Latest Bear Case For Natural Gas: Fuels Cells Running On Hydrogen

(Bloomberg) -- The latest sign that natural gas’s days as king of America’s power mix may be numbered: Bloom Energy Corp. is tweaking its fuel cells so they can run off hydrogen instead.

To date, Bloom’s units have used natural gas or biogas to generate electricity through a process that gives off greenhouse gases. The San Jose, California-based company said Thursday that it’s now selling units that can be re-configured to run on hydrogen, an emissions-free proposition that would produce nothing but power and water vapor.

It’s another way the power industry is responding to the movement away from fossil fuels, one that is increasingly shunning natural gas despite it being less emissions-intensive than coal or oil. Bloom has actually long aimed to shift away from natural gas, but in a different way: feeding locally made biogas into its cells to generate power. Chief Executive Officer K.R. Sridhar said hydrogen could fulfill a larger-scale need.

“We believe hydrogen will have a place,” he said in an interview. “We’re not going to get caught flat-footed. We’re always going to look at where the market is going to move and figure out what is going to be our response.”

Read More: Hydrogen Is the Fuel of the Future. For Real This Time, IEA Says

Bloom sees a combination of hydrogen and fuel cells -- which generate electricity through an electrochemical process rather than combustion -- potentially serving the same purpose as big, albeit slightly more complicated, batteries. Here’s how it would work: When places such as California are generating more solar or wind power than they need, they’d use the excess electricity to extract hydrogen from water using electrolysis and store it. Whenever they need more electricity, the hydrogen would then flow into fuel cells and produce it.

(Michael R. Bloomberg, the founder and majority stakeholder of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, has committed $500 million to launch Beyond Carbon, a campaign aimed at closing the remaining coal-powered plants in the U.S. by 2030 and slowing the construction of new gas plants.)

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