European Company of Hydrogen Technologies (CETH) develops and manufactures innovative systems and components for the production and purification of hydrogen. CETH offers high efficiency hydrogen generators, emitting little or no CO2. The hydrogen production uses primary sources of renewable (wind, photovoltaic panels, ethanol, etc.). CETH products and services thus contribute to reduce or even eliminate the emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs). 

The scope of the company technology and products are hydrogen production for industry-hydrogen production for Energy-recovery of CO2 - oxygen production for industry- the whole energy chain (reformer, electrolyzer, fuel cell, metal hydrides storage, MCP, purification, etc ..). 

PRESENTATION

CETH is a French cleantech SME, established in 1997.  It belongs to its founder and to the employees and is located at Marcoussis near Paris, close to the campus of the “Université Paris Sud” with which the company has established a strong relationship for several years.  The synergy between the Institut de Chimie Moléculaire et des Matériaux d’Orsay (Université Paris Sud) and the company has already made for innovative and performing developments which today lead to the marketing of world-class hydrogen products and job creation both in academic research and applied technologies. The university and the company share a common vision of a “clean” hydrogen economy, where hydrogen is the energy vector of the renewable energy sources.  Thus, hydrogen is seen as a strong catalyst for the expansion of renewable energies. The concept of clean hydrogen is also seen as a way of substituting fossil hydrogen by clean and sustainable hydrogen in all the market niches of both hydrogen energy and industrial hydrogen.

INNOVATION

The company’s industrial activity is organised into two business units: 

- Fuel reforming: The fuel conversion of pure hydrogen through a catalytic reactor integrating a hydrogen purification composite metallic membrane. 

- The membrane reactor allows for a highly efficient production of ultra pure hydrogen in very compact and efficient systems. For several years, CETH has been involved in the development of green hydrogen from bioethanol and today possesses unique expertise in that promising field. 

- Water Electrolysis: Pure hydrogen and oxygen production from water and electricity through PEM electrolysis. CETH designs, manufactures and markets innovative and efficient PEM electrolysis products, based on its relevant supplier and subcontractor network. CETH is in charge of the scale up and pre-industrialisation of the advanced and innovative research carried out in cooperation with the “Université d’Orsay” on alternative processes and materials for cost competitive PEM electrolysis, such as Membrane Electrode Assembly and electrochemical cell architecture. MEA are stacked in modules from 100 Nl/h to 10 Nm3/h; the electrolyser stack is then integrated into an automated electrolyser system.  Through its global hydrogen solution, the company integrates renewable energies, power conversion, the electrolyser, hydrogen purification, hydrogen storage in metal hydride, hydrogen compression and hydrogen delivery. In doing so, CETH has identified the key point and barriers to overcome in order to lower costs and improve efficiency in order to be able to provide competitive solutions. 

MARKET 

CETH markets are autonomous power supply in remote areas for telecom applications, power back up, hydrogen generator for laboratory, industrial (alternator cooling) and educational institution, hydrogen fuel station for fuel cell  vehicle demonstration and tri-generation (heat, electricity, oxygen) from renewable energies especially in developing countries. After safety, the main concern remains in the development and marketing of cost competitive, efficient and durable hydrogen source and purification components that would not use or use a minimum amount of rare raw materials. CETH is a market-driven company which expects to grow in B to B with major gas provider or energy companies. 

STRATEGY 

CETH has already completed development of its range of electrolysers in early 2009. Several industrial prototypes are already installed at customer sites. CETH has a new shareholder with SPTI, through its subsidiary, Marsot développement, which takes over the family of Claude Etiévant, founder of CETH ten years ago. It will enable the company CETH to evolve rapidly, from a universally recognized status of brilliant research company pioneering the hydrogen (H2) to an industrial company, specialized in hydrogen and oxygen generating industrial equipment without CO2, leader in France and Europe on its products. SPTI also brings his experience of industrialization of activities focused on Renewable Energy, especially in the field of photovoltaic energy, water and bio-methanation. Many synergies between the activities of the Group SPTI will also implement eco-industrial systems globally designed.  

Since July 2009, CETH initiated a process of industrialization of its range of clean electrolysers to produce hydrogen without CO2. It has relied since September 2009 on a joint development built with CETIM with two major objectives which are to minimize all pollutants used or generated by previous technologies (including alkaline) and increase the overall availability of system and its performance.CETIM offering its acquired skills and expertise in the areas of systems engineering, balance regulatory and eco-design. Based on these new products, CETH will implement ECOPARC concept based on which the company was winning the SIREME contest in June 2009. By engaging in joint development projects, taught by the Evaluation Committee of innovative projects (Cepi), CETIM also brings its multidisciplinary expertise, a network of experts in many fields, from design to marketing. CETH and CETIM plan to exploit together the industrial benefits of this work. 

SOURCES

Based in Toulouse, 2IDEA is a french cleantech company manufacturing an innovative technology named FREECOLD ®. This innovation is a cooling and freezing processes for places which are not connected to power grid. This unique technology using solar or wind energy, avoids to use expensive and limited life batteries. FREECOLD® refrigerators and freezers are suitable for many kinds of application : Home, Business and Medical.

PRESENTATION

Created in June 2005 and managed by Lionel Bataille, 2IDEA, (Innovation, Investment and Fair Development), is doing consulting activities on quality systems and suppliers audits in Europe and in Africa. 2IDEA is also doing consulting for the promotion of innovation, quality and fair development in Africa Caribbean Pacific countries, in particular for the IFAD. The company reinvested all of the revenues from those activities in Research and Development to develop innovative cleantech solutions. Since the company creation, they have been most interested in researching new processes using renewable energies, in particular the solar energy, in order to produce cold and/or ice. 2IDEA have thus developed a process allowing to produce some cold or ice using a solid-gas thermochemical reaction and thermal solar energy. Their innovation has been selected as one of the 100 finalists among over 2500 candidates for the World Bank’s innovation competition: « Development Marketplace ». In December 2007, the company granted an exclusive world licence to a European company involved in cold production. Following this success, 2IDEA’s team has developed a more simple, but still innovative, solar process whose name is “FREECOLD”.

INNOVATION

2IDEA developed an innovative refrigeration direct solar or wind power systems named Freecold with high energy performance, equipped with an exclusive device of cold supplying in complete autonomy. The only power consumption is solar or wind energy via a photovoltaic panel or a windmill: the process makes possible to use this energy to feed on line, without buffer battery, a compressor.

THE FREECOLD® ECOTAINER : A great self sufficiency

Cold is produced during the day to freeze a composite eutectic mass held in the FREECOLD ® Ecotainer and set in the heart of the evaporator. To mitigate the period of sunshine, the Ecotainer diffuses the cold during the night or no-sunny days and ensures a complete autonomy over 3 to 5 days depending on outside conditions. With a regular period of sunshine, the system thus allows permanent autonomous refrigeration.  The eutectic tank, the evaporator box and its insulating careenage have been developed and patented specifically for FREECOLD ® range to optimize the sharing of the cold between the interior aluminium tank and eutectic by confining the cold around the eutectic container

The A ++ Performance 

• A 90mm thickness of polyurethane expanded foam without gas CFC in the side walls to limit the losses of cold  .
• A very precise electronics management to start the compressor at low speed, to accelerate gradually and to sparingly use the available energy. For a minimal consumption of energy.  
• As soon as the sun appears, even for a few minutes, the system is producing cold.  

An optimum security

• Overpotential protection by fuse and against polarity inversion  
• Thermal cut-out of compressor and fan over-current cut-out  
• LVD protection if additionnal energy supply with batteries 

The energy flexibility

• Crystalline or amorphous silicon photovoltaic solar panel power supply 
• Direct wind power supply 
• Battery 12-24 VDC power supply, or dual voltage device (100-240 VAC grid and battery 12-24 VDC) with automatic selection of tension 

A vast range of appliances

150L, 270L and 410L refrigerators and freezers 

New Freecold applications

• Cooled milk tank powered by renewable energy (solar or wind)  
• Cold Storage built with local traditionnal materials  
• Cooling of spaces of life 

MARKET 

FREECOLD markets a wide range of refrigerators and freezers – 150L, 270L and 410L – and new solar direct applications: refrigerated milk tank, cold in traditional local materials, bioclimatisation living space. Main markets are domestic, commercial (restaurants, hotels, sales of food products including the open-air markets …) and medical (refrigeration of vaccines and drugs).

STRATEGY 

2IDEA is a company with 108 K euros of capital . The annual net income is positive since the beginning.  Team is composed of one managing director / senior R&D engineer, one communication and marketing manager and one R&D technician, supported by a business angel (for a 500 000 euros investment to date) acting as quality and project director.  The company is expecting to sell FreeCold products starting from April 2010.

SOURCES

McPhy Energy is a french cleantech company which industrializes the processes of hydrogen storage in solid form using technology that has been developed in Grenoble by the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research) in their laboratories, in partnership with Joseph Fourier University.

PRESENTATION

The CNRS teams have developed hydrogen storage using magnesium hydrides, creating a technological breakthrough in the hydrogen economy. The company develops, designs, manufactures and sells solid hydrogen energy storage tanks.

Hydrogen is today produced from natural gas and oil liquids and its use is mainly limited to the chemical industry. But, future, hydrogen could be produced without emitting greenhouse gas emissions to from nuclear for example, the storage of surplus production energy or from sources renewable (solar, wind, …). Thus, his use should also diversify including food cell fuel producing deviceselectricity through a reaction electrochemically with the air and zero emission CO2.
Today, we must have an efficient storage mode. Current solutions – gas with very high pressure or cryogenic liquid –bring problems of congestion, secutity and energy cost, especially for large amounts of storage.

INNOVATION

Compared with these well-known methods, hydrogen storage in the form of metal hydrides provides a very interesting alternative. This is what motivates the programs funded by the European Community. Most metal hydrides offer safe, reversible hydrogen storage, and above all much greater energy efficiency (no compression). The technology developed by McPhy is rather a safe storage solution.The hydrogen is stored at low pressure, without compression, to form stable metal hydride tanks. Then, hydrogen is obtained by heating of the hydride and / or pressure reduction.

Tanks developed by McPhy thus allow the storage of hydrogen safely, cheaply and with excellent energy efficiency (no compression). For the purposes of comparison, they can store as much hydrogen at atmospheric pressure as can be stored under 500 bar compression.

McPhy’s activity is based on several patents. Some of these have already been published and are listed below. Other patents arising from our innovative work are currently being reviewed and issued. Nanocrystalline composite for storage of hydrogen (FR2900401A1 / WO2007125253A1) Pulverulent intermetallic materials for the reversible storage of hydrogen (FR2897608A1 / WO2007096527A1)

MARKET 

Target markets include the short term, static applications with Self stationary tanks (without energy), reservoirs over 100 kg of H2, and in the medium term, portable applications, the transport, including applications using combustion engines.

STRATEGY 

McPhy positions itself as the leader in mass hydrogen storage and devotes significant investment in R&D from its revenues to continuously improving its products, both in terms of active materials (magnesium and its additives) and its implementation of different storage solutions. Member of the TENERRDIS competitiveness cluster, McPHy is involved either as a direct partner or as a sub-contractor in many projects. Other projects (notably Interreg and ANR – National Research Agency) will be introduced in the coming years.

McPhy raised funds from Emertec 4 (1,2M euros), Arevadelfi (0,4M euros) and Business angels (0,1M euros).

SOURCES

Created in 2006 by Pierre BIVAS (Polytechnique and Chief Engineer of Mines), Voltalis is a new player energy.The company has positioned itself as the 1st electric operator specialized in the production and adjustment time real. Voltalis offers individuals to provide direct economic benefit exceeding 10% their electricity bill.

Bluepod Technology  

The technology consists of the Bluepod wireless transmitter and electricity modulator which are linked to centrally-controlled “smart grid” software. 

Voltalis provides customers with this meter that monitors in home electricity use. When the electric grid is overwhelmed during a peak period Voltalis shuts down appliances in a household to ease the demand on the grid.

The company says it can save home owners 10% on their electric bills and utilities billions in money spent on building new power plants. 

A disruptive revenue model

The Voltalis revenue model disrupts industry practices for peak demand management because it requires payment for reducing demand rather than boosting supply. Commercial negotiations on payment structures will be concluded in mid-2010. Whatever the result, Voltalis exposes the problems electricity industry executives have in shifting from a mindset based on selling more electricity to one focused on energy efficiency and reductions in CO2 emissions.

Regulators in France didn’t take too kindly to Voltalis’ efforts to help consumers. The regulators think that Voltalis, in helping reduce electric use, are taking money out of the pockets of the power producers. And to compensate for that, Voltalis should be paying the utilities. But using less energy means that there will be fewer dollars flowing to utilities. Sure they save billions because they don’t have to build power plants, but they also lose money, as people are using less electricity.

As a conclusion, one may think that smart grid technology as Voltalis will disrupt traditional industry practices for years to come…

CO2 capture and storage (CCS) has the potential to account for 20% of global greenhouse gas reduction. A number of initiatives are underway to encourage widespread deployment. Pilot plants are being run around the world and several countries and federations are already establishing directives and regulations to guide the development of these emerging technologies. First scale one coal power stations equipped with CCS should be in operation no later than 2015 but other industries such as steel making are also studying CCS as a solution to reduce their CO2 emissions.

GEOGREEN : A unique expertise in CO2 transport and geological storage

Geogreen is an international services company specialized in CO2 transport and storage offering its clients strategic studies in the areas of CO2 capture, transport and storage in addition to engineering studies and technical assistance relating to CO2 transport and geological storage. Geogreen is a subsidiary of the IFP (French Petroleum Institute), Geostock (an underground hydrocarbon storage company) and BRGM (Bureau de Recherche Géologique et Minière).The company has a perfect technical complementarity with its experts enables Geogreen to provide the industries concerned and a comprehensive range of services, covering the whole chain from the transport of CO2 to its geological storage, from upstream expertise to engineering and project development. In the longer term, Geogreen will offer injection site operation assistance, inspection and maintenance services, and monitoring services related to post-injection control of storage sites.

Geogreen’s capital is held by IFP, Géostock and BRGM.

Storage approach : Once captured and transported, CO2 is then injected and stored underground at depths of at least 800 meters.

Three potential storage methods are envisaged:

• Storage in depleted oil and gas fields.

Theoretically, this is the easiest option to implement since these structures have held oil and gas for millions of years and this geological environment is well known. The injection of CO2 also helps to improve recovery of the oil and gas present. However, the storage capacity of these reservoirs is insufficient and they are very unequally distributed around the world, often far from industrial facilities.
Experimental storage operations are already under way in these types of reservoirs.

• Storage in unused coal seams.

The capacity of coal to “adsorb” – or preferentially trap – CO2 in place of the methane naturally present in coal, represents an interesting capture mechanism. But this option is limited by the porosity and permeability of coal, which remain low.

• Storage in deep saline aquifers.

These are reservoirs of non-potable salt water, located at great depths, which offer the greatest potential in terms of storage capacity. They are better distributed over the world’s surface than oil and gas reservoirs. A significant amount of research is currently under way aimed at characterizing these and assessing their potential in terms of geological storage.

A porous material created by a team led by Gérard Férey at Institut Lavoisier in Versailles has an unparalleled ability to capture carbon dioxide, a major challenge in the ongoing fight against global warming.

This recent study co-authored by several laboratories associated with CNRS has shown that MIL101, a mesoporous Metal-Organic Framework (MOF), could store close to 400 m of CO2 at 25°C per m3 of solid, almost double the capacity of the best materials commercially available today. Yet when Férey initially set out to create porous frameworks, he had no specific application in mind. His goal was to move beyond trial and error and devise a logical approach to create tailored porous solids. Using a personal computer simulation program, he found extraordinary virtual results. They eventually led to the creation of MIL101, the largest crystalline porous solid to date, with pores of 3.4 nm and a huge cubic cell volume.

The next issue was to figure out what to trap in such large cages and, given the increased focus on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, CO2 was a prime candidate. Férey also gives credit to his colleagues who demonstrated MIL101’s record CO2adsorption properties. “We now know why and where the CO2molecules attach,” he points out. “This is essential information if we want to find even better products.” The study also shows that the method chosen to activate MIL101 is crucial in optimizing its CO2 adsorption capability, the most effective method being a combination of hot ethanol and ammonium fluoride treatments.

CO2 storage is only one of many potential applications for a large-pore MOF and the possibilities are practically endless. “You can fill it with pretty much anything,” concludes Férey, “hydrogen, drugs, or even use the cages as a nanoreactor to produce materials directly inside them.

Source : CNRS - Fabien Buliard

Pierre Calleja is the talented inventor of a process that is already revolutionary : the lamp absorber of CO2. Pierre Calleja runs the innovative company named Tyca based in Libourne (Gironde) and specializing in aquaculture and aquariology. At a time when everyone is looking for solutions to counteract the pollution in our cities (especially pollution), he had the idea to develop a CO2 canister lamp.

It is equipped with a tank containing micro algae to absorb CO2, to issue in exchange for oxygen, while continuing to grow in the light. The lamp of this patent was filed by Tyca that had already been contacted not only by private customers, but also by large groups such as Vinci. The city of Libourne in turn could be one of the first laboratories of real experience of the lamp. This lamp absorber of CO2 is not yet commercially available.Car parks, tunnels, stations and buildings could develop in the future streetlights Calleja.

A revolutionary solution for its efficiency, since a lighting of 1.5 m3 can capture 1 ton of CO2 per year. Multiplied by the number of fixtures that exist in a city as Paris and it is the Amazon forest that is planted on our streets!

Source : Daylife

Ceram Hyd is a French Company focusing on hydrogen technolgies. It was created in September 2005. The company’s core activities are R&D in the domains of hydrogen production, storage and re-conversion into electricity. Ceram Hyd has, to date, been financed by private investors and innovation grants in France.

Ceram Hyd has developed a range of technologies that address various aspects of the hydrogen economy : - a novel ceramic proton exchange membrane that works in a temperature range between 0 and 200°C - an innovative process of ionic transport and absorption -a nano-structured ceramix developed specifically for hydrogen storage. Ceram Hyd’s aim is to bring its breakthrough technologies to market and to become the number one provider of CeraPEM membrane, hydrogen storage materials and integrated hydrogen production and storage processes.

More information : www.ceramhyd.com

French-led technologists said they had beefed up the performance of a nano-powder that stores carbon dioxide (CO2) in what could be a step forward in tackling global warming caused by road traffic.A cubic metre (35 cubic feet) of the new substance, called MIL-101, is able to capture 400 cu. metres (14,125 cu. feet) of CO2, thanks to pores 3.5 nanometres (billionths of a metre) across, the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) said in a press release.

It outperforms current commercial nano-powders which have maximum pores of 2.2 nanometres.

The powder could have a potential use one day as a filter to help reduce CO2 emissions by road vehicles, lead researcher Gerard Ferey at the Lavoisier Institute in Versailles, near Paris, said. Capturing and storing CO2 has become one of the most eagerly-explored areas of research in global warming.The idea is to sequestrate the gas as it is being burned by power plants, factories and vehicles, rather than let it escape into the atmosphere where it will contribute to the greenhouse effect.

The CNRS team is to report on MIL-101 in a forthcoming issue of Langmuir, a journal of the American Chemical Society (ACS).