CoorsTek hydrogen breakthrough fuels clean energy hopes for Colorado

A breakthrough in energy technology research is leading a Colorado company into the business of converting natural gas into hydrogen fuel, aiming to slash the carbon emissions of long-haul shipping and industrial processes.

Golden-based CoorsTek, long known for supplying industries with engineered ceramic products, has teamed with researchers in Oslo, Norway and Spain on creating ceramic membranes that, with an electrical charge, separate pure carbon dioxide and hydrogen from streams of methane passed through them.

"Separating hydrogen in an efficient way and being able to readily use it, either in combustion or through electrochemical processes like fuel cells, has been something everyone has been trying to do," said Timothy Coors, a co-CEO of CoorsTek and chairman of its subsidiary involved in the research. "This is a big step."

Methane is the key ingredient in natural gas. CoorsTek envisions its membranes being at the heart of hydrogen-producing fuel cells used at shipping hubs to create fuel for long-haul trucks running on hydrogen and at industrial sites, such as plastics manufacturers, that currently burn natural gas but seek to cut greenhouse gas emissions by switching to hydrogen.

The ceramic membranes promise to make converting methane into hydrogen far more energy efficient than existing methods, and the ceramic membrane reactors producing hydrogen would be compact enough to fit where natural gas is already being used, the company says.

CoorsTek's membrane sciences team in Norway, part of a 6,000-employee business with locations around the world, demonstrated the production of small amounts of hydrogen using the ceramic membranes housed in small, battery-like reactors.

The company is working on the technology with funding and expertise from energy giants including Saudi Aramco, Equinor, ExxonMobil and Shell and plans to build a pilot facility in Saudi Arabia that can yield 250 kilograms of hydrogen a day — enough to fuel a fleet of trucks.

At that scale, the company could begin to figure out commercializing the technology and figuring the role CoorsTek can play making natural gas-to-hydrogen conversion a steady business, Coors said.

"Our goal is, within the next eight years, to be ready with something," he said.

CoorsTek is mainly known for making specialized ceramics for semiconductor manufacturing, medical devices and defense applications. Its hydrogen conversion research isn't new — it's led R&D for ceramic membrane reactors for 13 years with its team based in Oslo.

The reactors are made with methane-converting cells, each one about the size of a AA battery, stacked together in groups of six into larger cells about two feet long.

With an electrical charge, methane passing through them splits into its component elements of carbon dioxide and hydrogen, and they're produced at pressure, making it easy to capture for nearby use or to be further pressurized for a pipeline, Coors says.

The stream of relatively pure carbon dioxide could be sold for use in commercial processes, such as beverage manufacturing, or to greenhouses, instead of being released into the atmosphere through the combustion of the natural gas, Coors said.

The benefit of efficiently producing hydrogen from methane is that it can take advantage of the extensive existing networks of pipelines and infrastructure for natural gas, Coors said.

Hydrogen has long been eyed as a clean alternative to burning fossil fuels. Separating the abundant element out of water or natural gas, where hydrogen is most easily found, has been so cumbersome and energy-intensive that economically viable use of hydrogen has been elusive.

CoorsTek sees its membranes being a breakthrough in making hydrogen fuel a realistic replacement where electrical batteries aren't a good fit and in the many places where switching existing natural gas infrastructure to handle hydrogen would be relatively straightforward, Coors said.

CoorsTek has made engineered ceramic seals and other components used in hydraulic fracturing and in other parts of oil and gas production, making the company familiar with the world of energy.

It's too early to guarantee the hydrogen research will yield a significant new line of business for CoorsTek, but there's good potential, Coors said.

"I think we will play a role in the energy space," he said. "We’re naturally suited to making these kinds of energy cells and other components."