds will be added to more than $400,000 from Griffith together with cash from the universities of Monash, UQ, Curtin and QUT.

Gray is hoping that next year a similar amount will come forward to enhance the facility's goal of driving Australia towards a "hydrogen economy". "From a technological point of view there are barriers," explains Gray. "The technology of using hydrogen to power vehicles is still fairly new, but it's reasonably well established. fuel-cell buses have already nun reliably in pilot projects. "Storage is what is judged to be the technical barrier storing it so that it's neither too big or too heavy.

"At the moment these techniques are very expensive, but the most important barrier of all is political will. A step in this direction is the carbon trading scheme where you put a price on carbon and allow the free market to trade in credits. But it has to be strong enough." The announcement of Gray's new National Hydrogen Materials Reference Facility puts southeast Queensland at the heart of Australia's research into hydrogen.

The region is already home to the National Hydrogen Materials Alliance, a collaboration of 12 universities, the CSIRO and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation. Dr Andrew Dicks, at The University of Queensland, heads the alliance and he has similar hopes for the future of coal.

"Ultimately it would be best if we could make hydrogen from renewable energy use solar energy to basically split water," says Dicks. "But before we advance to that, there are other methods and one is to use coal gasification." Dicks explains that coal gasification still generates the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide but in a way that is much easier to capture.

He says such a demonstration plant could be 10 years away, which is about the same time-frame that experts have put on so-called "clean coal" technology. This research, focused primarily on ways to capture and then store carbon dioxide underground, has attracted more than $100 million in funding from the Queensland Government alone.

"In Australia, we rely on coal for most of our power more than 80% and clearly it's been great for the economy," says Dicks. 'But if you are going to (capture and store) CO2, then the hydrogen route is the better way." Dicks has spent a similar number of years in hydrogen research as his counterpart Gray.

"When you work with hydrogen, you're either accused of being a dreamer and maybe sometimes I am or people say that it's that far away that we shouldn't worry about it too much. But neither of these views are right," says Dicks. Dicks argues that instead, Australia needs to take some eggs out of its "clean coal" basket and spread them around in its search for the right energy mix. "It's a bloody hard problem," adds Gray. "But because it's difficult, that doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile."