Hydrogen-powered cars and trucks are supposed to be cheaper and greener to run than anything today. It’s one of those big cleantech ideas that always seems to be five years away from the market. Yet Asemblon, a little Redmond, WA-based company on a quest to make this dream practical, took a small step forward recently when it struck a deal with one of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s favorite startup trucking companies.

Asemblon’s new partnership is with Los Angeles-based Vision Industries. Terms of the deal aren’t disclosed, but Asemblon is providing Vision with an exclusive license to sell its “Hydrnol” fuel to power heavy-duty commercial trucks. Vision Industries needs the access to hydrogen fuel for its Tyrano truck, a big rig designed to run on a zero-emissions hybrid electric/hydrogen motor.

Asemblon, advised by University of Washington bioengineering professor Buddy Ratner, is commercializing a family of organic carrier molecules that can release hydrogen on demand. This is supposed to make hydrogen practical as a liquid fuel by enabling it to be stored at room temperature, and without high pressure, so people could carry it around in containers or ship it on pipelines or trucks like gasoline. In theory, this should solve some of the major barriers to the adoption of hydrogen as a fuel, by eliminating huge infrastructure investments needed for high-pressure tanks, expensive new hydrogen filling stations, and costly transportation in a cold, liquid form. The Asemblon technique is supposed to yield hydrogen fuel at one-tenth the cost of the usual pressurized form.

While Vision Industries is still in the “vision” stage, it’s an idea that California’s self-proclaimed green governor likes a lot. The Tyrano truck is designed to run on a 535 horsepower engine, travel a local range of 200 miles, and cost 30 to 40 percent less to operate per mile than a conventional diesel-powered big rig.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

“This is exactly where the future is,” Schwarzenegger said in an October press conference, which you can view on Vision Industries’ website.

Vision is betting that by using Asemblon’s Hydrnol hydrogen fuel, it can set up the first coast-to-coast network of fuel stations, which is essential if the trucking industry were to ever adopt this technology. One of the key advantages is Hydrnol’s ability to be stored and transported without extra pressure. That matters because hydrogen-powered trucks today can only carry about 40 kilograms of compressed hydrogen, which limits them to a range of 200 to 400 miles. Asemblon’s method enables a truck to carry 110 kilograms of unpressurized hydrogen fuel, extending the range to 650 to 1,100 miles, depending on speed and load burden.

The trucking industry is also a logical place for Asemblon to start marketing its hydrogen fuel. Highway trucks consume about 13 percent of all the transportation fuel in the U.S., and the industry doesn’t require a vast network of corner fuelling stations like passenger vehicles do. For commercial trucking, the logistics of installing hydrogen fueling capability look a lot less expensive and daunting. Vision Industries estimates that a 300-station national network of truckstops with Hydrnol capability can be built for less than $100 million.

Partnerships like this are what Asemblon has had in mind for a long time, but hadn’t delivered on until recently. The company has gone through some pretty big … Next Page »

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Wireless telecommunication networks require a constant, uninterrupted supply of electricity. Unfortunately, power outages are a common problem in many parts of India. The electrical grid in those areas can go down for hours every day. As a solution to this problem, Indian telecommunications company ACME Tele Power has turned to hydrogen fuel-cell generators to keep power flowing even when the central electrical grid goes down. As we previously reported, Vancouver, BC-based Ballard Power Systems has formed a partnership with Bend, OR-based IdaTech, and together they are manufacturing these generators for ACME; earlier this month, they completed an agreement to send 310 direct hydrogen-fueled Electragen generators to ACME.

Hydrogen fuel-cell generators are a better answer to backup power issues than coal or gasoline-powered generators for a few reasons. They are cleaner, both environmentally and internally. They have few, if any, emissions from their electricity generation, and tend to require less in the way of maintenance—an important concern especially in the more remote parts of India. This deal is the latest in an upsurge in hydrogen fuel-cell usage, notably, as we reported, in cars.

Ballard Power developed and produces the two types of fuel cell. These first 310 generators are built to use hydrogen directly. Future shipments, this year and possibly in years to come, will be fueled by natural gas to generate hydrogen to run the fuel cells and thus the generator. IdaTech, a manufacturer of backup power supplies for more than a decade, signed an agreement with Ballard in May last year to incorporate Ballard’s fuel cells into some of its generators. When ACME approached IdaTech in October about the generators, Ballard was included as part of the deal, according to Tony Cochrane, director of the backup power market segment at Ballard.

IdaTech was founded in 1996 as a backup-power product maker, specifically low-maintenance machines that run on cleaner fuels, like natural gas, than standard generators. Ballard was originally founded in 1979 to make better lithium batteries, although since then it has moved exclusively into … Next Page »

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The activity in the Northwest picked up a little bit around the holiday weekend. In the past week, we’ve seen some interesting deals in alternative energy, healthcare, and software.

—Seattle-based Qliance Medical Management raised $4 million in venture capital led by Second Avenue Partners, with participation from New Atlantic Ventures and Clear Fir Partners, as Luke reported. Qliance provides basic healthcare to patients without involving health insurance companies, with the idea of paying doctors to spend more time with fewer patients. The company was founded in 2006 and has raised a total of $7.5 million. Luke first profiled the firm, which is led by CEO Norm Wu, back in December.

—Xconomy reported that Prometheus Energy, a Redmond, WA-based producer of liquid natural gas, raised $10 million from Shell Technology Ventures (managed by Netherlands-based Kenda Capital), with $10 million more coming down the road if Prometheus meets certain milestones. It’s a big deal for Prometheus, which has developed a novel method of producing alternative fuel from waste gases at landfills, coal mines, and other facilities. It’s also a big deal for Seattle cleantech and for the alternative fuels industry, which needs support from big oil companies.

—R.W. Beck, a Seattle-based engineering and business consulting firm, has been acquired by SAIC (NYSE: SAI), the San Diego government contractor, as Eric reported. Financial terms weren’t given. SAIC performs research and services for U.S. intelligence, defense, and security agencies. R.W. Beck was founded in 1942 and focuses on the energy and infrastructure sectors.

—Seattle stealth startup Ground Truth raised $2.6 million in equity funding, according to an SEC filing. The investors include venture capitalists Tom Huseby and Erik Benson of Voyager Capital in Seattle, and Beau Laskey of Steamboat Ventures in Burbank, CA. Ground Truth is led by executives Sterling Wilson and Michael Libes.

—Burnaby, BC-based Ballard Power Systems (NASDAQ: BLDP) has teamed up with Bend, OR-based IdaTech to sell 310 hydrogen-fueled generators to ACME Tele Power, a wireless infrastructure company in India, as Eric reported. Terms of the sale weren’t disclosed. The generators will help ACME produce backup power to maintain wireless networks during outages.

—The Financial Times reported that Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is in the process of selling Razorfish, its Seattle-based online advertising subsidiary. The report, which has not been confirmed by Microsoft, claims Morgan Stanley has been appointed to find a buyer, and that Publicis, a French marketing firm, is a possible bidder. Microsoft acquired Razorfish in 2007 as part of its $6.4 billion purchase of aQuantive in 2007.

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Ballard Power Systems (NASDAQ: BLDP) and its partner, Bend, OR-based IdaTech announced today that they can now confirm the sale of 310 hydrogen fueled generators to a wireless infrastructure company in India.  Ballard, based in Burnaby, BC, manufactures the FCgen-1300 fuel cell, which will be incorporated into IdaTech’s ElectraGen generators which provide backup power for wireless networks.  ACME Tele Power will use the generators to maintain wireless networks even during power outages, a common problem in India.

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Three local venture firms put on what amounted to a university startup fair at the Charles Hotel in Harvard Square yesterday. I went hoping for a peek at a few of the companies that could be pulling down Series A rounds a year or two from now.

Now in its second year, the invitation-only University Research & Entrepreneurship Symposium was organized by Atlas Venture, Flybridge Capital Partners, and General Catalyst and sponsored by Boston-based law firm Goodwin Procter. The firms formatted the event so that university research teams with hot, potentially commercializable technologies had a chance to give their best 12-minute pitches to a large collection of venture capitalists and corporate representatives from all over the region. Attendees had one track to hear about nine companies in the life sciences industry, and other track for nine more infotech- and energy-oriented companies. The research teams weren’t just from places like Harvard and MIT, but represented 15 different institutions from around the country.

Eight of the presenting teams were from New England. One, Boston-based Novophage, is a company that Ryan already covered; it’s working on “engineered bacteriophages” to combat antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as MRSA. I couldn’t be in two places at once, so I had to skip presentations by three of the remaining seven local teams. But the following is a quick rundown of the four local presentations I did hear. All of these groups are in the lab-bench or seed-funding stage, and are looking for venture capital to get to the next step in the commercialization process.

Making Ethanol from Soybean Hulls—Without Destroying the Protein

Jonathan Mielenz of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH, talked about a project with Dartmouth engineers John Bardsley and Charles Wyman to study soybean hulls as a potential raw material in the fermentation of ethanol.

Soybeans are used to make soy oil and other food products, and their hulls, which have a high protein content, are usually used as feedstock for cattle. That would seem to make them a bad choice as a source of biomass-derived ethanol; indeed, a lot of the effort in ethanol production these days is going into technologies, like ideas being developed at local firms like Mascoma and Verenium, that use non-food, high-cellulose sources such as wood chips or switchgrass.

But Mielenz said his group has come up with a simple way to ferment the sugars in soybean hulls without destroying the protein. The high-temperature pretreatment to which most other high-cellulose biomass is subjected before fermentation would break down the proteins in soybean hulls, Mielenz said. Simply by skipping this step, Mielenz says, his startup—which doesn’t have a name yet—found it was able to extract the sugars in the hulls without disrupting the amino acid sequences in their proteins, thus preserving their value as feed.

Selling the remains of the fermentation as feed could help bring down the net cost of ethanol production and make biofuels more competitive with fossil-based fuels, Mielenz argued.

Cheaper, More Powerful Methanol Fuel Cells

Nathan Ashcraft, a PhD candidate in the laboratory of Paula Hammond in the Chemical Engineering department at MIT, gave a talk about DyPol, a startup looking to commercialize a new, more efficient type of membrane for methanol-based fuel cells.

A methanol fuel cell works by exposing methanol on the anode side of the cell to a membrane where a catalyst such as platinum splits off protons and electrons. The electrons exit the cell to form an electric current while the protons travel through the membrane, meeting oxygen from air on the cathode side of the membrane to produce water as a waste product. DuPont makes the leading membrane material for methanol fuel cells, a polymer called Nafion. But Nafion has a few weaknesses, Ashcraft said; it’s costly to make; it depends a toxic fluorination process; and it’s easily permeated by raw methanol, reducing its efficiency.

Ashcraft and colleagues in the Hammond Lab, collaborating with a number of other labs around MIT, have devised a way to build polymer membranes layer by layer, allowing them to blend polymers that couldn’t otherwise be used together. The layers are less permeable to methanol, and can be created in a non-toxic, water-based solution. Prototype fuel cells built using the new membranes have 53 percent greater energy output than … Next Page »

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Xconomy has learned that EnerG2, an advanced materials company in Seattle, has closed an $8.5 million round of Series A financing, led by Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners and Palo Alto, CA-based Firelake Capital Management, according to multiple sources familiar with the deal. The news suggests that energy venture deals could be hot, even in the midst of a cold recession.

EnerG2 was founded in 2003, with technology from the University of Washington. The company is developing novel materials—synthetic carbon powder, carbon monoliths, nanocomposites, and others. It intends to use the stuff for applications like natural gas storage, hydrogen storage, more efficient solar cells, and “ultracapacitors” to replace traditional batteries, according to its website. EnerG2 is targeting customers in industrial, consumer electronics, and automotive sectors who need more efficient energy storage.

The startup is led by CEO Rick Luebbe, chief operating and financial officer Chris Wheaton, and vice president of research and development Aaron Feaver. Feaver did his undergraduate studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (always nice to acknowledge a fellow Illini alum), and came to the Seattle area in the late 1990s to work at Boeing. He co-founded EnerG2 while pursuing his Ph.D. at the UW, working with Guozhong Cao, a professor in the materials science and engineering department.

Feaver and Cao’s work included research on material-processing techniques to create new electrochemical properties at the nano scale (billionths of a meter). In 2004, EnerG2 formed a partnership with Cao to study carbon-based nanomaterials for storing energy and other applications. The work was initially funded by a $240,000 grant from the Washington Technology Center, a state-supported economic development agency that finances applications of university research. EnerG2 has also been funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and the UW Center for Nanotechnology.

The EnerG2 venture deal speaks volumes about the commercial promise of energy storage technologies, and the vibrancy of the local energy startup scene—particularly for technologies coming out of the UW. It also strikes me as a very smart deal for OVP, which has at least four cleantech companies in its portfolio—Carbonflow, Coda Genomics, M2E Power, and Tigo Energy—but none in the Seattle area until now. The 25-year-old venture firm has a couple of nanotech investments as well, but they are more on the biology side. OVP couldn’t talk about their latest deal just yet, but I hope to follow up with them in-depth soon.

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Hydrogen-powered Sports Car on the Way

The prototype of a sports car that burns a mixture of gasoline and hydrogen should be ready by November, according to Earth2Tech. Ronn Motors, of Austin, TX, plans to unveil its Scorpion sports hybrid, with a body made of carbon fiber, in Las Vegas. The company is also working on fuel cells and plug-in electric vehicles.

FCC Wants Broadband for Everyone

The Federal Communications Commission wants to bring high-speed Internet access to the 40 percent of American homes that lack it. BusinessWeek tells us that FCC Chairman Kevin Martin wants to provide government incentives for private companies to provide more broadband service. He wants to auction off wireless spectrum and have the winning bidder commit to bringing at least minimal broadband service to 95 percent of the country within 10 years.

What’s the Best Way to Manage Broadband?

There’s a lot of discussion going on in the industry about the best way for service providers to manage their bandwidth while maintaining the principle of “net neutrality,” with ideas like tiered pricing being floated. Vint Cerf, who goes by the title of Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, agrees broadband networks need some management scheme. At Google’s Policy Blog, he offers some ideas for managing the networks, but he says any restrictions should be narrowly applied so they don’t chase consumers away from useful applications.

Surfing at 20,000 Feet

Delta thinks its passengers should be able to go online while flying, and has announced plans to offer Wi-Fi service on all of its domestic flights by the middle of next year, the New York Times reports. The airline will of course charge a fee—$9.95 for flights under three hours and $12.95 for longer flights.

San Francisco to Vote on Clean Energy Act

Voters in San Francisco will see a question establishing a Clean Energy Act in the city on the November ballot, but Mayor Gavin Newsom is opposed to it. The act would require 51 percent of the city’s electricity to come from renewable sources by 2017, 75 percent by 2030, and 100 percent by 2040. But the Environmental News Network reports that Newsom says this is an attempt to take over Pacific Gas and Electric, the region’s utility, and he opposes the act.

Insurers Rate Consumers Via Prescription Data

As the healthcare industry moves to greater use of computerized records, health insurers are looking at ways they can assess which patients they should cover. The Washington Post reports that insurance companies are using prescription drug records of more than 200 million Americans to create a sort of health credit report. The approach could cut health care costs, but privacy advocates worry that it’s happening without government oversight.

Investment in Cleantech Growing Rapidly

Concerns about the environment are helping to drive up venture investing in cleantech companies, according to a report from Ernst & Young. The report found venture investing in cleantech hit $961.7 million in the second quarter of 2008, says CNET News. A big portion of the increase is coming from large corporations, such as Shell, Chevron, and DuPont.

Does the Internet Promote the Democracy You Want?

Many people believe the Internet is an inherently democratizing force, allowing individuals to break away from the influence of oppressive governments. But a blogger at The 463 wonders what happens if the young people in places like China don’t embrace Western ideals. The blog links to interesting pieces from the New Yorker and the Economist.

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Ballard Power, a Burnaby, BC-based maker of hydrogen fuel cell products, said it has signed a three-year agreement to supply fuel cells to become part of Bend, OR-based IdaTech’s methanol-fuelled backup power system. The system, called ElectraGen, will offer 3 kilowatts or 5 kilowatts of power, enough for days of backup, instead of hours, to a broad range of sites in the wireless telecom industry, Ballard said in a statement.

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