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Technology Stocks : Plug Power Fuel Cells (PLUG) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Fisherman1 who wrote (52)	2/4/2000 9:33:00 PM
From: Erik T	Respond to of 83

There is NO NONE NADA combustion the only by product is H2O and a bit of C02 PERIOD!!!! With regard to PEM fuel cell stacks, you are almost absolutely correct. Actually, the only byproduct from Microgen's fuel cell stack is H2O; there is not even any CO2!!! The problem is, the Microgen fuel cell stack is only capable of oxidizing hydrogen. The source of the hydrogen for the Microgen comes from reactions involving methane (natural gas) and carbon monoxide (CO) which occur in the Microgen gas reformer!!!! This is where your emissions come from. For anyone interested, go to the Plug Power website and click on "Fuel Cell Technology." plugpower.com Then click on "System Components." You will see a picture of the Microgen. Move your cursor over the picture and click on the part called "Fuel Processor." It will read as follows... The fuel processor portion of a fuel cell system has two operating components: the fuel reformer and the carbon monoxide (CO) cleanup unit. Funny they would need one of those ;-) The fuel reformer processes a hydrocarbon fuel, such as natural gas, into a hydrogen-rich gas known as reformate. Reformate contains heavy concentrations of CO so a CO cleanup system is applied to reduce the CO concentrations to (UN)acceptable levels (under 50 ppm). I just had my car emissions-tested. My ten year-old car has lower CO than the Microgen!!!! As for nitrogen oxides (NOx) and unburned hydrocarbons, Plug Power does not disclose these values. They should be very low, on the order of <1 ppm NOx, unburned hydrocarbons <4 ppm. Fuel Cell Energy has a fuel cell stack that directly oxidizes methane, therefore it has no gas reformer. They have reported with their system NOx = 0.45 ppm and unburned hydrocarbons = 4 ppm, and I don't see any reason why the Microgen should be any worse. Emmissions are less than turbines, get the facts! So, what about natural gas turbines? A relatively new technology, quite a bit more recent than fuel cells (which have been around for over a century), can combust natural gas for a turbine using a catalyst, rather than a flame, producing virtually emission-free electricity. The secret is in the lower temperature the catalytic combustor uses. Because others have asked me, I will supply the website that discusses this technology. (Full disclosure: I do not work for the company, but do have a small investment in them--would have been better to have bought PLUG which has captured the investment community's interest ;-) (Very quick overview) catalytica-inc.com (Table showing emission levels on a "commercial ready" product--Note: NOx < 2ppm, UHC < 1 ppm, CO < 2 ppm; for those of you counting that puts the Microgen CO emission levels at 25X that achievable on a gas turbine.) catalytica-inc.com distributed power is the future and includes fuel cells. Absolutely! I just don't think the fuel cell involvement will be as significant as investors suppose. It has a role in residential applications, but as I have stated several times, I think the economics of natural gas turbines will prevail overall. I really only intend this info for educational purposes. I don't care if any of you buy this stock or not, but catalytic combustion works just as well with large industrial turbines (GE E and F classes), as well as smaller applications for distributed power. No, I don't expect any successful residential turbines to come out, but I do expect gas turbines to overall be bigger players than fuel cells for both home electricity generation, as well as distributed power for business. The CEO Robert Nardelli is a director of GE Capital and of Plug Power. catalytica-inc.com GE Power Systems President and CEO Robert Nardelli commented, "GE continues to differentiate our products in the marketplace through technology innovations that provide added value for our customers. This project enables us to accelerate the application of Xonon to provide state of the art low emissions gas turbine combustion technology." Don't be too impressed just because Robert Nardelli is in Plug Power's camp, too. GE has their hand in everything. They will pursue that which benefits GE the most. Perhaps that will be residential fuel cells. Only time will tell. Regards, Erik