I’m pleased to be announcing our new Nu:ionic website with the first of what will be a series of articles exploring renewable energy, hydrogen’s role in building a cleaner future and our passion as a company for building a better tomorrow, today. Please share your thoughts and questions on our LinkedIn page or email me directly at jan.boshoff@nuionic.com.
Thank you!
Jan Boshoff
Co-Founder and CEO
The Future Looks Bright: Cleaning The Air With Hydrogen
I’ll never forget as a young engineer in South Africa almost twenty years ago, how the air in the town where I lived could be seen and smelled from miles away because coal was the primary feedstock at the chemical complex where I worked. In my first year, a major upgrade to the plant was completed to switch from coal to natural gas, and the impact was immediate: you could see how much cleaner the air was. Gone was the smell of sulfur and constant blanket of smog covering our small town. To this day, I remember the joy from the improved quality of life that was created by adopting a cleaner fuel source. That impact has stayed with me.
At Nu:ionic, we are allowing new ways of eliminating the combustion of fossil fuels in order to clean up the air. We’re allowing the adoption of zero-emission energy technologies by producing hydrogen from low cost natural gas, but eliminating the most polluting part of that process – the combustion of natural gas. And we’re replacing combustion with a clean energy source in the form of electricity, which allows us to cut the amount of natural gas needed for small-scale hydrogen by up to 35%. It also allows us to cost-effectively capture up to 100% of the associated CO2 to produce hydrogen at a carbon intensity that compares to that of green hydrogen.
As a father and husband, I spend a lot of time enjoying the great outdoors with my family. A few years ago, my wife and I were camping at Joshua Tree National Park, a beloved destination for nature lovers and widely known as the location of the Coachella Music Festival. As we looked towards the mountains, the air was so filled with smog from the Los Angeles basin that you couldn’t even see the valley. We were disappointed and saddened to witness first-hand how negatively the air is impacted by the activities of people.
Our Nu:ionic Teal Hydrogen™ is as clean as you can make it and the result is cleaner air. More than 95% of the hydrogen in the world is produced using steam methane reforming, where a portion of the natural gas feedstock is burned to provide heat for the process, emitting uncombusted methane, carbon monoxide, sulfur, NOx, and of course carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We’re eliminating this polluting part of reforming by replacing combustion of fuel with clean energy in the form of industrial microwave energy. By eliminating combustion, we’re eliminating the most polluting component of the production of hydrogen today and not only is it cleaner, it’s significantly less expensive than alternative hydrogen sources of the same environmental footprint.
This is why I’m so excited about what we are doing! We have the ability and potential to significantly impact the quality of our air and leave behind a world where you can stand at Joshua Tree National Park, look out at the valleys of California and see for miles. A world in which you can actually see the skylines of Mumbai and Beijing, and the peaks of the Himalayan mountain range in Northern India. This is the world our technology enables and the future looks bright.