New Type Energy||Renewable Energy

Hydrogen is by far the most common element in the universe — it's what stars are mostly made of.

The lightest element might also be the stuff that saves the world, at least in the mind — and garage — of Timothy Dolan, who lives on Chestnut Hill Road in Trumbull. Over the last five years, he has been using the gas to run his barbecue, fuel a gas range, and even operate a lawn mower and a portable generator.

The advantage to burning hydrogen, he says, is that the gas produces heat without byproducts such as carbon monoxide, Carbon dioxide, or any other gas that causes global warming.

"The end product of hydrogen combustion is water," Dolan is quick to point out.

Hydrogen also has a high flame temperature — 2,200 degrees Celsius — as opposed to 1,977 degrees C for gasoline. Hydrogen will burn about 1,000 degrees hotter in a pure oxygen environment.

The trick to using hydrogen, Dolan says, isn't burning it — that's the easy part. The trick is in extracting the gas, which isn't present in the Earth's atmosphere except in minuscule amounts. Free hydrogen is so light that it quickly rises through the atmosphere and soon drifts into space.

Nearly all the hydrogen on Earth is locked up in other compounds. Just about every molecule in human bodies, for example, has hydrogen atoms, often dozens of them. For Dolan and other hydrogen fuel pioneers, the source of hydrogen is the water molecule, or H2O, extracted using the process of electrolysis.

Often a demonstration performed in grade school science classes, this is a simple procedure in which wires carrying direct current are inserted into a beaker of water. Bubbles of hydrogen gas can be seen forming on the negative wire, called the cathode, while oxygen bubbles form on the positive wire, the anode.

Hydrogen can be extracted from fossil fuels, too, like gasoline. But Dolan prefers the electrolysis of water because the electricity he needs comes from solar cells, making it an energy source virtually free of pollution.

"This is all serendipity," he said. "I started fooling around with hydrogen a few years back and I asked myself, 'What can you do with this?' One thing was a barbecue. Ribs come out great. And the only thing I waste is sunlight."

He said that since his electrolysis system takes place in an enclosed tank, the hydrogen gas "compresses itself — I stop it at 2,000 psi (pounds per square inch)."

He has to bleed off the oxygen, but he didn't explain how he does that. "Some of this technology is proprietary," he said.

Most of the equipment he uses is off-the-shelf consumer and industrial gear. Some of it comes from the bottled hydrogen gas industry. As for converting a range to use hydrogen, he said that it's simply a matter of making the gas orifices a little smaller to compensate for the smaller molecular weight of hydrogen as opposed to natural gas.

Dolan isn't an engineer, or even a tinkerer — he calls himself a "developer of technology."

One of the reasons why people have been resistant to using hydrogen as a fuel, he said, is fear.

The Hindenburg air ship disaster still looms large, 72 years later. Thirty-six people died when the German zeppelin, with its 7 million cubic feet of hydrogen, caught fire and burned horrifically on May 6, 1937, when it attempted to dock at the Naval Air Station in Lakehurst, N.J.

"Most of them died from jumping out of the damn thing," he said, noting that there were also 61 survivors.

"Have you ever seen the MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheet) for gasoline?" he asked. "It's 15 pages long. And hydrogen has three times the energy density as gasoline per kilogram."

Dolan also feels that the oil and natural gas industry have been working behind the scenes over the years to discourage hydrogen as a fuel "even though the stuff is all around us."

In Dolan's garage is his experimental gear, which he said has all the proper permits. The gear includes such hydrogen-powered appliances as a torch, a cooking range, a space heater and electrical generator. He's formed a company, Enabling Technologies, to develop ideas. So far, he's the only employee. But he said he has been getting help from Fairfield University.

The generator, which used to run on gasoline, now runs without producing combustion fumes. In other words, it can run indoors without any fear of carbon-monoxide poisoning. There was a slight whiff of lubricating oil, but that was it. Out of the exhaust pipe came only water vapor.

"Just about everything that runs off fossil fuel will run just fine on hydrogen," Dolan said. "You don't need a Ph.D. to do this stuff — it's all grade-school science."

He said that he was frustrated by the recent international talks on global warming in Copenhagen because no mention was made of hydrogen fuel.

"All they were doing was telling people to cut, cut, cut," he said. "Here we have a fuel that's right under our noses that doesn't add to global warming, and everyone's looking the other way."