The Day an Ambulance Taught Me Everything About Hydrogen Purity

I’m not an engineer. I’m a microbiologist, trained in aquatics, with a career built in water chemistry and treatment. That distinction matters more than it might seem — because the moment that changed how I think about hydrogen systems had nothing to do with engineering theory. It had to do with what happens when water isn’t clean enough.

The Incident

In 2002, I was introduced to the Hydrogen Fuel Injection industry when an installation of an HFI unit, working in the field, failed. An impurity carryover in the system led directly to an ambulance’s throttle body failing. Not a simulation. Not a lab result. A real vehicle, doing real work, failing because of something that started as a water purity problem. Racing to an accident location, the throttle butterfly valve stuck in the open throttle position when approaching an intersection. The driver slammed his foot on the accelerator pedal twice, which did not remediate the problem, and immediately turned the engine off. This stopped the acceleration problem but resulted in a locked steering wheel and a reduction in braking effectiveness. He was able to stop without further incident and called for another unit to take the call. It could have been a much worse outcome. The cause: mineral build up on the throttle body created by impurities in the hydrogen being injected into the fuel/air mixture. A water purity problem.

For most engineers coming into hydrogen from a mechanical or electrochemical background, contamination is a variable to manage. For me, coming from water chemistry, it was the whole story. I’d spent years learning exactly how impurities behave, migrate, and cause failure downstream — just never in a hydrogen system, until that day.

Why Hydrogen Purity Became My Approach

That incident is the reason I’ve spent the years since treating hydrogen purity as a water chemistry problem first, and an engineering problem second. It’s also why, when I was later engaged by hydrogen pioneer Bill Ross to help solve carryover contamination in electrolyzer output, my background wasn’t a strange fit — it was exactly the right one.

Most people writing about hydrogen energy come at it from mechanical engineering or electrochemistry. I come at it from the water. It’s a different lens, and I think it’s one the hydrogen industry doesn’t have enough of.