IMW: Despite all the fuss in Ballard stock and the Ballard thread on SI, there is a lot less in the article than meets the eye. It is no great breakthrough to get hydrogen from gasoline. Gasoline is a little tougher than natural gas or methanol, but no big deal. The issue was never "Could it be done?", but "What does it cost?", "How much equipment will be needed to do that?" and "What will that equipment cost?" Equipment cost includes both how much it adds to the cost of the engine system, and its parasitic power loss, i.e., how much of the fuel cell's output must be diverted from running the car to running the little chemical factory needed to create the hydrogen from the hydrocarbon. The NY Times article said nothing about the cost, which is the only real issue.
That being said, gasoline is indeed a better fuel than methanol for a variety of reasons, the main one being that an infrastructure exists for it. Of course, when I pointed this out on the Ballard thread, I was attacked by all concerned.
The difficulty of the task before Ballard was shown by the article's numbers about target costs. To be competitive, a fuel cell engine must sell for US$100 to $150 per kilowatt of capacity. That is twice to three times what a conventional engine sells for, but that should be close enough, given the potential savings in fuel.
The article says that current costs are 10 times that, but that is crazy. No way can Ballard (or anybody in the world at the moment) produce a fuel cell for $1500 per kW. If they could, they would be getting rich selling them to the utility market, and Ballard has barely produced a single working prototype. Unlike ERC, Ballard has never published any information about its costs, but I suspect that at this point they are a lot closer to $10,000 per kW. Mass production and run of the mill breakthroughs may someday get them down to $1500, but it will take extraordinary breakthroughs on dozens of fronts to get them down to $150. Even if the $1500 figure is correct, keep in mind that a 150 hp car engine equals about 105 kW of power, which, at that price, would cost US157,500 for the engine alone. Daimler Benz or no Daimler Benz, people underestimate the engineering tasks ahead.
The article wildly overestimated the difference in efficiencies between fuel cell engines for cars and internal combustion ones. ICE's are about 20%, but given that a PEM fuel cell being fed perfectly pure hydrogen is never more than 50% efficient, and given the losses in efficiency from having a complex chemical factory under the hood to create pretty decent (but not pure) hydrogen, I doubt whether a working PEM car would have a real life efficiency more than 30%. Nice, but not so great that the cost of that extra efficiency won't be an issue.
As the news yesterday about the clean Honda engine demonstrates, the makers of internal combustion engines are not folding up shop and going home. In fact, I would bet that DB itself is probably spending at least $10 on developing better ones for each $1 it is spending on fuel cell engines. Ballard and its fans like to compare the imaginary fuel cell engine of the future with the actual internal combustion engine of today, but the real competition it will face in seven years will be much tougher.
ERC's molten carbonate cells are aimed for stationary power, not cars, so none of the article that I have discussed so far directly relates to it. More relevant is the mention in the article of Plug Power, the outfit that, despite not having a single demonstration unit in existence, claims it will be providing individual household fuel cells in a few years.
This concept is superficially appealing, but stupid. Household electricity needs vary widely over the day; to make your own electricity you would need capacity probably ten times your average needs. That capacity is way too expensive to be sitting idle most of the time. This is one reason why electric utilities make sense as a form of enterprise, because the variance for the population as a whole is much smaller.
Furthermore, fuel cells produce DC power and homes need AC, so expensive inverters are also needed. This is the kind of expense that doesn't make much difference in a larger fuel cell, like ERC's 1 and 2 megawatt designs, but starts becoming significant when you get to IFC's actual and Ballard's proposed 250 kW designs, and becomes completely prohibitive at the 5-15 kW individual house level. At least for the next 20 years or so, this will never happen.
I am going to repost this on the Ballard thread, and add some additional comments at the end. Here is the link: techstocks.com |
