Bill:"Just keep in mind that ERC has serious issues with corrosion that may never be solved."
Not true, or true in the same sense that automobiles have a problem with air resistence, which will never be solved. But that doesn't stop companies from making cars and people from buying and using them.
Early in any technology company's life it must make some fundamental decisions which it must stick with, based on its assessment of the scientific evidence available at that time. Fuel cells have been around for over 100 years, and the pros and cons of possible ways of doing them have been known for decades.
When ERC started out doing molten carbonate fuel cells, I'll guess that it thought about the possibility of doing PEM cells, but rejected it, perhaps because it thought itself unable to solve potential problems like the life of the membrane. Yet Ballard thought it had a better way of dealing with the membrane problem, and has since made trememdous advances on that issue. The membrane problem is "unsolvable", in that they won't last forever, but that is a minor problem now; there are other issues, such as cost, that are the big ones for Ballard to solve.
Similarly, people who chose not to try to do direct (no outboard reformer) molten carbonate fuel cells probably decided so because of what seemed like an unsolvable problem - corrosion, because of the chemicals involved and the high heat. ERC thought of a better way, and now that is not a major issue. It is "unsolvable", in the sense that some internal components will eventually corrode, but similarly, all parts of your car don't last 250,000 miles. It still makes sense for you to own one.
ERC saw the same thing happen in its battery efforts. Nickel-zinc, ERC's technology, had been tried many times before. The attractions, among others, are its high power, light weight, low cost, and environmental friendliness when thrown away. But all who tried gave up, because the ones they came up with could only handle 30 deep discharge cycles and a few hundred shallow ones. That meant that batteries had a very limited life.
ERC thought it had a better way, and the last figures that have been officially released show that it has achieved over 600 deep cycles and over 11,000 shallow ones. This is more than enough to say that the problem is solved, commercially. To the extent that there is any limit at all, it is an unsolvable problem - but that doesn't mean anything commercially.
Not everyone in the world is up to date with everything that is going on. So if you were to poll battery scientists, some large percentage of them may well say that the problem with nickel-zinc is you can't get many cycles out of them. I would put the fuel cell corrosion problem in the same category. |
