Hydrogen device could replace the need for fossil fuels

Story provided by the Connecticut Post

ANDREW BROPHY abrophy@ctpost.com

FAIRFIELD — Tim Dolan believes he's found the key to solving the world's energy-consumption woes and the environmental damage caused by burning fossil fuels.
But Dolan's plan to replace fossil fuels with hydrogen — the H in H2O — isn't just a long series of scientific symbols and calculations that work only on paper.

Dolan has built a machine that creates and stores hydrogen. The device, powered by sunlight, sends electricity through water to separate hydrogen from oxygen and then pumps the hydrogen as a gas into a container, where it is stored as a renewable energy source.

"Once you have this stored hydrogen, you can take it out of here and run it into any device that uses fossil fuels," said Dolan, a 46-year-old Trumbull resident. "The only thing hydrogen won't do is it won't make plastics. That's what we need fossil fuels for."

Dolan said he converted a small engine to run on hydrogen, and the engine works fine off his machine and emits only water vapor.

"What I like about hydrogen is it's clean — there's no emissions in making it and there's no emissions in using it. You start with water and you end with water," he said.

Dolan, married and the father of three children, is president of Enabling Technologies, a Trumbull company that develops renewable energy systems. He was formerly a partner and director of research and development at Bridgestone Technologies in Bridgeport.

Bob Wall, New England regional director of Smart Power, a Hartford-based marketing company that promotes clean energy, said Dolan's machine works. "It's working. I can attest to that," Wall said. "The beauty of it is it's able to store energy."

"The next step, and this is the big step is how close are we to replicating this on a grand scale?" Wall said. "He is demonstrating that it can be done, and it could be a vital growth industry for Connecticut."

Wall, a Fairfield resident and member of the town's Clean Energy Task Force, said hydrogen could be the solution to fossil fuel shortages.

Dolan's machine, built with the help of several companies in Fairfield County, is different from a fuel cell, which uses hydrogen to create electricity. His machine uses electricity to create hydrogen.

"What they did is put the cart before the horse. They didn't come up with a good supply of hydrogen," Dolan said of fuel-cell enthusiasts. "Fuel cells are back where the first computers were."

Dolan said his machine is unique because it directly couples to a renewable power supply and can make hydrogen at high pressure without extra parts.

He said his machine, which also can operate on wind power, is not only cleaner than fossil fuels, but also more efficient compared to the energy required to use fossil fuels.

But a problem with Dolan's prototype, from a practical standpoint, is the space needed to store hydrogen.

A pound of hydrogen may have three times the energy content of fossil fuels, but it takes 400 cubic feet to store the hydrogen equivalent of a gallon of gasoline, Dolan said.

But Dolan said his machine's storage container, 4 feet by 8 feet and capable of storing 1,000 cubic feet of hydrogen, could be larger.

He said his machine also could store hydrogen at high pressure. "If you store it under pressure, it gets a lot smaller," Dolan said.

The container can store nonpressurized hydrogen at an equivalent of 95 kilowatt hours of electricity, or 300,000 BTUs, Dolan said.

The machine now built is a prototype, and Dolan said he could have made the storage container big enough to store 10,000 or 20,000 cubic feet of hydrogen.

Dolan's prototype can't make hydrogen as fast as people would use it to heat and light their homes and run appliances.

But the point of the hydrogen container is to allow the machine to build up a big reserve of hydrogen — like the oil reserves now available for fossil fuels.

It takes two days for Dolan's machine to make the hydrogen equivalent of a gallon of gas, he said. "If I had a bigger system, I'd be very comfortable running my house on it because it would work," he said.

Dolan declined to say how much it cost to build his hydrogen-making machine. But he said it would cost a lot to buy, mostly because of its photovoltaic panel, which produces the electricity sent through water.

But Dolan said the operating cost of his machine is low — the equivalent of 1 cents for a gallon of gas. Dolan also thinks the cost of his machine would drop when it is mass-produced.

"It was designed to be easily replicated and mass-produced because it is that important," he said.

Lastly, Dolan disputes concerns that hydrogen is too dangerous for widespread use.

He said hydrogen, unlike gasoline, is nontoxic and can be difficult to combust when unenclosed.

"Just like with any energy source, you have to take your precautions with it," he said. "Nobody died from hydrogen burns on the Hindenburg. Most died from jumping out. The only reason the fire lasted was because of diesel on board."

Dolan began to build the hydrogen-maker in August 2003 and finished in May 2005. He stores the prototype on town-owned property and said he has replaced only a sensor and a water filter in the past year.

Dolan said he monitors the prototype remotely. "I can get automatic e-mails telling me of the status of the system at any time," he said.

The world has to abandon fossil fuels as an energy source, Dolan said, because the oil supply will dry up in three decades and carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels are damaging the environment.

The technology behind Dolan's machine has been around 100 years, but nobody used it because fossil fuels were cheap and abundant. People also didn't know fossil fuels damaged the environment, he said.

Dolan, though, believes his prototype is the future of energy. "Everything else is a consumer of energy. This thing will make it and store it," he said.