Kevin Kendall

Title : Green hydrogen UK by 2030: Progress and prospects

Abstract:

Green hydrogen is starting an energy revolution in Britain this year [1]. 
It has been with us for six centuries, and the phrase ‘Hydrogen Economy’ was coined in 1970 but without much penetration [2] because it was not green then.
Real action to go green has been sluggish because hydrogen has previously been isolated in petrochemical plants and has almost all hydrogen production has been fossil hydrogen, predominantly made from coal, petroleum and natural gas. That is changing rapidly by 2030 as the British Government has begun to inject significant funding into the green material, though much less than USA, Germany, Japan and China.
The author installed the first UK green hydrogen station in Birmingham University during 2007-8, refuelling 5 fuel cell battery cabs for the 50 PhD chemical engineering students that arrived in 2009.  Only 10kg/day were required, contrasting with the first UK large ITM Power station delivering almost 1te/day green hydrogen opened in July 2020.  The other 11 hydrogen stations in Britain at present may be slightly green but are still using significant fossil fuel to produce the product. These stations will lower emissions compared to dirty diesel but will not stop climate change.
That is the first question asked in this presentation ‘What do you mean, Green?’. Then the developments in Birmingham and around the world are summarised, with the key innovations defined. As a sideshow, the remarks of Elon Musk about this technology ‘Fool Cell; Mind bogglingly stupid’ are humorously demolished.  He is amazingly rich, but completely wrong. The future may take another century, yet we are on the exponential way, if we can persuade our politicians that hydrogen needs both batteries and the grid but beats both in the end.
 

Biography:

Kevin’s main interest over the last 40 years has been clean energy, especially hydrogen and fuel cells. He started his company Adelan Ltd on this track in 1996 with his daughter Dr Michaela Kendall, little recognising that about 100 fuel cell companies worldwide have been burning investor money continuously since then, never making a profit. But, as I said in the 1990s, this market will boom soon.

He obtained his 1970 PhD in the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, studying true contact of solids, not much related to the hydrogen fame of Henry Cavendish who called it factitious (ie man-made) air in his remarkable 1766 papers.

Kevin’s interest in Green Hydrogen blossomed in 2008 when he installed the first UK green-hydrogen refuelling station for vehicles at Birmingham University, Chemical Engineering.  Converting fossil fuels into hydrogen fuel seemed such a ridiculous idea at the time, and still is, though the petrochemical giants and our Government continue talking about doing it as they have done for the past centuries.

The key idea was to operate a fleet of bio-hydrogen fuel cell vehicles made by Microcab. 50 PhD students were recruited to research the hydrogen fuel cell vehicle performance. Despite this early advance, there are only 12 stations in the UK at present, most of them not working when you arrive to fill-up. This must move to 100 working stations around Birmingham very quickly, then to 1000 by 2030. And only 300 hydrogen vehicles in UK at present need to increase to 1 million by 2030.