Hydrogen production discovery inspires alternative energy start-up

This profile is the last story in a four-part series highlighting University of Calgary faculty innovators who were recognized by President Elizabeth Cannon and the Advisory Committee on Entrepreneurship and Innovation. The series is part of Global Entrepreneurship Week at the University of Calgary, an initiative of the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. The series will appear in UToday Nov. 18-21.

Simon Trudel is co-founder of FireWater Fuel Corp., a company born out of a revolutionary discovery in the science of hydrogen production. Alongside co-founder Curtis Berlinguette, Trudel has taken this discovery and applied it to the alternative energy industry. Trudel is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Nanoscience Program, co-founder of the Centre for Advanced Solar Materials, and a member of the Institute for Quantum Science and Technology. 

Q: What market need does your venture address? 

A: One of the problems of renewable energy, such as wind or solar, is that it’s not reliable. We don’t know when it’s going to be windy or sunny, and just because it is, it doesn’t mean it coincides with when you need energy. 

The best way to compensate for this supply-demand mismatch is to store the energy when it is available. One way to do this is to create a chemical fuel. Plants do photosynthesis, they make sugars. We are not able to make sugars, but we can make hydrogen and the way we do it is to extract hydrogen from water.

Q: What discovery has allowed you to make that a viable, marketable product?

A: You use the electrical supply from the clean energy source when it is available and do what is called water splitting. It’s an electrochemical reaction used to separate water into its two elemental gases, hydrogen and oxygen. And then the hydrogen can be used as a fuel later on, when energy is in high demand and in low supply. 

Water splitting is not new and it’s not an efficient reaction, it is very slow and energy-demanding. This lowers the efficiency of the whole process. What we needed was a catalyst that would lower the energy demand to do the water splitting, which changes the economics of the water-splitting reaction. 

That is where the breakthrough was. We were able to take advantage of almost 80 per cent of the periodic table using a method that was already known, but applying it in a new way to make novel very efficient electrocatalysts. We are now fine-tuning the catalysts to make the reaction more efficient, and that’s the added value of that technology.

Q: How has your entrepreneurial work impacted the way you approach your work at the university? 

A: You become critical of scientific results in a different way. Sometimes you’re going to learn something, but in the end if there is no performance enhancement, it stops there. 

Working with new materials opens up a lot of scientific questions, but from the company’s point-of-view we ask different questions: are we improving the product? Is there a performance increase? In business you decide whether something is worth pursuing quickly, while in science, we take a longer approach. 

Q: Why did you choose to apply this discovery to business?

A: In material science we want to make things that lead to better processes with more benefits. When you find something that might be a good research area, you start to get excited and talk to people in that market space.

If they say, ‘if this is what your technology can do then yes, we want to talk to you’ that tells you there’s a demand for this product, which makes you want to go in that space. Then you start to look for evidence of a growing market for it, and that tells you that you have competition out there. That’s good, because it motivates you to bring that technology to fruition. 

Q: If a colleague who was apprehensive about taking the entrepreneurial path approached you, what advice would you give him or her, based on your experience?

A: It’s a new challenge, and that can be really motivating. Beyond the possible financial gains is that you start to create jobs and expertise, and seeing that grow is very fulfilling. When you get your first employee, that makes it worth it.

A lot of ventures don’t fail because of the technology, but because they don’t know how to bring it to market, which isn’t an easy thing to do. You need to surround yourself with people who understand how to do it. In science, you build knowledge, but in business it’s more concrete. You push this research and see how far it can go, which is really exciting.