Fuel Cells

When looking at alternative fuels, such as hydrogen fuel cells, there exists the challenge of how to do it so as to be competitive with existing technologies.  The trick is to gain the advantages while overcoming the disadvantages in order to reach the goal of a competitive new transportation technology.

Hydrogen is the simplest, commonest element in existence.  That's good and that's bad.  The good thing is that it can be clean and plentiful.  The bad thing is that it takes a lot of volume to contain any of the stuff.  The result is that you have to compress it or cryogenically store it if you want to use it.  Whatever your gain was gets lost in transport or storage of the gas.  How to overcome the disadvantage and gain the advantage sought for?

There was this demonstration program called the NECAR which demonstrated one way of overcoming the storage problem.  The solution was to not store hydrogen at all, but to produce it on demand.  This method used a reforming technique to produce the hydrogen.  There may be a better way.  Here's another way to produce hydrogen from methanol:

NPO19948 methanol hydrolysis.pdf

 This is from a NASA produced pdf which I downloaded several years ago.  It may already be in commercial use, but I am not sure about that.  What its capabilities are, I don't know.  Some questions that I would have, if I could get it, would be this:  could this thing be an improvement upon the reformer method used on the NECAR?  In other words, could you put one of these on a car and drive it across country?  How would it perform?  Would it be economical?  Has anybody tried it?

In an attempt to answer this question, I didn't get very far when I went to the NREL site.  But one thing I did notice is that this method wasn't tested.  Why not?  I don't know.  It may have been tested in terms of producing hydrogen to be distributed to FCV's, but not actually on an FCV itself.  By putting one of these on an FCV, you can get around the problem of hydrogen storage.  This could solve the problem, but at what cost?  Could it be done and if so, what would it cost?  Would it be economical?  The NREL doesn't mention that as far as I can tell.

I noticed on the Ballard Fuel Cell Site awhile back that they may use this technique of extracting hydrogen from methanol by hydrolysis, but my casual perusal this time didn't yield quick results.  So, I don't know as of this writing whether or not they use this.

A possible experiment could be to see if you could power a Chevy Volt with a Ballard Fuel Cell combined with a methanol hydrolyzer (assuming one exists) that would reproduce the NECAR results.  It would be interesting to see if the results would be better or not.

Update:  1/17/11, approx 1:00pm cst

This 2006 article in Technology review shows the problem with direct methanol fuel cells.  The problem is the cost of the catalysts such as platinum and ruthenium.  These catalysts may be available in large quantities from asteroids or perhaps the Moon.

The above mentioned hydrolysis is a slightly different process, yet the result is pretty much the same as direct methanol fuel cells.

At any rate, you would only have to fill up at the pump as you would now.  Instead of gasoline, you would fill up with methanol instead.

One advantage of fuel cells is that they are much more efficient than an internal combustion engine.  It would require less fuel to achieve the same result.