The leader of the Green Party is calling on Premier Blaine Higgs to halt NB Power's dalliance with a Florida startup and its mysterious, unproven clean-energy technology.

Earlier this week, NB Power confirmed it has struck a deal with Joi Scientific, a Florida-based clean-energy startup, to develop power stations that would convert seawater to hydrogen electricity.

Joi Scientific CEO Traver Kennedy says the agreement will lead to "the ending of net new carbon emissions in the province."

"Every once in a while, there's a major innovation that resets a whole new area of inquiry, and we believe that our discovery will prove to be something that creates a whole new area," he said.

But to avoid revealing too much to potential competitors, "we need to keep it secret for a little bit longer."

CEO Gaetan Thomas said the technology is "proven at the laboratory level. … The issue will be scaling up" to an industrial-level generation of electricity.

Thomas wouldn't say how much money the utility has committed to the project, though the newspaper L'Acadie Nouvelle quoted Kennedy saying it's $13 million. Kennedy wouldn't repeat that in an interview with CBC News.

NB Power's payment includes a licence fee for exclusive rights to build Joi-designed hydrogen power stations and then help market the technology to other utilities while sharing in the profits.

'No mandate'

Green Leader David Coon said the venture goes beyond the utility's legislated role.

"It has no mandate as a public entity to be spending ratepayers' money on [research and development], to be acting like an angel investor in someone's project in Florida. It's not their mandate.

"They're way beyond the bounds of their mandate. The premier needs to have a discussion with the board of NB Power."

Thomas said the utility is not an investor and does not own a stake in the company.

He said NB Power is looking at two options for plants that would convert abundant seawater to hydrogen energy.

One would see a large plant alongside an existing gas plant to keep the gas plant's emissions below federal regulatory limits.

We want some proof. Just because you say something, it's not necessarily true. - Olivier Clarisse, University of Moncton

Another is a network of up to 30 smaller "mini-plants" around the province that would reduce the cost of transmitting the electricity.

Besides a share of the profit from selling the technology to other utilities, Thomas said it would reduce NB Power's carbon-tax bill.

"It has zero carbon," he said.

Mystery technology

But Coon questions whether the technology is viable.

"It still remains a mystery," he said. "No one in the hydrogen world is talking about this.

"There's no buzz that I can see about it, mainly because the company has yet to reveal exactly what it is. This remains in the realm of mystery, and it's still at the level of laboratory prototypes."

University of Moncton chemist Olivier Clarisse said he and his colleagues scoured scientific journals for evidence that the company's method is viable and could not find anything.

"We were expecting to see some papers from the scientific world about this major discovery, but we didn't see that," he said.

"The proof of concept is not available to anybody. We want some proof. Just because you say something, it's not necessarily true."

In a joint news release, NB Power and Joi Scientific said that their agreement comes after "successful third-party verifications … by scientific institutions and experts."

Studies will be released ... eventually

Kennedy said the company is looking forward to releasing peer-reviewed studies eventually.

Water is split into hydrogen and oxygen through a process called electrolysis, but Clarisse said so far no one has found a way to do that without burning more energy than what is produced.

"It's not workable to produce hydrogen in an economic sense," he said. "You receive less energy than what you have used to produce it."

Thomas said that Joi Scientific's process is not electrolysis.

"I can't tell you what it is, but it's not electrolysis," he said. "What we're saying is that it is much more efficient than electrolysis."

Thomas said NB Power hopes to have a prototype ready in two or three years, with commercial operations five years from now.

He said the utility will eventually have to provide more detail when it appears before the Energy and Utilities Board.

NB Power has been unlucky with major investments in new ventures in the past.

It spent $700 million refurbishing its Coleson Cove station to burn Orimulsion, only to see its supply agreement with a Venezuelan state-owned fuel company fall apart. The utility's lawsuit was eventually settled for $338 million.

And the refurbishment of the Point Lepreau nuclear station, the first upgrade of its kind, went $1 billion over budget and was three years late.

NB Power is betting $7 million on a promising but untested new way to generate electricity without emitting greenhouse gases: turning seawater from the Bay of Chaleur into energy.

CEO Gaëtan Thomas talked last month about converting the Belledune generating station to hydrogen power by 2030, after coal is phased out.

But the public utility is tight-lipped so far on its collaboration with Florida-based Joi Scientific, a start-up headquartered at the Kennedy Space Centre.

"Unfortunately, it is too early in the process to be discussing details of this research and development project," said NB Power spokesperson Marie-Andrée Bolduc.

Joi Scientific's vice-president of marketing, Vicky Harris, said in an email statement that the company is "involved in multiple research projects, in many different sectors, but, as I am sure you would understand, we are not sharing details of our proprietary research and development work at this time."
On its website, the company calls hydrogen "the universe's most abundant element and the world's cleanest source of energy."

Once considered too difficult

Extracting hydrogen from water and storing and transmitting it has been considered too difficult and too expensive, but Joi Scientific says in a promotional video that it "has solved the problems that have kept hydrogen from being widely used for energy."
The company says on its site that its "hydrogen 2.0" process is "a very efficient extraction technology that will enable the localized production of hydrogen gas from water — safely, affordably and with no carbon emissions."

The $7 million is paying for further research into how Joi's technology would apply at NB Power's Belledune generating station, which sits less than 200 metres from the Bay of Chaleur on New Brunswick's north shore.

Thomas said last month that converting Belledune could cost "hundreds of millions" of dollars, but the eventual fuel supply would be a bargain.
"What's cheaper fuel than seawater?" he said. "There's plenty of it in New Brunswick."

The CEO even suggested a hydrogen-powered Belledune plant could lead to lower power rates for NB Power customers.
He called hydrogen "a very promising new fuel" but acknowledged the technology is still in the research and development phase. But he pointed out NB Power has 12 years to come up with a replacement fuel for Belledune.

What to do with Belledune?

The federal government has set 2030 as the deadline for provinces to phase out coal-powered electricity under its national climate plan.

Green Party Leader David Coon said last month that it was "news to me" that hydrogen power could be generated affordably enough to use in a power plant.

University of New Brunswick chemical engineering professor Willy Cook says turning hydrogen into energy is simple, but it's not necessarily cost-effective because the process itself requires a lot of electricity.

"You can't get something for nothing," he said. "Using electricity to produce hydrogen to go back to the process to produce electricity--that in itself probably isn't economically viable."

But he said he's not familiar with Joi Scientific's technology and it's possible the company has come up with "a more efficient process."

He also said if NB Power earned carbon credits for reducing emissions, hydrogen technology might become competitive with other energy sources.

"I have faith in the NB Power engineers to come through and do that assessment properly," he said.

Some costly efforts 

 

Thomas claimed in December there is "a solid history at NB Power of being leaders in many areas," including the first Candu 6 nuclear generating station at Point Lepreau and the first-of-its-kind high-voltage direct-current converter station in Eel River.

But some of the utility's forays into new technologies have been costly.

NB Power spent $700 million refurbishing its Coleson Cove station to burn Orimulsion, only to see its supply agreement with a Venezuelan state-owned fuel company fall apart. The utility's lawsuit was eventually settled for $338 million.

And the refurbishment of Point Lepreau, the first upgrade of its kind, went $1 billion over budget and was three years late.

New Brunswick governments invested $4.7 million in a Saint John company, Atlantic Hydrogen, that went bankrupt in 2015. The company was trying to develop clean-energy technology but wasn't able to make it commercially viable.

Minister favours 'new direction'

Still, investors in the U.S., including Dean Woodman, a wealthy tech investor whose son founded GoPro, have put money into Joi Scientific.

"I was comfortable with my investment over two years ago and am even more so today," he told CBC News in an email.

NB Power's only alternative to converting Belledune would be to sign an equivalency agreement with Ottawa that would let it burn coal past 2030 in exchange for equivalent emissions reductions elsewhere. Nova Scotia signed such a deal in 2016.

But Energy Minister Rick Doucet said last month that the province prefers to "move in a new direction [with] something that's very innovative, and we've got a great opportunity right on our doorstep."