First published on the Cleantech Investor website. Copyright Cleantech Investor, July 2008 

AIM listed ITM Power has launched a demonstration bi-fuel car and home hydrogen refuelling system. The home hydrogen refuelling station is based on ITM’s platinum free electrolyser technology (ITM’s electrolyser stack uses a low cost polymer instead of platinum). Jim Heathcote, CEO of ITM Power, believes the company’s technology has the potential to solve some of the challenges involved in moving to a hydrogen economy: Heathcote envisages a distributed hydrogen energy infrastructure, with hydrogen created by the ITM electrolyser from renewable energy resources.

ITM has converted a Ford Focus into a demonstration bi fuel (petrol and hydrogen gas) vehicle through a retrofit. The demonstration vehicle (which was converted independently from Ford), has a range of 25 miles on a single recharge of hydrogen from the ITM home refuelling station. Running on compressed hydrogen (which would need to be supplied by a commercial scale refuelling station), the range extends to 100 miles. A key different between the ITM vehicle and the BMW Hydrogen 7 – perhaps the best known hydrogen vehicle – is that the ITM vehicle runs on gas, whereas the BMW runs on liquid hydrogen.

Heathcote considers ITM’s technology to be ‘disruptive’, from a number of perspectives: he claims it challenges the fuel cell industry as it permits the use of hydrogen for distributed energy without requiring the use of fuel cells.