Kevin Kendall

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.