HydrogenSource Demonstrates New Noble Metal Water Gas Shift Catalysts for Fuel Processing and Hydrogen Generation Applications

30-Jan-2004

HydrogenSource LLC, a leading developer of fuel processor systems, announced that it has demonstrated the viability of new advanced noble metal water Gas Shift (WGS) catalysts as cost effective components in fuel processor systems for fuel cell and hydrogen generation applications.

Fuel processing is one of the most economical and convenient approaches to convert hydrocarbon fuels, as well as oxygenates like ethanol, to hydrogen either to power fuel cells or for other hydrogen applications. A critical step in fuel processing is water gas shift, which reduces carbon monoxide while boosting hydrogen content.

Conventional WGS catalysts use base metals like copper-zinc. Although commercially mature, they require large volumes and suffer from transportation issues due to their self-heating nature.

HydrogenSource evaluated new generation, proprietary noble metal water gas shift catalysts under a joint development agreement with Sud-Chemie Inc. and United Technologies Research Center. The catalysts demonstrated high performance for both high and low temperature water gas shift reactors, and sustained performance over many thousands of hours, also in the presence of sulfur.

Endurance data shows that the noble metal WGS reactors will be very compact and cost competitive compared to base metal reactors, being 10 times smaller with a similar cost for a same capacity unit. Furthermore, the new proprietary WGS catalysts will be safer and easier to handle, since they do not have the self-heating and handling issues associated with the base metal catalysts.

Recently, these advanced noble metal catalysts have been successfully incorporated into many of HydrogenSource's new products, including the 5 kWe Vega 5TM and the 150 kWe stationary platforms, which also employ HydrogenSource's proprietary Catalytic Partial Oxidation (CPO) technology.

https://www.chemeurope.com/en/news/34611/hydrogensource-demonstrates-new-noble-metal-water-gas-shift-catalysts-for-fuel-processing-and-hydrogen-generation-applications.html