KEY POINTS:
More than $500,000 of taxpayers' money will be spent in the next year on a project mapping out how the heavily hyped "hydrogen economy" can become a reality here.
CRL Energy's research manager, Tony Clemens, said his company would spend $533,334 to show how the nation could switch to hydrogen-based energy and hoped to have a discussion paper by the end of the year.
The paper would not only canvass the potential to use hydrogen to run vehicles and generate electricity, but how "surplus" electricity - from sources such as windpower, wavepower or ocean currents - could be used to split hydrogen out of water and store it until needed.
The paper would also look at other ways to produce hydrogen, ranging from the concept of extracting it from big coal deposits - and re-burying the unwanted carbon - to producing it in methane from digester systems making use of manure and other effluent from dairy farms.
CRL Energy is half-owned by the coal industry and half by a state science company, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research.
State-owned miner Solid Energy has previously said New Zealand could be given energy security if coal could be used to economically produce hydrogen gas, with the carbon being dumped back underground.
Chemical fuelcells can use hydrogen and oxygen via a catalyst to generate electricity, with heat and water the only "waste".
A pilot hydrogen plant operated by CRL Energy was given $6 million of taxpayer funding in June 2002, shared with Industrial Research Ltd (IRL), which has expertise in gas clean-up and fuelcells.
The plant began turning coal into hydrogen in 2004 at Gracefield, Lower Hutt, to generate hydrogen gas for use in an alkaline fuelcell.
IRL has run a 5kW fuelcell on hydrogen.
Separately, Solid Energy has been developing a hydrogen "roadmap" for the coal industry and technologies for managing carbon-dioxide emissions.
From 2008, companies are expected to have to account for their carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere and Kyoto Protocol constraints on greenhouse gases bite.
Solid Energy says this country's 10 billion tonnes of economic coal reserves could last 1000 years at present annual production levels if environmental constraints can be met.
Solid Energy wants to prove the technology by producing enough hydrogen to power a 50kW plant that could supply 10 to 20 houses or a small commercial operation.
It has said that if a series of technologies - hydrogen extraction from coal, re-injection of carbon to underground sinks and fuel cells running on hydrogen - can all be made to work, consumers may be able to generate their own electricity.
$1m for bio-energy options
One million dollars of taxpayers' money will be spent over the next 16 months on the assessment of the risks and opportunities in developing different "bio-energy" options.
Scion, part of the former Forest Research Institute at Rotorua, will report on the potential for production of heat, power and liquid transport fuels from crops and other plant material.
Biofuels provide renewable energy from "biomass", recently living organisms or their metabolic byproducts, such as cow manure.
It will also develop a map of biomass resources for energy.
The company will investigate ways in which useful energy "products" can be created from not only wastes such as the offcuts from pine plantations, but also short rotation crops, forage crops, grasses, dairy farm wastes, algae on sewage ponds, and other biomass.
It may also look at other waste-streams, such as the methane produced by plants and other organic material in landfills.
Mr Gifford said the study will link to other research programmes.
Separately, Scion and another state science company, AgResearch, are working with San Diego-based Diversa Corporation, which has developed enzymes for breaking down the cellulose in trees into sugars that can be fermented and refined into ethanol.
The three believe forestry could provide ethanol for all three billion litres of petrol the nation uses each year, but there is also potential for special crops of fast-growing grasses to be used.
A private company, Biojoule - an offshoot of Genesis Research - plans a trial plant producing ethanol from shrubby willows near Taupo.
In Marlborough, Aquaflow Bionomic Corporation has started turning the scum from sewage ponds into biodiesel. It has predicted an eventual production of one million litres of biodiesel a year from the algae.
- NZPA
