Global Asia Energy Fuelling the Dream of Clean Cars

7/30/2019 Global Asia Energy Fuelling the Dream of Clean Cars

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Cella Energy may have the solution for carmakers trying to winsupport for hydrogen power, writes Amy Wilson .

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In less than five years, your new car could be powered by a high-pressure tank ofhydrogen rather than petrol.

This is what the big carmakers are driving at as they seek to produce vehicles with

low or no carbon emissions, but they face a number of obstacles in making it areality.

The first is public acceptance; visions of the blazing Hindenburg airship inevitablyspring to mind when hydrogen is mentioned not really what people want from afamily car. Beyond that are the practicalities, how do you fill your car up safely

with a volatile gas? How do petrol stations become high-pressure hydrogenstations?

Cella Energy, an Oxford-based energy technology company spun out of thegovernment-backed Science and Technology Facilities Council and UniversityCollege London in 2010, aims to answer these questions by supplying hydrogen for

fuel in the form of small plastic-looking pellets. They release hydrogen whenheated above 100C (212F), which is taken up by a fuel cell to power the car.

To a man, car manufacturers think hydrogen is the future for vehicles, saidProfessor Stephen Bennington, Cellas co-founder and chief scientific officer.Theyre aiming to roll out the first affordable vehicles from 2015 using high-

pressure gas tanks in the back of your car.


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However, the infrastructure costs of putting in gas compressors, which cost between$1m (650,000) and $2m each, mean the average mom-and-pop filling station wouldhave to find $10m. So were working on small pellets which act like a fluid, and canbe pumped into your car in a familiar way using pumps that are not dissimilar tothose used now.

Cella is working towards having its hydrogen fuel pellets ready for use between 2015and 2017, as an alternative to high-pressure tanks. The ideal testing ground wouldbe a fleet of vehicles that all get refuelled in the same place, such as Royal Mailvans, said Prof Bennington, 48.

If it succeeds, and the company says it is in talks with all the major carmakers, thescale of the opportunity is clearly immense. But until that happens, Cella has themore prosaic problem of making enough money to keep its research going.

What we have is a convenient way of storing hydrogen, said Prof Bennington. You

can use it in lots of places but none of those markets exist yet. The challenge is tomake a business around the idea. The car manufacturers development cycle isseven years. As a small, venture-capital funded company, we dont have sevenyears. We have to find nearer-term revenue.


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Cella is trying to raise between $10m and $15m, which it estimates will fund itsresearch and product development for the next three years. Were two years awayfrom serious revenue, said Prof Bennington. Its valley-of-death time.

Cellas technology has already won the approval of Space Florida, a state-fundedbody that awarded the company 2m in 2011 under an agreement in which it carries

out research at NASAs Kennedy Space Centre in Florida as well as in Oxford.

It also raised 300,000 in 2010 from Thomas Swan, a County Durham-basedchemicals maker. The companys early fundraising efforts were helped by winningShells Springboard award for low-carbon business ideas. It gave us publicity wecould never have afforded, and credibility, said Prof Bennington.

In March, Cella raised a further $4m from a consortium of high net-worth investorsfrom the north of England, including its chairman Bryan Sanderson, a former chiefexecutive of BPs chemicals business.

These fundraising efforts have given Cella the money to set up two labs, one in

Florida where it has five employees, and one near Oxford where it has 15 staff. Thecompany also has 15 clean-energy PhD students, mainly from UCL and Oxford, andaims to have 50 staff in three years time.

To start producing revenue, Cella is developing partnerships in a number ofindustries, starting with long-life batteries. The first market it has identified isunmanned aerial vehicles (the smaller ones used for reconnaissance rather than thearmed version)


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By putting a fuel cell using its hydrogen pellets into a UAV, it will have three times theamount of energy as with a standard lithium battery, according to Cella. Theyre movinginto the civilian market as an eye in the sky, for the police and companies who want tosurvey their pipelines and rigs, said Prof Bennington. Cella aims to start making revenuefrom the replacement batteries within two years.

The second project, which could start producing revenue in three years, is co-combustionsystems to be used in the diesel engines of heavy-goods vehicles. Cella is working on acartridge of its hydrogen pellets which would feed into a diesel engine, making it moreeffective and reducing carbon emissions by 10pc. The aim is that the cartridge system couldbe fitted onto older vehicles.

EU targets are on an escalator and people are fitting catalysts to clean up exhausts, saidProf Bennington. Its neater and potentially cheaper to fix it within the engine itself. Cellais also working on radiation shielding technology with NASA, which could extend the life ofelectrical equipment on satellites from seven to 10 years.

But Prof Bennington does not see this work as a major revenue stream: Its exciting to beinvolved in space but so far we havent found anyone to say they will buy it from us now orin 10 years time.

For the professor, a physicist by trade, the precarious nature and commercial realities ofrunning a start-up have not been the rude awakening some might imagine. Academics arenow seriously pushed to think about the potential use of any research, he said.

In every grant application you write, you have to think, who is going to buy this? Twentyyears ago you would have been sneered at for doing something 'applied but now you get

huge recognition for it. So the selling process has been surprisingly familiar.

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Global Asia Energy Fuelling the Dream of Clean Cars