RICHLAND, Wash. — A step toward getting clean, fossil-fuel free gas is through hydrogen fuel. The main problem getting in the way of that, is it’s costly. Getting hydrogen fuel is soon to be a problem for the past.

“Hydrogen at the filling stations; it’s terribly expensive. It’s terribly expensive, because the way you normally make hydrogen is in a big chemical plant, but then you’ve got to move the hydrogen 100 miles or further, and that costs a lot of money. The result is hydrogen at a filling station is the equivalent of about $15 per gallon of gasoline,” said Bob Wegeng, the Chief Mechanical Officer at STARS Technology Corporation in Richland.

A company right in the Tri-Cities is making big changes that could change the future of gas efficiency, price and emissions.

This is STARS Technology Corporation, based in Richland, Washington. They consist of five former PNNL employees working together to develop a prototype hydrogen generator for commercial operation; the first of its kind. Inside are three electrically-heated reactors.

“This is completely new,” said Wegeng. “No one’s ever built one of these before.”

Years of production and engineering to get to now, with an endless list of people supporting Bob Wegeng and his team on their goal of creating this more efficient way to produce hydrogen fuel and energy.

“First, I’m incredibly excited. And secondly, I’m nervous too, because when it gets down there, it’s going to operate, and people are really going to love it, or they’re going to hate it, or they’re going to say you need to change it,” said Wegeng.

The engineers said the hydrogen market is going to grow exponentially. In order to do that sustainably and economically, the price needs to go down.

Wegeng said having systems that give us cheaper energy than the fossil systems do is the best way to get the world off of fossil fuels.

The price of hydrogen production, Wegeng said, currently sits around $15 per gallon, which is not exactly desirable in the economy right now.

“We need it to be cheap compared to gasoline, not expensive compared to gasoline,” said Wegeng.

This generator they created is also record-breaking in hydrogen production efficiency.

Wegeng said their generator attained 82% electrical to chemical conversion efficiency. The highest anyone else has reported for a reaction like theirs has been just 23%. A significant improvement, built right in Richland.

This efficiency, Wegeng said, will make it more affordable, and therefore, “When alternative energy becomes cheaper, everybody wins.”

“This is just more evidence that we live in an area with some truly outstanding engineers and scientists,” Wegeng said.

STARS is a group of five men who had a goal. They began planning for something long before they knew just how influential it would be.

But Wegeng is staying humble about his project. “I’m not trying to become Henry Ford in charge of a gigantic corporation. I’m just trying to help save the planet,” he said.

Wegeng said it really just took some people to take a risk. But he said getting rid of fossil-fuel energy was worth failing for. Luckily, this effort that took risks is paying off.

“My father used to say half the time you do something new you get a surprise. Half of the surprises turn out to be bad surprises,” said Wegeng. “Since there’s risk, it took some people to say, ‘I’ll take a risk.’”

“If we want to move forward as society aggressively, if we want to get off of our, if we want to reduce greenhouse gasses, emissions aggressively, if we want to do some things like that, we’ve got to be able to do some things that might not succeed in order to find the things that succeed very, very well,” explained Wegeng.

They say they’ve worked hard for four years, from paper to product. Crews loaded it onto a semi truck Monday afternoon, on its way to making history.

Dennis Walters from STARS said it was like sending your kid off to school for the first time.

Southern California Gas Company, the nation’s largest natural gas utility, where the first generator is going, is bringing down a group of STARS and HiLine engineers to make sure everything runs smoothly, and to train people how to run it.

Fuel cells produce electricity via a hydrogen based chemical reaction and are an ideal alternative to batteries where the weight and/or recharging time of batteries are problematic, given a fuel cell weighs a fraction of an equivalent battery pack and can be refueled in minutes, akin to gasoline powered vehicles.

The Fuse Fund was a big help. They are a group of community-minded investors who helped STARS cross the finish line by rounding up $500,000 through investors in the community.

Recent legislation has also been making moves in support of decarbonization and hydrogen production.

Hydrogen has been recognized by many as the most viable solution to large scale decarbonization of the heavy lift transportation industry. The momentum is growing for hydrogen fuel cell deployments, with the Federal Government recently passing the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill that included $8 billion for regional Hydrogen Hubs and the Inflation Reduction Act which carried about $370 billion in subsidies and credits for clean energy investment in the United States. STARS is uniquely poised to deliver a scalable and cost-competitive technology solution to US and global markets.

“A real hope is that we can establish a mass production capability here. So we build lots of them here and then ship them all over the USA and all over the world,” said Wegeng.

They said this is far above what anyone else has achieved, and coming from the Tri-Cities is a major development.

“We started an investigation about 25 years ago, saying if you would use computer chip architectures to build really small heat exchangers, and chemical reactors, and separators and all that, would it do anything interesting? Would it do it better, would it be worse, would anybody care? So, we started some projects,” said Wegeng.

He said this project is going to be exponentially helpful to remove carbon emissions by getting fuel cell vehicles on the market. He said it will be an incredible next ten years to see where this goes.

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