Panasonic will be first to market next year with a complete home heating system based on fuel cell technology. The system consists of two large storage tanks: one for natural gas and the other for water. The fuel cell takes hydrogen from the natural gas and combines it with oxygen to produce water. The electricity produced by that process is then used to heat the home, but the water by-product also acts as a heating element, thereby increasing the efficiency of the system.
There is still a need for a natural gas supply, but Panasonic says the system is more efficient (i.e., it uses less gas) than conventional heating systems. The only downside initially will be the price, which comes in around US$10,000 per system. Panasonic will start installing it in new Japanese homes next year.
Toshiba, on the other hand, is going miniature with its fuel cells, claiming it has produced a cell capable of powering an MP3 player for 20 hours while being just a bit larger than a chewing gum tablet. In terms of technology the system is complete; however, Toshiba doesn't plan to release the cells until 2006 because of a lack of testing and the often overlooked issue of teaching the consumer how to use fuel cells.
Toshiba's system is different from conventional fuel cell systems, which require a separate reservoir for the water by-product. Toshiba's cells take air and mix it with methanol to produce water, CO2, and electrons; the water is fed back into the mix, prolonging the reaction. Adding more methanol is just a matter of inserting a new gum-like cartridge into the device. As the cartridges are so small, selling them in tabs of 20 (akin to headache tablets) and the like is being considered.
Read more at CNET.
The more I hear about fuel cell technology the more I can see it becoming an integral part of our lives in the future. Miniature cells that can power electronics for hours and then do it again and again just by having inserting small tablets inserted into them is what I'd been thinking of; I didn't expect the first fuel cells commercially sold to be on a rather large scale like Panasonic is planning. But I guess we have to remember that all computers used to be that big, and just look at them now.
Toshiba's method of pushing the water back into the methanol through the membrane means the size of the fuel system is instantly decreased, making it more viable for portable products. Its use of a passive system requiring air intake may cause problems if people cover the intakes on a device, but again, that also makes the system more efficient.
It's good to see the tech companies focusing on making this future power technology as efficient as possible from day one rather than releasing something that works and slowly improving on it.
So, it looks like 2006 may be the year for fuel cells, unless one of Toshiba's competitors gets to market first. With electronics now pushing to become more power efficient (laptops especially) and fuel cells promising so much, it may not be long before the struggling battery market is superseded and portability can be truly realized.
Natural gas can be reformed into hydrogen relatively easily by steam reformation, and there are several companies working in this space. The impurities usually present in the reformed hydrogen are no problem for an SOFC, but reformers have a ways to go still for cheap pure hydrogen for PEM or other hydrogen applications.
As for Toshiba's DMFC (Direct Methanol Fuel Cell), this is the way the Japanese electronics industry is going. Hydrogen storage hasn't yet caught up with the advances made in other fuel cell development areas. Methanol, however, can be easily stored and transported.
The thing to remember about methanol and natural gas-reformed hydrogen is that both involve carbon emissions. The ultimate goal is to use hydrogen fuel which has been made 100% emissions free. Right now, the only way to do that is through the electrolysis of water, using a “green” electricity source such as hydro, solar, or wind. Solar and wind are both still too expensive to make hydrogen a realistic commercial possibility, and hydro is only available in certain areas. We need to do some work in this area!
Most of the world's electricity comes from the burning of fossil fuels. Until that changes, 100% clean emissions-free fuel cells will still be science fiction. But we will get there – there is a clear path to do so, and the required technologies have already been demonstrated. Now, it is mostly a matter of economics – we have to get the cost of fuel cells down to where people can afford them. - by Fidgital
The only company in the world with a commercially viable micro fuel cell technology is Medis Technologies. Medis uses a mixture of glycerol (a food additive) and sodium borohydride for fuel. The Medis system is entirely passive and operates at room temperature. Medis already has distribution deals with Kensington (Best Buy, Office Max, etc.), Superior Communications (cellular stores) and General Dynamics (military market – “powered soldier”).
More info at - by Michael
|oh (3:39pm EST Wed Oct 27 2004)
oh my god i produce CO2 woops a little methane just escaped…not to worry ill blame my co-worker.
Hey people there are six billion of us CO2 Methane emmiters on the planet.(plus cows..or …some are cows)
Whats a few hundred thousand fuel cells going to do. not much..
The ability of our environment to absorb and remove CO2 from the atmosphere is awsome millions of tons per year converted to plant material eventuly back to soil and then back into the air as it decomposes or burns.
If your realy worried about CO2 and green house gasses dont drive your car dont eat beef and stop all that farting.
Oh by the way we are all fu*!ed anyway
have a nice day - by FreeKE
|freeke (3:54pm EST Wed Oct 27 2004)
you are an idiot. global warming is not some theotetical problem, it is real. and while you are right about the sources, you are wrong about 2 things: 1 adding to the problem wont have no effect. 2 we are not all fu*!ed anyway.
there are real changes that need to happen in the way we get and use energy, but none of them need lower our standard of living, or be more expensive in the long term. in fact, clean energy technology is a growth industry. the problem is that movement to newer clean sources requires both a large initial capitol investment, and some serius paradigm shifts.
I live in a house that is highly efficient for its size. i use solar for both electricity and hot water. on rainy days and at night i pull from the grid, and i use gas for cooking and suplimental hot water. still, in southern california, i pay on average $15/month energy for my home. - by eco guy
|RE: Eco Guy (4:06pm EST Wed Oct 27 2004)
Some of us don't get government subsidies for solar equipment. I wish I did, but it's just not affordable here. Glad you are being mre efficient, but you are one of those people who look at data for the last 50 years and say that the greenhouse effect is “real.” Go back to school and study some science. You can't just look at one part of the data. The earth's climate has fluctiuated greatly throughout hisory. The everage temperature was much warmer when T-Rex was roaming the plains. Oh no! Where were all the glaciers? Following your logic, our cave man ancestors caused the ice age by smoking up the sky with their camp fires? - by Seljo Myeri
|It's the rate that matters (4:38pm EST Wed Oct 27 2004)
Seljo, your point is taken, but what you didn't mention was the RATE of climate change. During the Cretaecous(sp?) atmosphereic CO2 was much higher than today thanks to the very high rates of sea floor spreading and volcanic activity. However, those phenomina occurred VERY gradually from a human perspecitve. The rate of change was slow and things had time to adapt. Today, that's not the case. The coral and algae are dying off because the oceans are warming too rapidly. As the ocean temps rise, more CO2 will dissolve back out of the oceans. This could lead to a VERY nasty positive feedback loop. Global warming is abolsultely happening and this time around it's human activity that's causing it. The real question is how it's going to effect a planet with 6+ billion people living on it. Will the atmostphere and planet surface get so destabilized that life becomes difficult? Those are the real questions as far as I'm concerned. As far as Ice ages are concerned, what I find interesting is that the data suggest that temps to rise slightly before the onset. I'm not sure what causes them but as I recall it may have something to do with the “warble” in the the Earth's axis, that causes the tilt of the planet to vary over time.
– T - by Tripp
|combustion (4:40pm EST Wed Oct 27 2004)
4CH3 + 7O2 -→ 4CO2 + 6H2O + Δ
how is this different from combustion?
4CH3 + 7O2 + Δ -→ 4CO2 + 6H2O + Δ H + Δ e
but if i'm heating my house, why bother getting the electricity, and turning it back into heat?
I helped a buddy of mine calculate the breakeven point for purchasing the equipment needed to go pure solar -vs- just paying $0.0655/kilowatt-hr for the rest of your life (what it cost in our town).
So to burn a 40W bulb 24/7/365 @ $0.0655 kWh = $160/yr. An array of solar panels plus transformers and such that can provide the same 2.6 million watt/hours cost many $1000's. At $160/yr it takes decades to break even.
Without a single equipment failure our calculations were on the order of 20 years before you actually started saving money on your equipment cost(depending on # of cells, quality of transformers, and such). One blown tranformer and it went to about 30 years.
What makes changing from our gas & electric infrastructure so expensive is the initial non-recurring cost you have to put up. If you started from scratch it would take you 100's of thousands just to get a drop of gasoline out of your $55/barrel of oil, and several decades for your new refinary to sell enough gas break even. Once you've operated these systems for decades (which we have) your equipment is largely paid for and your really just upgrading it from then on.
That's why fliud burning fuel cells are so attractive, the entire infrastucture you need is already there, the multi-trillion dollar cost of transporting and delivering the product has already been spent.
Also, there is tremendous cost in generating the electricity we then stored in chemical batteries, most of it comes from burning some kind of liquid fuel oil. Just think the processing cost that could be saved if we just eliminated the storage batteries and directly burned gas in our laptops. Not to mention all the chemical waste that goes with batteries. Batteries are not cheap or as clean as people think when you include all the cost.
Truth is, anything that generates mostly water & heat as a waste product is pretty hard to beat $$$ wise.
|Wood Alcohol (8:35am EST Thu Oct 28 2004)
Keep in mind, methanol is wood alcohol and can be made from a number of renewable feedstocks including waste wood, landfill methane gas, and digester gas. Also, methanol can and is being produced from natural gas that had been previously flared or vented. Methane is a twenty times more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. For more info on methanol, visit - by The Methanol Guy
|CO2 harmfull or not? (12:40pm EST Thu Oct 28 2004)
I thought CO2 not that harmfull on this planet. I thought Carbon monoxdide ( sorry dont know how to spell, please dont pick on me) is bad and damaging the greenhouse effect and us.
so buring oil/gas emits CO2 and Carbon monoxdide? I dont remember since high school.
- by Wack2K
|re: CO2 harmfull or not? (1:17pm EST Thu Oct 28 2004)
ahh… it's considered to be a 'greenhouse gas' — helps keep heat in the atmosphere longer (vs radiating back out into space) absorbs IR (between 1340 and 2350 cm^-1), &c.
CO (spelled Carbon-monoxide)is rather more reactive than CO2, and – thus – tends to be a tad bit more “damaging”, but it (generally) doesn't stay CO for long, in an open environment.
burning (aka Oxidizing) *any* organic (i.e. carbon based) material will give you some mix of CO, and CO2 — usually, also, H2O, and a mess of other stuff (depends on the other constituants of the compound that you're burning, and the ratio of reactants). rather than get into calculations of free energy, entropy, &c., i'll just say that those nice, balanced equations that you use in the first couple of years of Chem are similar to Newtonian physics — nice, neat, and not quite what happens, in the real world (although they do work well as illustrative examples). - by ac
|re:Solar break even points (2:23pm EST Thu Oct 28 2004)
It is even worse:
24x7x365 for a 40 watt bulb is $23 per year. Don't multiply by 7, just 24×365. - by Phil
|CO v. CO2 (10:40am EST Fri Oct 29 2004)
Ok, I'll try to straighten this out. (FYI: I'm a chemical engineer) Ac, you're right, but I'll go into more detail. I will assume you understand the basic working of an internal combustion engine.
In an oxygen abundant atmosphere (like ours) when a carbon nased substance is burned, virtualy no CO will be emitted. When the reaction area is oxygen starved, CO is generated, because there just aint enough O2 molecules to go araound.
Let's take a car engine, for example. Without any of the pollution controls, a tuned internal combustion engine would produce no CO. The problem is Nitrogen (N2) in the air (79% by mass). At high pressures, N2 and O2 form NO and NO2, and other NOx compounds. These are MUCH worse than CO2, or even CO these (NOx's) are what causes acid rain and smog. So, modern internal combustion engines are “low compression” to reduce these NOx emmissions. However, this low pressure in the combustion cycle of the engine favors CO, so that's why you shouldn't sit in the garage with your car running. When driving down the road, the CO goes off and eventually picks up another O, becoming CO2. - by Seljo Myeri
|Re: Seljo Myeri (11:12am EST Fri Oct 29 2004)
Thanks for explanation! - by Nunhgrader
|re: ac (1:04pm EST Fri Oct 29 2004)
How is it geek.com supports the Delta, but not the semicolon?
WTF is that? - by
|re delta (2:36pm EST Fri Oct 29 2004)
i was actually thinking (sorta) when i typed that stuff. remembering past posts where the parsing routines mangled what i had typed, i just sent in some embedded HTML. for example, the delta – Δ is coded as & #916
- by ac
Not sure how to save money I not sure I will be able to savethe planet . Just give me cheap feul/power who really cares - by homosapien