Focus; Fuel Cells

In this hour, Focus 580, we'll be talking about fuel cells. On the show, fairly recently, we did a number of shows about energy and energy policy in this country. And where does our energy comes from? And on some of these shows, the subject of the fuel cell came up. There are a lot of people that feel that there's great potential of fuel cells to power some common devices that we rely on. There are people who think that one day they may run our vehicles like buses and cars, they may power our offices and our homes. They might even power our laptop computers and our cell phones. So after having had a number of passing mentions of fuel cells, we thought, well, we ought to do a show and talk about fuel cells and try to talk about what they are, how they work, what are the applications and what kind of research is going on. And that is what we will do this morning in this part of Focus 580. And our guest with the show is Scott Barnett. He is Professor of Materials, Science and Engineering at the Robert McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University.

And we'll be talking a little bit about some of the research that he's been involved in. And about the subject time, we hope in a pretty basic sort of way. Questions are certainly welcome, if you'd like to call in. The number here in Champaign Urbana, 333-9455. And anywhere else, if you're listening in Chicago or Western Indiana or Southern Illinois, any place that signal will travel, use the toll-free line. That's 800-222-9455-333-WILL toll-free 800-222-WILL. Professor Barnett, hello. Professor Barnett. Professor Barnett? Well, I seem to be having a little problem with our connection here. Now we'll try it again. Professor Barnett? Well, I'm not quite sure what the problem is. We'll have to see if we can get it straightened out.

And because we're doing this with that, this nice high-quality phone connection that we have sometimes can take advantage of. And because he's at Northwestern, we can do it that way. And it makes it almost sound like he's in the room here with me, but that he's not. So we'll see if we can get that straightened out. And we will talk with him in just a second. Maybe let me mention just what we'll be doing on some of the other shows this week. On the program on Thursday, we'll have our regular monthly program on Children's Health. Robert Bochak will be here. He is pediatrician from Christy Clinic. And you can call him with whatever questions you have. Also on Thursday, we'll be talking with Brian Sykes. He's Professor of Human Genetics at the Institute of Molecular Medicine at Oxford. And we'll be discussing his book, The Seven Daughters of Eve, The Science That Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry. So that will be on Thursday. We're going to try again here, Professor Barnett. Yes? Great. Great. Thanks for talking with us today. My pleasure. We appreciate it. And when my producer Travis, when he told you that what I had in mind was fuel cells for dummies, you wouldn't kiddin'.

So that's... So you'll have to humor me if I ask some questions that are painfully basic. But I expect that probably for a lot of people who will be listening to us, that's the level they'll be at. So to start out then, I guess, the question to ask is, at its most basic, what is a fuel cell? Okay. Well, it's a device that converts chemical fuels. Say, for example, natural gas directly into electricity without moving parts. And it's perhaps the closest analogy would be a battery. And you can think of a fuel cell in a sense as a battery that will never wear out. In a battery, the electrodes in the battery are being consumed as you use the battery up, and then you either have to replace the battery or perhaps you can recharge it. But in a fuel cell, instead of having electrodes that are consumed,

you're continually feeding in air in this fuel to either sides of the device. And those are consumed. And so as long as you continue to feed in the air and fuel, you'll continue to generate electricity. Well, I guess that answers one of my basic things that I was a little unsure about. And that is this very point. What exactly is the difference between a battery and a fuel cell? So in the fuel cell, you have these two, you have two electrodes. At one, your fuel goes in, at the other, your oxidant goes in, which I guess is usually oxygen, which just comes out of the air. And that somehow, then you have this chemical reaction that goes on involving the two that produces electricity. Right. Well, Dave, I think you were deceiving me here. It sounds like you do know something about these things. Oh, well, no, you know what they say about a little bit of knowledge being a dangerous thing. That's a, I guess I couldn't explain to you exactly how it happens.

But I get the idea that you have, you have these two things, you have your fuel, you have your oxidant, and you have this kind of a medium, the electrolyte that is the thing that essentially allows this to happen. And that there are different kinds of electrolytes. So for that reason, then there are different kinds of fuel cells. So depending on what it is that you pick to be the, is it correct to say that that sort of mediates the reaction between the your two electrodes? That's right. And I guess I would say that the metal picture you can have of the fuel cells is that there are these three components. And you can think of them maybe as three layers. The central layer being electrolyte, and the two outside layers being electrodes. One electrode where the fuel is called the anode, and the electrode where the oxidant or air comes in is called the cathode. And I don't know if you want me to give you a little description of just sort of what happens in the operation of the device.

Yeah, do that. The two electrodes are hooked up to an external circuit. And of course that's where you actually get the power out is by connecting up to the two electrodes. And one way you can think about the device, and this isn't the same for all fuel cells, I'm going to describe maybe the simplest case in which you have air coming into the cathode. And the key ingredient there is the oxygen that's coming in, oxygen molecules. And the electrons also will come into the cathode from the external circuit. So the oxygen molecule will react with electrons and actually split up to become two oxygen ions, each ion carrying two electrons. And that happens more or less at the interface between the cathode and the electrolyte. Those oxygen ions are then migrated across the electrolyte. And that's really the role of the electrolyte. It's a medium that allows these ions to transport across it and carry a current across it. And once it gets to the other side of the electrolyte to where the anode is,

there's going to be a fuel there and the reaction will occur between the oxygen ions and the fuel and the fuel will become oxidized. So for example, if it was natural gas that's primarily methane, the products would be carbon dioxide and hydrogen, or I'm sorry, not hydrogen, water coming off. And then those electrons that got carried across the electrolyte go back into the anode and back out into the external circuit and the fuel cell then forces that current to flow around the circuit and that's how you get your electrical power out. So you're actually, I guess you would say you're electrochemically burning the fuel, but you don't actually have a flame like you would in a normal combustion process. And that's where you get the advantage of the fuel cell that is because you're not burning anything, you're not getting the the byproducts of combustion that we get from from burning fossil fuels that are problematic for a variety of reasons. That's right. It's it's useful in thinking about this to compare a fuel cell with with a conventional way of producing electricity, which is normally use a mechanical device like a

turbine or a piston engine in which you actually burn the fuel directly with with air. And that mechanical energy is then run into a electrical generator which produces the electricity so it's a two-step process and but unfortunately that that combustion process is somewhat inefficient usually and it also it's a source of pollution that normal burning process. So certainly one of the key advantages that the device been touted for fuel cells is improved efficiency and lower pollution because of the the direct oxidation process. And I guess you know as I have heard people talk about this and when I have read about it before it now that just a little I've read about it makes it sound like sort of a miraculous thing that essentially gives you energy for free and I guess one has to remember that in fact you still need to have a fuel. You have to have you have to have something to put into the one side to have

the reaction go so we're still talking about using possibly if you can get pure hydrogen I guess you can use it you can also use methane I know at argon they're actually working on a fuel cell that uses gasoline and I guess there are some others that are potential so we still have to we still may be thinking about using fuels having to use fuels that as far as we know our finite so at least we still in some of these cases do have a little bit of a problem when it comes to what it is we're going to use for the power essentially for the fuel source. Right these things are not cold fusion or a miraculous source of power like that but they certainly can have some key advantages that if we can implement these things in the next couple decades I think that could really improve our over a quality of life both by basically reducing the amount of fuel that we have to consume to get get the electricity we need and

also reducing the pollution that's produced in that process. So even for example if we were using a fuel cell like the ones that they're working on at argon to power a car for example but uses gasoline we would still be using having to use petroleum to make the gasoline but we would get more out of the gasoline that we do now with an internal combustion engine that would be one advantage the other advantage would be that we wouldn't have the air pollution that we have now. That's right I mean I guess in the context of an automobile you could just think of it as you could improve your mileage considerably so your gas bill goes down and our reliance on petroleum goes down because of that. Let me I should do for anybody who's tuned in here probably I should introduce again the guest for this part of Focus 580 we're talking about he would Scott Barnett he is professor of materials science and engineering at the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and applied science at Northwestern University and in his

work one of the things he has been doing has been working on fuel cells and that's what we're talking about this morning. We're trying to do a basic kind of conversation about the fuel cell what it is how it works its applications and basically where where things stand with fuel cells as energy generators and questions are welcome 333 WILL toll free 800 222 WILL so I just it mentioned at the beginning of the program that there are different types of fuel cells they are named for the electrolytes they use the and do correct me if I'm wrong about this what you're doing there the work that you have done involves a solid oxide fuel cell that's right that's right so this is the thing that has I guess some of the some of the fuel cells like a battery have electrolytes that are liquid but this one in this particular case there's no there's no liquid in your fuel cell that's right the solid oxide fuel cell or ceramic fuel cell is really the only one in which it's in all solid state device the the other ones usually have some sort of liquid

electrolyte and the other thing that distinguishes the solid oxide fuel is that it typically higher operating temperature than most of the other fuel cell types those are usually down around room temperature or slightly above that is and and here with the ones that you're talking about we're talking about hundreds of degrees yeah if we're operating temperature that's right in fact until the last 10 years or so the typical solid oxide fuel cell operated at about a thousand degrees centigrade which is a really quite high temperature and when we talk about potential applications then the kind of a solid oxide fuel cell the kind that you're working on here we might be thinking about the the possibility of say a using this to have some large fixed sort of installation like a power plant for example that has definitely been the traditional outlook for a solid oxide fuel cell is for relatively large stationary power plants I should say though that they would probably be somewhat smaller power plants than the then the really

large mega power plants that that you see in the one of the advantages that people talk about is the opportunity for for developing more of a distributed power system okay in which you tend to locate smaller power sources right at the need for the power source and that's an advantage because you reduce the need for running power lines all over and there's some of course loss of efficiency when you run those power lines the other advantages that if you can for example have a let's say a small industry or hotel or apartment building that was run locally by a fuel cell is that you can also use to advantage the heat that's produced by the device for space heating hot water heating and that can actually further increase the efficiency of the process because now you're using both the electricity and the heat which is in a remote power plant is normally just dumped and lost can actually be utilized to advantage and I guess that the reason that that's

feasible with the fuel cell and maybe not with a turbine power plant is because of the fact that it's a very quiet low pollution device and you you don't mind putting a power plant right in a neighborhood or in a populated area when it's a fuel cell power plant. I guess it's my understanding that there are some places where they're looking at and these may be different I'm not sure different different kind of fuel cells than that that you have you have worked on but apparently in another number play in in the United States but also Germany Japan they're looking at some very large ones I guess the biggest one was at one time it was at was in Japan an 11 megawatt fuel cell. That sounds right I'm not not sure exactly what the size of it was but but they have been running fuel cells in Japan quite a bit it is demonstrations and there's a variety of other locations. I'm also it came across an article that apparently in the in the Chicago area there are

they're going to be doing some testing on residential fuel cells that is the idea that instead of a furnace in your house you could have a fuel cell. There's been a lot of interest in that that application for the last few years I noticed in fact that we're having a thunderstorm come in here right now and one of the problems we have occasionally is power outages and if you have your own little fuel cell power plant in the in the basement you don't have to worry about the food going bad in your refrigerator or whatever else happens when the power goes out. The I guess the idea of the fuel cell has been around for a long time since before the turn of the last century and the term itself was coined in 1889 so people have been experimenting on these for a long time. What though were some of the problems involved in actually making them making them work and getting technology to the point where it is now? Well I guess you could categorize it in the

sort of two main main problems that there have been one of them is that fuel cells really until recently run only on hydrogen as the fuel and there's problems with availability of hydrogen and transporting hydrogen generating hydrogen it's just not the kind of fuel that we normally use. We use liquid fuels like propane and gasoline and diesel and we have natural gas usually in our available in our homes but normally fuel cells just do not run on those fuels and you have to do special things to get them to work with those those fuels and the other one has really been the sort of engineering fuel cell system at a reasonable cost and it's really an engineering problem. The scientifically and technologically the fuel cells work quite nicely but there are competing technologies out there that in our economy in order for a technology to become commercially viable it has to be cost effective and even if fuel cells have advantages if they

cost significantly more than the alternative approach people aren't going to use them. Well what do you think has to happen before they the idea of a fuel cell would become cost effective and is it is the issue how would is we're going to what sort of fuel we're going to use or is it more an issue of getting the technology right and then being able to manufacture them at a cost that's reasonable to think about? Yeah I think the manufacturing is the problem because in bringing in a new technology like this the people that do manufacturing the key thing is is that once you develop your production process and get it bigger and bigger you get economies of scale and the cost drops down but until you've gotten to that point it's maybe difficult to get market penetration through technology to make a worth building that large production plan. So it's sort of a catch 22 situation and you know the government for example

Department of Energy realizes this and they're doing things to promote people to develop the production capability for fuel cells. For example in demonstration power plants they'll help subsidize the cost of installing a demonstration plan and so forth but that's really a key issue is how do you get get up to a large enough scale production to really bring costs down to competitive levels. We're about at the midpoint of this part of focus 580 our guest who's Scott Barnett from Northwestern University he's professor of material science and engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and we're talking about fuel cells. He's been involved in this research and if you have questions you certainly should call in the number if you're here in Champaign or Banner where we are 333 9455 we also have a toll free line good anywhere that you can hear us so even if it would be a long distance call you can use that number and we'll pay for the call that's 800 222 9455 again 333 WILL and toll free 800 222

WILL. You talk about the fact that basically fuel cells are we have two broad classes those that run at low temperatures and those that run at high temperatures and they're sort of different and they lend themselves to different applications. If you have one that runs basically at room temperature then maybe that's the one you could think about more reasonably using for your laptop or your car or your bus and that the high temperature ones if you're building a big plant then maybe you think about that as a big power station or maybe even heating your home. I know in some of the work that you've done you yours is the solid oxide is a one that runs at high temperature and you've managed to get the temperature down how much further do you think you can get your operating temperature of your fuel cell down or is at some point where because of the laws of physics you say it's just never going to get down below any particular below a particular point. Well it's not

really a laws of physics but it's the materials we have available to work with and we have have other groups have been able to get fuel cell solid oxide fuel cells running down to six or 700 degrees centigrade so it's considerably lower than than where we were at say 10 years ago when it was a thousand degrees centigrade and with existing materials it looks in principle feasible to get down as low as about four hundred degrees centigrade and if we could do that that would certainly be very exciting but even at six hundred degrees centigrade the sort of traditional picture that you described is for the applications of fuel cells has changed somewhat and the issue really is sort of a combination of the operating temperature and what kind of fuels you can use and an advantage of a solid oxide fuel cell and particularly some of the recent work that we've been doing at University of Pennsylvania is that it's becoming clear that you can actually directly

use a variety of fuels in these fuel cells and this is in contrast to the low temperature category for particular the polymer based fuel cells and that operated fairly low temperatures those are you're really restricted to fairly pure hydrogen is the fuel there is one example where in which people have been able to run on methanol and that's the the the case in which you can have a portable generator so you'd have actually have a small methanol tank and you could actually envision running a say a laptop computer from that but there's actually been a lot of interest for those sorts of applications now in solid oxide fuel cells in which you would have instead of a methanol actually a source of fuel for example propane or butane or even something like gasoline or diesel as the fuel and so the advantage is that those fuels actually have a much higher energy density than something

like methanol or certainly much higher than hydrogen so that means that if you want to have a compact package the those fuels are advantageous because you need to carry much less fuel the disadvantage of course is still that the temperature is above room temperature and you would actually need to have to insulate the device to protect the consumer from getting burned but there I guess then it would be one could imagine the possibility of using a solid oxide fuel cell in a car. Certainly and there are people and numerous companies that are pursuing that application right now it's actually interestingly the solid oxide fuel cell development has been primarily for what people call an auxiliary power unit it's not actually to for the main drive traction of the car but it's for providing electricity for the auxiliaries that one has in the car and the automakers are envisioning that there will be more and more electronics in an automobile

as time goes on in effect as I understand it they're they're looking to go from 12 volts to 42 volts at some point to be able to run more electronics and the idea I think is to have this APU or auxiliary power unit run with a solid oxide fuel cell hopefully running directly off gasoline that would produce maybe as much as five kilowatts of power to to run the electronics in an automobile. We have a caller here somebody on a cell phone so let's get them in here on our line number four right there hello hi thanks for your time sure I got a couple questions for you there's a number of companies developing fuel cell systems for your home the residential fuel cell systems and one of which also captures that heat energy and the supplements your furnace right and I was curious what they anticipate the dependability or the maintenance of those units to be over a long period of time compared to like a generator or a furnace because if I understand quickly there are no or very few moving mechanical parts so I was kind of curious on that topic you know I don't know the

details for for those companies of what they're they're promising I know that in principle the fuel cell systems for the for the reasons you mentioned can be extremely reliable you don't have a lot of things that are going to wear out and you'll see people showing demonstrations where power plants have been run continuously for as long as I think seven or eight years without break and without problems so I think that maybe once maybe initially there'll be some bugs but after a while I think they could these could be very reliable devices so they should have a very long I guess useful life or however you want to phrase it right okay how do you what do you see as far as the implementation or commercialization of a residential fuel cell what kind of time frame or the automobiles as well I've heard automobiles probably take a little bit longer a lot related to the the type of fuel and how do you change gas stations to the different you know types of fuel and a lot of logistics and things like that but how do you anticipate those two markets growing well

I think if I remember one of the companies is called plug power that's trying to develop this this home generation system yeah and last last time I heard them talking about it they were wanting to have products on the market in a couple of years which I think is very aggressive but but maybe maybe it is possible for the automotive case the again there's sort of two categories there's fuel cells that would actually provide the electricity to run the the traction drive of the automobile and then there's the auxiliary power unit okay and the I think the auxiliary power units are perhaps closer because that's that's an easier problem the I don't know if that I've heard any estimates as to when that's going to happen that's primarily I think Delco that's been off from GM that's developing APUs that's just a less demanding application obviously the supplemental power right

it's less power and the the key problem it turns out actually with the with automobiles is that the internal combustion engine is just a dirt cheap way of producing a fair amount of drive for a car a fair amount of power replacing that with the fuel cell is really a difficult cost challenge to get the cost down comparable to an internal combustion engine and produce the same kind of power the other thing is that the the you again have this issue of the the fuel that you're using and primarily people have been been trying to use polymer based fuel cells for for that application but the problem is that they require pure hydrogen is the fuel so there are various scenarios and I know that David you mentioned argon having a fuel cell that runs directly off of gasoline what they've actually been doing is they have a pre fuel preprocessor that actually converts the gasoline into pure hydrogen before it goes into the fuel cell that's a device called a fuel reformer

and that's certainly a viable option but the the difficulty there is that you have an additional device both to try to fit under the hood of the car and it's also something that's going to tend to increase the overall cost of the system which is it's already difficult to get it down to where an internal combustion engine is okay that's all right thanks it's certainly it's it sounds like it so we've got a number of engineering challenges here layered on top of the fact that we're in us we still have a lot invested in a particular kind of approach a particular infrastructure and that we're used to working with certain kinds of energy that comes in certain forms and when you talk about something doing something very dramatically different like just for example to make the most extreme sort of example is going from using a liquid fuel like gasoline to hydrogen which unless you have it very very cold it's not going to be a liquid then you start

asking well you know how do we how do we handle it how do we store it how do we provide it to people how do we design this new vehicle to to deal with it so we're still we still got a number of pretty big problems to have to solve right I think everybody is sort of looking far ahead to to a time when we're maybe running out of fossil fuels and we'll have hopefully gotten to a point where we can actually have a hydrogen economy and and there it's a it's a beautiful scenario because there's really no pollution involved in that the only byproduct is water that that comes out of a combustion air and and hydrogen but but we're still a ways away from that but there's some interesting things happening for example you heard in the news within the last month or so that the general motors bought a California company that had developed a new method for storing hydrogen with fairly high high density and that's really been one of the problems for the automotive application is using hydrogen not just you know where do you go to buy

hydrogen for to fill up your car yeah but how do you actually store it in the vehicle and my understanding is is that even if you were to use highly compressed hydrogen like 5000 psi hydrogen tanks the actual tank volume in your car would be something like 10 times the volume you have for your gas tank presently which is is probably a problem so there's there's a need for a storage technology in order to be able to utilize hydrogen and automobile is the prime fuel we have some other folks to talk with let's go to Urbana and line number one for another caller right here hello yeah I haven't heard you mention the catalyst too much in the way fuel cells are being visualized are are they is the catalyst is there a does there have to be a catalyst involved and if it's really critical to the whole thing that's a really good point the this is a again

another distinction between the low and high temperature fuel cells that certainly the a lot of the low temperature fuel cells use a precious metal catalyst typically platinum to make the electrical chemical reactions go at reasonable rates at low temperatures and that has been an issue for making cost effective fuel cells and I know there's been a lot of efforts for example in the polymeric fuel cells to bring down the amounts of precious metals that they need in those to to work well and then bring the cost down as a result of the reduced metal content the I guess one people one advantage people tout for solid oxide fuel cells is that because of the higher temperature there is not as much need for precious metal catalyst and in fact typically they're they're not used at all the catalyst and the and the anode of a solid oxide fuel cells typically nickel which is not terribly expensive and on the cathode side it there's not really any

catalyst used at all it's it's just a ceramic material huh so it sounds like a lot of the economics of it maybe turn around the need for catalyst and then can I ask you one more question I remember there was a this in the popular press there was this through a while ago year or two ago about a I don't know why this particular fuel cell got so much attention maybe it was just a slow news day or whatever but I think it was called a Patterson fuel cell but anyway it you know it was it was brought forward and with a lot of fanfare and and in particular the thing they called my eye anyway was that the U of I somebody here at the U of I was working on had been given a prototype and that they were saying that that's a more energy that more energy was coming out

and was being put in and they implied that that the thermodynamics of the thing was not well understood and I I tried to find out through this you know just being nosy I just tried to find out if if this story had any truth and of course as I could get was a graduate student to who said that basically correct that they were correct they couldn't figure out why more energy was coming out than what's going in and I was just wondering just how this is it was this mythology or was this is there some sort of basis for this kind of reporting that that in fact the the thermodynamics of this of this device are not well understood or are they well the I think in general people believe they understand the thermodynamics of

of fuel cells rather well and and people would certainly be suspicious of a device in which you'd get more energy out than than was put in it in the fuel going into it it sounds a little bit similar to the the biggest thing about cold fusion that happened I don't know what was that about 10 years ago or so in which they were reporting getting large amounts of power out of these devices it couldn't be explained but I haven't heard specifically about a Patterson fuel cell and I guess seems like I would have heard something more about it in the various conferences and in the symposia and fuel cells if there was there was really something to that so you're pretty confident about the theory involved okay thanks all right thanks I guess that there what that wouldn't that violate the rules of physics getting more energy out than you put in isn't that not we think that's not possible sure that that's one of the basic ones there's

people have been trying to make perpetual motion machines for for years and years but one can usually figure out there's a trick somewhere involved in that okay we have about 10 minutes left we have a color we get right to in just a second but I do want to introduce again our guest most speaking what's got Barnett from Northwestern University he's professor of materials science and engineering at the Robert McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science there at Northwestern we're talking about fuel cells and if you have questions there welcome here in Champaigner Banna 333 9455 and toll free 800 222 9455 here's a caller from Southern Illinois on our line 4 hello thank you for having this guest it's very interesting I was wondering if there are any power plant companies in Illinois using few cells now and where they where they are as far as I know there are not the the only fuel cell power plants that are out there right now are actually demonstration power plants I don't know of any Illinois that there are I believe some

fuel cell buses that are being run in the Chicago area I think there was five that were that were bought and are being tested out in the Chicago area those again are our demonstration and I guess when I say demonstration I just mean that those things are probably too expensive to be actually a commercial product yet but people want to be able to go out and fuel test them and see how they really work in the real world companies in Illinois trying and working on the technology to produce fuel cells yes there are there's no large companies that I know of there's a number of small companies in fact I'm associated with one up here in Evanston that's doing some fuel cell development and give me the name it's applied then films incorporated and plug power you mentioned earlier where are they from I believe they're out of I believe they're out of California and a couple more questions you mentioned other countries are working on fuel cell

development how far along are they compared to the United States and are you getting any help from the Bush administration or as far as funding or any any interest from the energy department well actually there has been good support in the last few years from the Department of Energy for fuel cell research I don't know maybe the Bush administration is too new to to have had a lot of impact on the fuel cell funding but there's a group at the a national energy technology laboratory that has had a lot of foresight in really pushing this fuel cell technology even in a time a couple of years ago when it was a political environment didn't seem to be that good for it but but they've been pushing the technology and that's actually been very important because the we do have competitors outside the United States there's very active programs in Japan and throughout Europe in fuel cells are they very far along

I I guess to assess them overall I would say that that I wouldn't say that any particular country has a real lead right now in the various types of fuel cells I guess I would also include Canada is actually a fairly big player in fuel cells the Ballard is the large company and there's also a company called Global Thermal Electric that has just in the last couple of years developed a really big presence in solid oxide fuel cells thank you very much it's very important and I look forward to having you back on the radio okay thanks for the call just now out of curiosity the the the demonstration buses that they're running in the Chicago area what do they use for fuel those I believed I do use diesel fuel and they use what I mentioned before a fuel reformer system that will basically a small chemical processing plant that strips the hydrogen off the fuel

and then supplies that to the fuel cell and what do they then produce as as byproducts of all of this it would be primarily carbon dioxide and water okay so we still have a little carbon dioxide problem there right as long as you're using a fossil fuel there's there's really no way to get around that but again the the one advantage of a fuel cell if you have higher efficiency to get a certain amount of electricity you're burning less fuel and then you're also producing less fuel too so you're you're get your energy yield is more for the amount of emissions that you produce that's right okay here's another call a clay city line number one hello yes I work at a power plant coal fired in southern Illinois and how long before I'm going to have to start worrying about my job is that 10 years down the road 15 years down the road before let's say the average homo billet will have a fuel cell set up in the yard

just to supply their own needs and not have to buy off the grid and what about blended technologies is there anything that coming along where they they sort of use fuel cells and they sort of use a fossil and and blend the two technologies together thank you okay the I don't know if I would worry about my job anytime soon really the I think it's going to take a long time before everybody has a fuel cell and they're producing the power for their individual home but the other thing I would mention is that there there's a lot of interest and this has been actually a traditional area of interest for many years to use fuel cells as a method for utilizing coal as an energy source and trying to clean up the use of coal in fact I have a research program that's from the university coal research program but where we're doing some of our fuel cell research

so and I think also politically there's a lot of interest of course in doing that because there's a lot of states that have coal reserves so that's going to remain a topic of interest and maybe at some point your power plant will get converted to a fuel cell power plant but still utilizing coal but you wouldn't see that happening within the next 10 years if not maybe not even the next 20 years or can you even can you even make a speculation like that well it's it's dangerous to speculate but I would tend to follow what some of the larger developers are saying for example Siemens Westinghouse is the probably the largest developers one of the largest developers of solid oxide fuel cells in the US and for example they're now producing power plants that are up to I think a quarter of a megawatt power and they're envisioning trying to get commercial plants into operation within something like five years

at least that's what they talk about at public meetings you know whether they really believe they can do that or not that's something else yeah let's see we can squeeze one more collar here in champagne line number one hello hi I tuned in a little late unfortunately I was looking forward to this program but anyways as far as from an investment point of view I mean I think fuel cells someday are going to be quite profitable what companies do you think would be good to invest in now you know as far as looking at profit down the road I think a big play has certainly been Ballard that company out of Canada I think they're listed on NASDAQ and that stock has done pretty well this particularly after I think Daimler Chrysler figures back bought a significant fraction of that company there's a lot of other companies I mentioned

like Siemens Westinghouse honeywell actually has a nice program in both polymer and solid oxide fuel cells the problem with some of those larger companies though I guess is that that's such a small fraction of their overall program that it may not the fuel cells may not impact the lot and they're overall bottom line what about the company I bought some stock in a company just I think it's just called fuel cell it's FCEL is the what it trades under seeding some of those smaller companies will someday turn profit that would probably be the way to go although I think it would be very speculative it would probably be something comparable to buying Microsoft 20 years ago right if you hit on the right one you'd certainly make a ton of money right okay well thank you very much okay one I'm we're really haven't got very much time and one of the things that maybe we should have talked about is that we talked in the beginning about the basic idea of the fuel cell you got your cathode you got your anode you got your chemical reaction there produces your energy one thing that that we didn't

mention is that and apparently against my understanding that the individual fuel cell you got one of those that really doesn't produce very much energy what you got to do is you got to have a whole bunch of them put together how how big a thing are we actually talking about if we're talking about for example how something that would produce enough energy for a home how how big a device would we be talking about the I think they just used the example this plug power unit that I think it's something like on the order of the size of a dishwasher so that's not all that you know no bigger than the furnace that people would have now right right and the the fuel cell stack you know the group of a large number of fuel cells can be up to something like a kill a lot per liter as far as actual volume that's required so it's actually a fairly high energy density now that's just for the fuel cell itself there's other things that have to go around in the package to bring in the fuel in the gas and take the electricity out so forth so it gets more

it takes more volume for the whole package but they can be pretty compact well we're going to have to stop there because we've used the time and it's something to perhaps in the future we can revisit but for them oh we want to say Professor Brian Hemp thanks very much for talking with us well it's my pleasure I also just wanted to say hello to everybody down in in champagne or ban I and note that I actually lived in both champagne or ban of androbanne for many years when I was a student on a U of I well that I noticed that and I maybe I should have mentioned that you you were a graduate student here right that's right okay well again we appreciate you giving us your time and also thanks very much to the folks there at Northwestern to make it possible for us to have this nice high quality connection okay thank you very good and our guests got Barnette he's professor of materials science and engineering at the Robert Armacornic School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern