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Motor Mouth: Why hydrogen might be the simple solution to ICE …

  1. Technology & Innovation[1]
  2. Motor Mouth[2]

A Canadian company is mixing hydrogen with diesel and finding that far fewer emissions come out the tailpipe

Heavy-duty trucks running Hydra Energy hydrogen conversion kits
Heavy-duty trucks running Hydra Energy hydrogen conversion kits Photo by Hydra Energy

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication

Leonardo da Vinci

The main reason — indeed, the only reason — I’m still banging on a keyboard 35 years after the National Post decided it needed a Driving section is because I get to meet smart people doing smart things. You can, believe me, get tired of supercars. Ditto BMWs and Jaguars. But if curiosity truly be the lust of the mind, there be no better — or longer-lasting! — way to satiate desire than hanging out with smart people telling you smart things. And, if you just happen to be an auto journalist, and the smart thing the smart people are doing is cutting tailpipe greenhouse-gas emissions more simply — that should be read “cheaply” — than anyone else you’ve ever met, well, then, that lust, er, curiosity, turns into a whole goddamned Motor Mouth, doesn’t it, now?

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Meet Jessica Verhagen. Jessica is the CEO of British Columbia’s Hydra Energy, and she and her merry band of mechanics, machinists, and software engineers have together crafted what might truly be the simplest way I’ve seen yet to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. No batteries needed, not an electric motor to be found. Nothing need be re-engineered, and, if you don’t know what you’re looking for — and, even if you do, you’d have to look closely — you might not spot any modifications to Hydra’s tweaked ICE engines at all.

Register HERE for our upcoming free virtual panel about the Hydrogen Revival[3]

And yet the company has found a way to cut the carbon dioxide emitted from tailpipes by some 40 per cent — perhaps by 50 per cent, by the end of this year — by injecting raw hydrogen into the combustion chambers of piston engines. Hydra has not only found a way to inject said hydrogen into said combustion chamber, but can also retrofit its hydrogen injection system onto engines up to 12 years old. And, just to prove Motor Mouth does not use profanity spuriously — like that “goddamned” in the previous paragraph — the retrofit is not only simple, it’s free. Have I got your attention now?

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  1. Motor Mouth: Hydrogen vehicles are finally getting their renaissance

    Motor Mouth: Hydrogen vehicles are finally getting their renaissance

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  2. Motor Mouth: The growing case for synthetic fuel

    Motor Mouth: The growing case for synthetic fuel

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There is, I’m guessing you’ve figured out, a caveat. The Hydra system is only available for diesel engines. More specifically, the large commercial diesels that power long-haul 18-wheelers. It could work on gasoline engines — in fact, Hydra did build some hydrogen taxis about eight years ago — but the trucking business model made more sense for a hydrogen-production company looking for high-volume traffic.

Here’s how the system works. Essentially, what Hydra does is add hydrogen fuelling to an existing powertrain. A tank — actually a collection of high-pressure tanks — are fitted in a remarkably well-disguised cabinet behind the cab. Fuel lines are then routed from the tanks to some injectors mounted to the intake manifold, just aft of the turbocharger. These injectors simply mix metered amounts of H2 into the incoming air that’s on its way to the combustion chamber. Once there, it mixes with the diesel, and, faster than you can say “compression ignition,” the resulting explosion is up to 40 per cent cleaner than if the engine were 100 per cent fuelled by bunker crude.

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A Hydra Energy hydrogen-driven truck
A Hydra Energy hydrogen-driven truck Photo by Hydra Energy

It really is that simple. Oh, there is an electronic controller for the entire thingamabob, and Hydra’s ECU has to be made to work in conjunction with the truck’s stock computer. But nothing on the truck is modified — except the intake hose where the injectors are mounted — which means that, not only can the engine run on pure diesel if no hydrogen is available, but the addition of the Hydra injection does not void any of the new truck’s warranty. The two systems are in fact so completely separate that you could remove the entire system and, save for a few bolt-holes, not have to repair a darned thing.

Not that there would be any reason to remove Verhagen’s hydrogen injection. In fact, it’s kinda hard to come up with a downside to Hydra’s tech. Simplicity itself — Leonardo would definitely be impressed — the entire installation takes less than two days, most of that mounting the fuel tank and routing the plumbing. The high-pressure hydrogen containers — originally, they stored 30 kilograms of H2, but now they hold 40 kilos, and Hydra’s working on 50-kg units — take less time to fill up than diesel tanks, and have inlets on both sides of the cab.

An in-cabin display keeps track of how much hydrogen you’ve used, as well as how much you have left, and also what percentage of the engine’s power is being generated by H2 (this latter is measured by energy content, not how much fuel is being consumed). In other words, from the driver’s point of view, the Hydra system is simplicity itself. Other than filling an extra tank, driving a Hydra-equipped 18-wheeler is no different than a standard truck.

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And, it works. According to a recently presented Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) paper — On-Road CO2 and NOx Emissions for a Heavy-Duty Truck with Hydrogen-Diesel Co-Combustion — by Dr. Pooyan Kheirkhah, another of Hydra’s smartnicks, the amount of CO2 reduced is commensurate with the amount of hydrogen injected. In other words, if 40 per cent of the energy your diesel engine internally combusts comes from H2, the amount of greenhouse gas that diesel engine will emit will be reduced by that same 40 per cent. Burning hydrogen even reduced the engine’s nitrogen-oxide output by some 10 to 20 per cent, says Kheirkhah’s study. A win for the environment all around, then.

Nor do there seem to be any other downsides. The system can be retro-fitted to any post-2009 truck (Hydra has modified everything from a 2009 Freightliner Cascadia to a 2023 Western Star). The company also says the total cost of ownership — all important for economical long-distance haulage — is nearly on par with 100-per-cent diesel, and will only improve moving forward. And there may well be more savings, since maintenance costs are down, the cleaner-running engines reducing the maintenance required by onboard particulate filters, for instance. More importantly, Hydra has a vested interest in not only keeping the trucks well-serviced, but also in keeping its hydrogen pricing low, since the main reason it came up with this new technology was to create a client base for its hydrogen-for-mobility product (that’s also why fitting the system is, as I mentioned, free of charge).

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A Hydra Energy truck on a highway
A Hydra Energy truck on a highway Photo by Hydra Energy

As for the future, Verhagen says that her engineers are shooting for internal-combustion engines running on 100 per cent hydrogen. She hints that they might well even be almost completely carbon-free. But if you want to know more about that and why it might all matter to cars, then you’re going to have to listen to her live, as she speaks on Driving into the Future’s The Hydrogen Revival[6] panel on May 3 at 11:00 AM, where she’ll be joined by:

  • Jeff Grant, vice-president, Transportation Solutions, HTEC
  • Dr. Nasir Mahmood, vice-chancellor senior research fellow, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
  • Craig Scott, general manager & director of Fuel Cell Solutions, Toyota Motor North America

Click here to join the panel free of charge[7].

David Booth picture

David Booth

Canada’s leading automotive journalists with over 20+ years of experience in covering the industry

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References

  1. ^ Technology & Innovation (driving.ca)
  2. ^ Motor Mouth (driving.ca)
  3. ^ Register HERE for our upcoming free virtual panel about the Hydrogen Revival (events.driving.ca)
  4. ^ Motor Mouth: Hydrogen vehicles are finally getting their renaissance (driving.ca)
  5. ^ Motor Mouth: The growing case for synthetic fuel (driving.ca)
  6. ^ The Hydrogen Revival (www.driving.ca)
  7. ^ Click here to join the panel free of charge (www.driving.ca)
  8. ^ Community Guidelines (driving.ca)
  9. ^ email settings (driving.ca)

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