| Report on Knowledge Foundation's Small
Fuel Cell Conference This was the 6th consecutive year for this conference, which has become the leading North American conference specifically about "small" fuel cells, and as far as H2FC knows, the leading such annual conference in the world. There were attendees from a variety of sectors: investment types, chemical and parts suppliers, potential micro fuel cell customers and of course the fuel cell companies themselves. The scope of the conference included "micro" fuel cells all the way up to systems in the range of hundreds of watts, plus small hydrogen storage and generation devices (reformers). There wasn't a single device on display at this conference, working or otherwise: the four or five tables in the "exhibition area" offered literature only. Also, there was not a single presentation from any of the Japanese electronics manufactures who have been so actively hyping their fuel cells lately. People from those companies may or may not have been in the audience - H2FC was not able to scrutinize every attendee's name tag. Samsung was the only Asian company to give a presentation.
Stefener made much of how well suited the A25 is for the mobile home/recreational vehicle ("RV") market and his company's partnership with Hymer, a "market leader in recreational vehicles" in Europe. H2FC didn't get it. For one thing, 25W is not much for an RV: 25W won't run even one appliance or TV at a time. At most, 25W will run a small music system or a couple of small incandescent lights. And then there is that price. H2FC cannot understand why any RV owner (except one who happens to be quite wealthy as well as a rabid fuel cell enthusiast) would ever spend so much for so little power. The power output of the A25 is much better suited for a laptop computer than a recreational vehicle (although the unit is much too large to be of practical use to any but the most power desperate laptop user), and the price would be much more justifiable for a customer in some super-premium application like providing uninterruptible power backup for a medical heart monitor or toxic leak sensor. On the other hand, the A25 page on SFC's web site also promotes this product for use on boats, where it could provide primary or backup power for navigation equipment (a pretty premium application in a storm or other emergency) and battery charging "wherever it might be required" (is this the the real RV application?), and points out that lead acid batteries with energy content comparable to the A25 (with one fuel cartridge?) would weigh "about 100kg" (220 lbs.). So the 9.7 kg/21 lb. A25 might be attractive in applications highly sensitive to weight, like power for instrumentation on an ultralight airplane.
H2FC called Fuel Cell Store last week to see if they had a better price than $4750 for the SFC A25, and was told that a distribution agreement with SFC is in the works and that there is no pricing information available for the A25 yet. The sales rep did tell H2FC that Fuel Cell Store is selling the 1 kw Ballard Airgen for $6495, plus $1100 for a fueling adapter form Praxair. The Airgen appears to be a much better deal - higher power output for the dollar - than SFC's product, especially for an RV type customer, as long as that customer can get fuel (compressed, tanked hydrogen) and has a way of conveniently storing it in a place like a mobile home, and the recent approval of metal hydride storage canisters by the US government should make using the AirGen much more convenient once those canisters become available. The AirGen is three or four times the size of the A25 and the compressed H2 fuel currently available is a lot less convenient than SFC's liquid fuel, but the Airgen provides 40 times the power output (Airgen's 1000watts/A25's 25 watts) for a price that is only about a third higher than the A25's. There were three MTI Micro (MKTY) related presentations given at this conference. The first, by Duracell's "VP for New Products and OEM Business", dealt with marketing issues, like the "chicken and egg" problem of making the fuel cell and the fuel cartridges available at the same time, getting retailers to stock the product before it proves itself with sales, making the product an attractive proposition for retailers, etc. The Duracell speaker stated that we are "still a couple of years away from large scale regulatory approval" of methanol based fuel cells. This was a recurring theme in the MTI presentations, and H2FC sees the regulatory issue as starting to become somewhat of an excuse for not pursuing consumer markets now (see discussion of Motorola's take on this issue below), when in H2FC's view the real reason that the MTI technology won't fly as a consumer product is its very high probable cost compared to the best available batteries. The second MTI presentation
was by Alan Soucy, COO of MTI Micro. His presentation started with
the standard MTI line about the size of the market, the "growing
dependence on wireless portable devices" and potential applications
for micro-FCs (as if anyone who has done even cursory due diligence
on the subject doesn't know all of this already). The balance of Soucy's
presentation was about how great the MTI-Gillette alliance is: (quoting
the handout materials) "it will take more than great technology
to launch an industry and become a market success - MTI Micro and
Gillette Duracell share this vision". A shared vision is great,
but the presentation was pretty thin on how that vision gets translated
into a business. Not a word was said about how much MTI's
technology will cost, what kind of margins MTI or Duracell will be
able to achieve, and when MTI/Duracell will actually enter the consumer
market. Overall, Soucy's talk struck H2FC as pretty fluffy.
Gottesfeld also talked about hybridizing his fuel cells with batteries, making it unclear to H2FC whether achieving energy density significantly better than Li-Ion in a pure fuel cell system is even a goal at MTI anymore. Gottesfeld spent a little bit of time on non-methanol micro fuel cell chemistries, asserting that formic acid and ethanol micro-FCs can't perform as well as MTI's DMFC. His criticism of Medis's approach was less explicit than it was at the Fuel Cells 2004 conference in Miami last November: this time he only said that you can't get much power density from a 6% aqueous solution of a hydride, whereas last time he specifically criticized alkaline chemistry, but in H2FC's view this veiled swipe at Medis was still unfair because it ignored the fact that Medis uses two fuels (glycerol and sodium borohydride) that work together synergistically. H2FC no longer believes that MTI's claim that it uses "100% directly into the fuel cell" is just semantics (a convenient redefinition of "inside the cell"), and is now persuaded that Gottesfeld has achieved the mechanical engineering workarounds required to get past one of biggest problems inherent in the Nafion-platinum-methanol chemistry (crossover). But the issues of manufacturability and cost remain, as does the question of what margins will be left for MTI after Dupont gets its share for the MEA, Duracell gets its share for the refueling system, Flextronics gets its share for assembly, and possibly others get their shares for electronics and fluidics. Although H2FC now believes that MTI is on track to deliver a working product to Intermec by the end of 2004, H2FC still believes that it will be several years at best before the MTI fuel cell can be made cheap enough to compete with batteries (and Medis) in high volume consumer markets, and still has a hard time trying to figure out how MTI will ever make much money with its technology. There were two presentations from Motorola. The first, by Jerry Hallmark (Manager, Energy Technologies, Motorola Labs), an old hand at these conferences, emphasized a "reformed methanol to hydrogen fuel cell" (RHFC). There was a lot of detail about the reformer itself: "Multi-Layer Ceramic Conceptual Design for RHFC", trade offs in terms of the complexity of the micro-reformer versus performance and durability of the fuel cell as the result of allowing more or less carbon monoxide to be in the reformate stream, chemistry and engineering of the reformer, etc. A slide in the presentation indicates that the reformer itself operates at 225°C (437°F) and requires a combustor operating at 250°C (482°F) - unattractive, to put it mildly, for hand held consumer devices where the heat generated by the electronics themselves is in many cases already a big problem (try actually running a laptop on your lap for awhile). Other points made by Hallmark:
In H2FC's view, Motorola has made only the most incremental progress toward a commercially viable micro fuel cell over the last few years, has all but given up on a PEM-DMFC, and still has a very long way to go before it has a RHFC ready for market. Talking about a cordless desktop battery charger (as opposed to "mobile" or "portable") as the most attractive fuel cell product is a warning sign. Hallmark and his team are staying at it, but Motorola is pretty clearly not making much significant progress, and is still really waiting for better membranes and catalysts to be developed by others. The other Motorola presentation was by Ronald Kelly, a "Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff and Advanced Energy Technology project leader in Motorola's Advanced Project Technology Center." This presentation was about such things as integrating a fuel cell into an electronic device, where the wireless paradigm is going, battery performance being a moving target with respect to fuel cells, hybridization of fuel cells and batteries and so on - not the technical issues involved in the fuel cells themselves. For H2FC the most interesting thing Kelly said, in a slide titled "Challenges: Forget about the Airplane" was that (quoting the slide as included in the handout materials) "[i]f consumers demand fuel cell technology then regulators will approve (see Li-ion)." This seems to undercut assertions by MTI and other participants at the conference that fuel cells for consumer markets will have to wait for regulatory approval: Kelly is saying that if the fuel cell technology is good enough and the market knows about that technology and wants it, the regulatory issues will be resolved quickly. This was certainly the case when lithium ion batteries were introduced: li-ion was well known at first for spontaneous combustion (burning phones and laptops), yet as soon as li-ion became available and the market saw how superior it is in performance to ni-cad, li-ion was approved to be carried and used on airplanes. Kelly is saying here that regulation is not the problem for fuel cells, the problem is getting the fuel cells to be good enough to displace batteries. H2FC agrees. H2FC missed Neah Power's presentation (had to get to the airport to go home) but the handout materials indicate that the initial Neah product will be in the 15-30W range, and that "field trials/early shipments" won't begin until 2006. Most interestingly, one slide in the handout materials from Neah shows the anode and cathode reactions for a methanol-nitric acid chemistry, and another shows sulfuric acid involved in the chemistry. In the past Neah has always talked about a straight methanol chemistry, and that's all the web site's technology pages still talk about. (Google searches of the Neah web site for "acid" "nitric" and "sulfuric" turn up nothing, while "methanol" produces 27 hits.) H2FC's conclusion: while the heart of Neah's technology is still the the porous silicon based electrodes and membranes, the actual power generating chemistry remains unsettled, as do intended applications, since Neah now appears to be focused on laptops to the exclusion of cell phones and other smaller devices that the company has talked about in the past. In light of the fact that Neah's chemistry still seems to be changing pretty radically, "early shipments" in 2006 strikes H2FC as very optimistic. A presentation by the principal investigator of small fuel cell research at Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, Hyuk Chang, was very heavy on using nanotechnology based catalyst support materials as a way of maximizing catalyst surface area. A "nanocomposite membrane" based on "inorganic proton conductor from clay material" was discussed. An image of a 150 cc, 15 cell stack intended for a laptop computer sitting comfortably on top of a compact disc was shown, along with a chart showing relative performance of systems with pumps providing the cathode with air at 2 liter/minute versus 1 liter/minute. Chang also said that Samsung's electronics division will accept a fuel cell with an operating temperature of 70°C, which H2FC finds pretty hard to believe. For H2FC, the most important thing Chang said was that in order for his DMFCs to be commercialized, he must achieve a 200% improvement in power density, a 50% reduction in size, and a 30% reduction in cost. Since making additional progress gets harder and harder the closer one gets to the goal (this seems to be an "unwritten law of nature), the Samsung effort seems to H2FC to still be a pretty long term R&D project. Robert Hockaday, who was once much more closely associated with Manhattan Scientifics (MHTX) than he is now, was present at the conference but did not give a presentation. H2FC caught him in the hall during a break. He said that he is continuing to work on his fuel cell and is continuing to make progress, and that he is now working with MHTX purely on a licensing basis. He was being very reserved in his comments, and that was about all H2FC could get out of him. [This report covers only a few of the
presentations given at this conference.] |
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The
third and for H2FC by far the most interesting MTI presentation was
by MTI Micro's chief scientist, Shimshon Gottesfeld. Gottesfeld finally
said enough about how his fuel cell works, in particular about how
his fuel cell can run on 100% methanol, to take his technology out
of the realm of pure magic (for H2FC at least) and into the realm
of a device that operates in a way that H2FC can at least speculate
about. Gottesfeld said that while water is still mixed with methanol
on the fuel side of his cell, the cell can start from a dry state
using neat methanol and without water priming by using the
crossover phenomenon and generating the water needed for start-up
on the cathode side of the cell as the initial jolt of methanol crosses
over the membrane. H2FC takes this to mean that there must be a layer
or layers on the cathode side made of materials and set up in such
away that when 100% fuel is introduced into the dry cell at start-up
time and immediately starts crossing over the membrane to the cathode
side, a lot of water is quickly generated through catalytic oxidation
of that fuel (unknown how much heat this generates - maybe quite a
bit), and the water is forced back through the membrane (by a diffusion
gradient?) where it can immediately be used to dilute more fuel, which
once diluted is less prone to crossing the membrane. Such a mechanism
should have the very desirable property of being self regulating:
the more water is generated at the cathode to be driven back through
the membrane to the fuel side, the more the fuel becomes diluted and
the slower the crossover becomes, until an equilibrium is reached
and the cell runs at a steady state as long as fuel is available.
Another possibility might be pores all the way through the membrane
or indentations on the anode side lined with catalyst, so that when
"neat" fuel is introduced into the dry cell, water is quickly
generated "inside" the membrane from where it can quickly
diffuse into the membrane material proper and the area on the anode
side closest to the membrane, where that water can quickly be available
to start diluting additional fuel. Gottesfeld was still mysterious
about how the water produced at the cathode gets back to the fuel
side without leaving the cell ("we have our ways"), but
H2FC guesses now that this is done with channels of some kind going
through the membrane arranged in such a way that the water produced
at the cathode "prefers" to move in the direction of the
membrane and the anode.