Changing priorities
ECN ended up in a turbulent world. The issue of energy was on everyone’s lips. After the second oil crisis of 1979, coal was once again seen as the fuel of the future, though in a far cleaner form than before. A major national research programme for coal was soon established and ECN was assigned a role in this as well.
Its tasks included research on issues such as fluidised bed combustion for the application of coal in the industry. Sadly, this application proved unable to compete with the use of natural gas and all interest in the fluidised bed combustion of coal was eventually lost. ECN then turned its attention to coal gasification, an activity that would later form the basis of the current biomass gasification research at ECN.
In the 1980s, ECN invested a great deal of effort in the development of fuel cells. The development seemed to be happening at a rapid pace in the rest of the world and the Netherlands did not want to be left behind. Again, all hope was pinned on the development of a type of technology on which the Netherlands could build its own energy industry. ECN played a pivotal role in this research, where the material-related knowledge that had been gained during nuclear research proved an important link. Unfortunately, the market prospects turned out to be unsatisfactory and the high industrial ambitions had to be scaled down. In the meantime, ECN had grown into an internationally renowned knowledge centre in the field of fuel cell technology.
The solar energy programme that ECN launched in the late eighties was another core area. By then, all the major international players were collaborating in this field.
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