Coors Beer Clan’s New Brew: Cheap Hydrogen For Cleaner Trucks And Factories

Coors Beer Clan’s New Brew: Cheap Hydrogen For Cleaner Trucks And Factories

Irene Yuste, a chemical engineer at CoorsTek Membrane Sciences in Oslo, Norway, displays the company's hydrogen-generating proton ceramic membrane. Hydrogen, the universe's most abundant element, has been an elusive clean fuel option for decades, bedeviled by the difficulties of generating the energy-packed element in an efficient, low-cost method and without carbon emissions. CoorsTek, a low-key giant in the world of engineered ceramics, says it has a highly efficient new method to make hydrogen fuel that works with existing energy infrastructure. The Golden, Colorado-based company, led by the great-grandchildren of brewery founder Adolph Coors, thinks its approach is an energy-efficient alternative to the conventional way hydrogen is made for refineries and chemical and food-processing plants – steam reforming of natural gas (CH4), co-CEO Timothy Coors tells Forbes. The technology, which uses a nickel-based glass-ceramic proton membrane to generate the fuel, is also more efficient than electrolysis, a competing approach to making "green" hydrogen by splitting water (H2O) with electricity from renewable energy sources, Coors says. Hydrogen generated from steam reformation and electrolysis, under the best of circumstances, have energy efficiency in the mid-70% range, but "we've got a cell that's operating at in the upper 80% to low 90% overall efficiency,