High Purity Hydrogen 5.0 for Fuel Cells

High Purity Hydrogen 5.0

Klean produces hydrogen 5.0 — 99.999% purity — for fuel cell use, because stack life depends on what is in the other 0.001%.

Hydrogen is not a single product. Gas that is perfectly acceptable as a burner fuel can poison a proton exchange membrane within hours. Carbon monoxide, sulphur compounds, ammonia and particulates all attack catalyst surfaces, and the damage is cumulative and largely irreversible. For fuel cell service the specification is not a marketing grade, it is a warranty condition.

What hydrogen 5.0 means

Hydrogen 5.0 denotes 99.999% purity: five nines, with contaminants held at trace level. Klean produces hydrogen to this grade for fuel cell applications, including the Nikola Tre Fuel Cell Electric Class 8 trucks used in its collection logistics and the stationary fuel cell systems in its project portfolio.

Getting there from waste

Producing five-nines hydrogen from end-of-life tires, plastics and municipal solid waste is a gas cleaning and separation discipline as much as a conversion one. The raw stream leaving a pyrolysis or gasification process carries the signature of its feedstock, so conditioning, contaminant removal and final separation are sized for that variability rather than for an idealised inlet. Klean integrates this with partners including Enapter, H2 Core Systems and Plug Power so the delivered gas meets specification consistently, not occasionally.

Where it is used

Fuel cell trucking is the visible application. The same grade supports stationary fuel cell power — as in the United States beef-plant project integrating fuel cells with biogas — and industrial users who currently buy merchant hydrogen trucked in from distant production.

Analytical certificates, contaminant limits by species, delivery pressures and supply agreements are issued to counterparties under direct discussion.

Purity also determines logistics. Gas that already meets fuel cell specification at the point of production can be dispensed on site without a second upgrading step or a long haul to a purification plant, which removes both cost and a common source of contamination in transfer. Producing to grade at source is therefore a supply chain decision as much as a chemical one.