Oil Co. CEOs and More on Fuel Cells

Oil Co. CEOs and More on Fuel Cells

This past six weeks or so has been an intense ENERGY period

for me. Hence, I beg your forgiveness for being unable to write

about any other subject. I promise this will be the last on energy

for at least a couple weeks or so. I”ve been working virtually

night and day preparing material for a 4-day course on batteries,

other energy storage and generation devices such as fuel cells. I

discussed a bit about the latter a couple weeks ago in my column

that also lamented the passing of my friend Charlie. I want to

correct one statement made in that column. Specifically, I cited

my home”s electricity usage at 25 kilowatt-hours per month.

Would that were the case. It should have been 25 kilowatt-hours

per day! This also changes my calculation of how many such

homes could be powered by a 250-kilowatt fuel cell. It”s about

240, not 7,000! This is my second mea culpa in two weeks and

probably indicates something about my own energy level.

My two colleagues, Al and Tom, and I presented the course last

week at a U. S. Navy facility in southwestern Indiana. I had

forgotten (a) how beautiful the rolling hills of that area are with

thousands of dogwoods blooming and (b) how friendly and

genuine the people are. For the course, I had the task of

delivering the lecture on fuel cells. I have had no experience with

fuel cells and it took some degree of chutzpah to talk about this

subject. To be honest, my column of a couple weeks ago was to

help embed in my mind some of the features of these devices. I

prefaced my Navy talk by saying that, ironically, I had never even

seen a fuel cell but that, after my lecture, I was to be shown one

that they had running just a short walk from our lecture hall! It

was consoling that one member of the group, prior to my lecture,

had asked me just what a fuel cell was; at least some of the

audience were indeed unfamiliar with the concept.

Well, this fuel cell installation proved to be quite impressive and

was, coincidentally, a 250-kilowatt unit. However, it was not the

phosphoric acid type of fuel cell made by ONSI, the company

mentioned in the column two weeks ago. Instead, it used a

polymer electrolyte or so-called “proton exchange” membrane

(PEM) and was manufactured by Ballard Power Systems in

Canada. This type of cell employs a membrane, a sheet of plastic

a few thousandths of an inch thick. The membrane allows

hydrogen ions (protons) to zip through it and replaces the

conventional liquid electrolytes such as the sulfuric acid in your

car battery. It”s rather neat in that each side of the sheet of

polymer is coated with platinum particles acting as the catalysts to

speed the overall reaction of hydrogen and oxygen to form water.

I think it”s neat because you have all the action taking place on

one sheet of material. Incidentally, Ballard is the company that

manufactures the fuel cells used in the fuel cell-powered buses

now running on regularly scheduled routes in Chicago and

Vancouver.

The Ballard unit I saw occupied about the same volume and

somewhat resembled the back end of your typical large tractor-

trailer. The unit was operating on natural gas that was being

compressed to a higher pressure than what comes out of your gas

line. The compressed gas then passes through a unit that removes

any sulfur that is present as an impurity in natural gas. Any

sulfur would quickly poison our platinum catalyst. The sulfur-

free gas now has to be “reformed” into a mixture rich in hydrogen

by reacting with very hot steam. This generates a good bit of

carbon monoxide, which is a poison, not only for us but also for

the platinum. So, another couple of steps involving more

catalysts “shift” the carbon monoxide to carbon dioxide, a more

acceptable compound. Only after all these steps is the hydrogen-

rich gas fed into the fuel cell. The amount of plumbing packed

into the unit to accomplish all this was quite impressive to say the

least. The unit was housed in a tent with a cooling unit sticking

outside the tent. The cooling unit was pretty noisy but inside the

tent, it was quiet.

I asked the young man in charge how often they shut down the

unit for maintenance. He replied that the unit made that decision

for them. So far, it seems that there has been no problem with the

actual fuel cell stack itself. The problems have all been with the

equipment necessary to get the gas into the proper form to feed

the fuel cell itself. It seems clear that this “PEM” (proton

exchange membrane) type of fuel cell is in its early stages as far as

the economically competitive production of large-scale power is

concerned. However, I gather from the Ballard Web site that a

similar 250-kilowatt unit will be field tested in Germany.

(Germany, incidentally, leads the world in the amount of installed

wind power facilities and is also quite active in other areas of

alternative energy such as solar power.)

At the other end of the scale, Los Alamos and Motorola are

developing a very small PEM fuel cell. This fuel cell occupies

only about a square inch of area and is being considered for use in

a cellular phone. No huge amounts of plumbing, hot steam, etc.

for this device. Instead, this tiny fuel cell would be fed methanol

directly; hence the name of the Direct Methanol Fuel cell

(DMFC). The cellphone envisioned would be of the small size

currently in use and would accommodate the tiny fuel cell plus a

slot for inserting small tubes containing methanol. When you run

out of methanol, just remove the old tube and put in a new one.

No waiting to recharge your battery.

We flew home from Indiana to New Jersey via Cleveland, landing

and taking off within a few hundred yards of NASA Lewis, site of

my first job working on the ill-conceived atomic airplane. On the

flight from Cleveland to Newark, I still couldn”t escape “energy”.

Al passed me a copy of a slick publication “World Energy” he

picked up in the airport lounge. It was an issue primarily

concerned with the petroleum industry and CEOs of major oil

companies wrote most of the articles I scanned. It was quite

interesting to read their viewpoints, on the other side of the fence

from the usual environmentally oriented critics of the oil industry.

More than one of the CEOs stressed that those who maintained

that the science predicting greenhouse warming was flawed and

no action was required were barking up the wrong tree. These

CEOs, on the contrary, were stating that, even if the science is

uncertain, there had to be a sincere effort on the part of the oil

industry to address the greenhouse gas emissions problem. One

figure I recall is that slightly over a third of the greenhouse

emissions in the U. S. come from the generation of electricity.

One CEO stressed the point that it would take the cooperation of

everyone, not just the oil and power generating industries, to

bring down these emissions.

In my own household, I”m sure we could reduce substantially

those 25 kilowatt-hours consumed per day by turning off more

lights. Now if I could only convince my wife. She would

probably suggest I write shorter columns and save all that time on

the computer, which must use a few watt-hours itself.

Allen F. Bortrum