Fuel Cell Store Blog

Hyundai, South Korea’s largest automaker, says it will plans to commercially produce its first hydrogen fuel-cell car starting in 2012, three years after the company introduces its first gas-electric hybrid compact car in 2009, the Avante. Hyundai says the hydrogen fuel-cell model will be priced between $100,000 and $1 million, but the cost is is expected to decrease with government incentives and production economies of scale. Cleantech reports the details. We’ve mentioned Hyundai’s fuel cell plans before.

FuelCell Energy Inc. of Connecticut and Canadian gas distributor Enbridge Gas Distribution Inc. have opened what Enbridge describes as “the world’s first Direct Fuel Cell - Energy Recovery Generation (DFC-ERG) power plant.” Translation: It is the first power plant that pairs a fuel cell with an emission-free process that converts waste energy into electricity.

The $10 million plant opened in Toronto last week and will generate enough power for about 1,700 homes. From the Enbridge press release:

How the DFC-ERG^TM works
Natural gas travels long distances in pipelines at high pressure. Before it can be safely distributed to homes and businesses, the pressure must be reduced. Hundreds of these pressure reducing stations exist across Ontario. Normally this is done by squeezing the gas through a valve. Since this process causes the gas to cool, it is usually preheated using gas-fired boilers to maintain reliable deliveries of gas to consumers. Instead of using a valve which wastes the pressure energy, the DFC-ERG power plant directs the high-pressure gas through a turbo expander, which harvests the waste energy for power generation much like a wind or water turbine. The integration of the fuel cell more than doubles the amount of low-impact electricity that is delivered to the electricity grid, and the non-combustion heat from the fuel cell eliminates the need for the boiler and its emissions.

FuelCell CEO R. Daniel Brdar said the two companies will promote the technology to other gas utilities. The Connecticut Clean Energy fund has already selected approximately 18 MW of DFC-ERG power plants for the state’s renewable energy requests for proposals, Brdar said.

Here’s the Reuters news service report.

Think fuel cells are a tiny little niche business? The 32nd annual Fuel Cell Seminar and Exposition starting today in Phoenix might just change your mind. The event, today through Oct. 30, has attracted more than 800 companies to the Phoenix Convention Center, according to the Phoenix Business Journal, and will feature expositions on the latest technology behind fuel cells for uses ranging from cars to backup power. The event also will will include technical seminars to help bring together researchers in the field.

The Fuel Cell Seminar and Exposition was begun as a government event but became a privately organized event in 2005. The goal of the Fuel Cell Seminar and Exposition: Provide a backdrop for the industry to see where companies are taking fuel cells and to trade information about their technical aspects. Among the features this year: a driving course where attendees can test drive five fuel-cell vehicles from Daimler, GM, Honda, Hyundai, and Toyota.

Panasonic has the big fuel cell news today - engineers at the Japanese electronics giant have succeeded in reducing the size of a prototype methanol fuel cell so that it is no larger than a laptop battery pack but provides all-day power. ITWorld.com reports:

The fuel cell, which the Japanese company has been developing for the last eight years, was first shown at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 2006. At that time it was about double the size of a laptop battery, but the latest version, due to be unveiled later this week at an event in Japan, is half the size, Panasonic said Monday. The new version has a volume of 270 cubic centimeters and can deliver an average power of 10 watts with a peak output of 20 watts, Panasonic said. It weighs 320 grams.

Wired calls it “a real leap forward in batteries for notebooks.”

DailyTech.com says it won’t be available on the market until 2012.

A Win-Win? Researchers Find Low-Cost Way to Make Hydrogen from Sewage
Researchers at Oregon State University are working on a technology that, if commercialized, would be a win-win for our energy needs and the environment. The newly technology for producing hydrogen gas from biowaste - sewage - offers the possibility of not just a much lower cost way to produce hydrogen, helping usher in the hydrogen-powered future faster, it also means a new way to get rid of human waste.

From the Oregon State University press release:

A new approach has been developed to use several types of biowaste, including ordinary municipal sewage, to produce hydrogen at a much lower cost than the traditional “electrolysis” technology, and make it more viable for use in the hydrogen fuel cells that many believe will power automobiles of the future. The findings have just been reported in Water Research, a professional journal, by researchers in the College of Engineering at Oregon State University.

Studies suggest that this approach could reduce the amount of energy needed to produce hydrogen by as much as 75 percent, compared with hydrogen production by water electrolysis. More work needs to be done to reduce the cost for electrode materials and more advances in efficiency are possible, experts say.

“In the laboratory we’re already quite close to the Department of Energy hydrogen cost goal of $2 to $3 per gasoline gallon equivalent, or GGE,” said Hong Liu, an OSU assistant professor of biological and ecological engineering. “And with some additional research it should be possible to scale these systems up to levels needed for commercial use.”

But that’s not even the best news, Liu said. While it’s producing significant amounts of hydrogen from sewage, this system also cleans the water. …

“Another interesting application of this approach might be in developing countries or remote areas,” Liu said. “Often these places have few or no waste treatment plants, and no practical way in a remote location to produce electricity. Small systems used there might solve both problems.

“There’s no doubt this could help contribute to a more sustainable future,” Liu said. “We could clean up our sewage and produce fuel at the same time. That’s very promising.”

Indeed. Faster, please.

You can listen online to Oregon Public Radio’s news report on this story here, or download it by clicking here.

BeyondFossilFuel.com takes a look at the KH4 portable hydrogen-powered generator from Trulite, a Houston-based company:

Simply pour water into the unit and it will generate 150 watts of electricity, 200 watts at its peak. While 200 watts is not a tremendous amount of power it will recharge laptops, cell phones, recharge power tools or run a small appliance.

The website says contractors working on skyscrapers “will be the primary target market” for the KH4. Contactors use cordless power tools that need frequent battery changes, which requires either carrying a lot of spare batteries or toting around a gasoline generator to recharge them. Generators create objectionable fumes and noise - the KH4 will be an attractive alternative, the website says. Also, says BeyondFossilFuel.com, “Campers will love the Turlite KH4 for TV’s and small appliances because a portable hydrogen generator is very quite unlike a gasoline generator.

The website says Trulite “will send out beta units soon and plans to sell the units the second quarter of 2009.”

We’re looking forward to that.

Bloom Energy, a fuel-cell startup backed by the Kleiner Perkins venture capital firm reported to “almost certainly have a commercial product ready within a year or two,” has just licensed thermal management technology for its fuel-cell development from Modine Manufacturing Co. for $12 million. Here’s the Business Wire press release.

According to Earth2Tech from GigaOm, the agreement stipulates that Modine will provide products and services to Bloom Energy through December 2009, “about the time we hear Bloom might be unveiling its 5-kilowatt Bloom box.”

In a successful test at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, over the past two years, engineers ran the refrigerator-sized Bloom box on natural gas for 6,000 hours and found it to be twice as efficient as a boiler burning natural gas, with 60 percent lower carbon emissions. The thermal energy management system licensed from Modine is crucial in allowing the fuel cell to run long periods of time without overheating.

Bloom has reportedly pulled in $250 million over the last six years. As the company approaches production of a commercial product we expect to start hearing more about Kleiner’s stealthy Sunnyvale, Calif.-based fuel-cell bet.

Ballard Power Systems will supply 10,000 fuel cells to be used as backup power for wireless telecom base stations in India over the next two years, the Vancouver, Canada, company announced today.

Ballard will deliver 1,000 fuel cells in 2009 and 9,000 in 2010 to a new joint venture between IdaTech, which makes fuel-cell systems, and the Acme Group, which sells green-energy and energy-efficiency systems to telecom companies and others.

The cells are slated to provide backup power for Acme customers’ wireless base stations, which connect calls to and from mobile phones. The agreement gives Acme exclusive rights to sell Ballard’s fuel cells for stationary power applications in India and for telecom backup-power applications in the Middle East and Africa, except for South Africa.

It’s the biggest supply agreement the company has ever signed - Ballard shipped 850 fuel cells in 2007 and expected to ship about 1,700 this year.

Click here to watch a Ballard promotional video showcasing how the company is accelerating fuel cell adoption in the wireless telecom backup power market. The company operates in several niches, including cogeneration, materials handling, buses and prototype automobiles.

Could a mushroom enzyme help make fuel cells less expensive - thus helping bring the technology to the mass market? Perhaps, says this report in London’s Guardian newspaper, though it isn’t going to happen overnight.

A chemical found in mushrooms could one day replace the expensive and polluting heavy metals at the heart of fuel cells and conventional batteries, say chemists at Oxford University, boosting the development of clean power. They have demonstrated that laccase, an enzyme produced by fungi that grow on rotting wood, can be used as a cheaper and more efficient catalyst. Fuel cells use chemical reactions - such as that between hydrogen and oxygen - to produce emissions-free electricity. But current technology is expensive and requires electrodes that contain rare metals such as platinum.

Christopher Blanford, a chemist at Oxford, is working to replace these metals with enzymes, biological molecules that are cheap and abundant. Enzymes are used by living organisms from bacteria to humans to speed up chemical reactions and there are many different types specialised to catalyse specific reactions.

Laccase has now been shown to equal the catalytic performance of platinum when used to speed up the reactions on the electrode of a fuel cell. The fungi, such as Trametes versicolor, use laccase to break down lignin, a component of the cell walls of plants. But Blanford found that it was also highly effective at reacting oxygen with hydrogen to produce water and electricity. Portable power sources from enzyme-coated electrodes could one day replace the batteries in now everyday use, he said.

Around 3 billion batteries are used every year in western countries, which turn into a mountain of 200,000 tonnes of unrecycled waste in the UK, Canada and the US alone. Even the world’s supply of one of the crucial ingredients in normal batteries, zinc, is due to run out in 2037 according to the British Geological Survey. And, although countries such as the UK may have no domestic source of zinc and platinum, there are plenty of plants that can be grown to produce laccase.

Blanford’s first goal is to produce a fuel cell that works as well as a rechargeable battery, producing about 400 milliamps for around 2,500 hours. This is enough for a portable music player but, in future, he intends to produce mobile-phone sized batteries or fuel cells in the standard AA shape, all using mass-produced enzymes harvested from genetically modified fungi. He says that a single re-fuelling of an enzyme-based fuel cell would last the equivalent of 20 re-charges of a modern battery.

Interesting stuff, though it’s a long way from commercialization and there are many questions.

Smart Fuel Cell AG, a leading provider of fuel cell technologies for mobile and off-grid power applications, today announced that it will open a sales and technical service office in Atlanta, the first step toward establishing full U.S. operations. The Atlanta office is needed to meet growing demand for its fuel cell products for the defense and industrial markets, the German-based company said in its press release.

“The United States is a key and fast-growing market for SFC and our new office is intended to be our first step towards establishing full U.S. operations. Establishing a team of SFC experts on the East Coast will enable us to work even more closely with our defense and commercial partners,” said Dr. Peter Podesser, CEO of SFC Smart Fuel Cell. “The new headquarters in the U.S. will serve to further enhance our collaboration with our technology partners as well as help us to increase our market penetration into the U.S.”

Previous posts about SFC can be found here.