Fuel cells drawing on power of the most faithful

Weekend Australian
Saturday 8/11/2008 Page: 4

QUEEN Victoria was in only her second year on the throne. France had a Bourbon king. Prussia dominated a cluster of states that had still to become Germany. Martin van Buren was president of the US. It was 1839 the year two scientists, one German, the other Welsh, simultaneously came up with the idea of fuel-cells and 170 years later their invention is still battling to establish its place in the energy spectrum.

With General Motors announcing the imminent birth of a fuel-cell car, the Sequel, and Honda beginning small-scale commercial production of their Clarity, it might seen that the long arduous trek of the concept from the minds of Christian Schoenbeing and Sir William Grove to community use is finally over, but not so fast nothing is ever easy with fuel-cell development.

It is not hard to see why motor manufacturers including Ford, Daimler, Hyundai, Toyota and BMW have fuel-cell propelled cars as a key goal. The vehicles are virtually noiseless and their exhaust is distilled water. But the inability of technologists to deliver hydrogen supplies in scalable volumes and the non-existence of infrastructure for refuelling is not so much a bump in their road as the Grand Canyon.

The outlook is not helped by the fact that the fuel-celled cars need engines using platinum, a repeat of the precious metals issue manufacturers had to overcome when catalytic converters were first put in cars. Ford's chief engineer for hybrid and fuel-cell technology, Scott Staley, is blunt about the problem. He has told US technical media that there is "a lot of serious science that has to be done to get costs down by a factor of 10 or more". But, he also points out, the cost factor was 100 to 1 at the start of the decade.

Unfortunately, the environmental movement is not all that enthusiastic about fuel-cell vehicles either. The Friends of the Earth in Britain summed up their attitude by commenting recently: "Hydrogen-fuelled cars are a long way off the immediate priority of the motor industry should be cutting vehicle emissions by producing smarter cars that burn less fuel." The other aspect troubling the environmentalists is that hydrogen is complex to produce and requires a great deal of energy in the process. It would be cheaper, they and others in industry point out, to take the methane needed for gas turbines to provide this energy and pump it straight into the fuel tanks of gas-propelled cars.

The hype this year of GM and Honda in announcing their concept cars is an extension of innumerable announcements of breakthroughs over nearly four decades by manufacturers and fuel-cell developers. However, with international pressure to slow the growth of fossil fuel use and to transition to a sharp reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, fuel-cell research has grown substantially this decade and its proponents see real prospects for success, although not necessarily a major shift in fuelling motor vehicles in even the medium term.

Fuel-cells, in fact, have been in use now for almost 40 years. They power space capsules, the NASA shuttle and the space station. They are used in submarines because they generate no noise or vibration and, in still limited applications, they are being used to recover energy from methane exuded by waste water and garbage dumps as well, more recently, to operate co-generation (heat and power) plants in buildings.

The US fuel-cell sector points out that they are now at work powering thousands of American buildings, including hospitals and hotels usually as back-up in case of grid failure and are also in use for vending machines, highway road signs and even industrial-strength vacuum cleaners.

"This is an exciting time in the history of fuel-cells," gushes Valerie Browning, spruiking a large conference on the topic she is chairing in Phoenix, Arizona. "Everyone's been talking about fuel-cells and now they are finally using them. After decades of research and development, they have come of age."

Her optimism is shared by the well-known Tokyo research institution Fuji Keizai Co, which claimed last month that the Japanese market for fuel-cells has the potential to expand by 300 times its present size by 2020, generating sales of more than $US11 billion. Fuji Keizai's projections include a big future for the cells in the automotive industry, embracing buses and trucks as well as cars, and a strong take-up by households.

American technologist Bela Liptak, inventor of a solar hydrogen system, claims that the cost of his cells, which he asserts can make solar energy available night and day, can be driven down from $US3000 per kilowatt today to about $US250/kW. By comparison, an American diesel generator today costs between $US800 and $US1500 per kW and a natural gas turbine no more than $US400. "Reducing the fuel-cell cost to $US250," says Liptak, "will make it competitive for virtually every type of power application."