Posted on 07/16/2008 10:17:07 AM PDT by DGHoodini
Nisshinbo Industries Inc. (TSE:3105) has worked with the Tokyo Institute of Technology to develop the technology to use carbon instead of expensive platinum as the electrode catalyst for fuel cells.
The company hopes to have a practical version of the new catalyst ready in fiscal 2009, and will start by commercializing a product for the electrodes of residential fuel cells. Later, it will develop and commercialize a version for automotive fuel cells.
(Excerpt) Read more at tradingmarkets.com ...
Very interesting.
At least, when you read all these stories that's what they're telling us..
In other words, this is vaporware. Next.
Indeed! Hugh and Series, too!
All kidding aside, if this pans out it just changed the whole energy equation.
This years jack-up of oil results in could move forward by years technology that will cause Saudi Arabia’s biggest export to be sand.
Oh yes, now, as the article says, all that’s left is to develop the non-existent hydrogen fueling infrastructure.
With the Platinum being a major part of the higher cost of a fuel cell vehicle, it still would surprise me, if using ten times more carbon in the catalyst, would come close to the 1/10th of the cost that using platinum does. I may be wrong, but I’m pretty sure carbon is a cheap and plentiful substance.
Everybody has hydrogen production capability. It’s called a battery, two electordes, and water.
“hydrogen fueling infrastructure’
And it’s got be safe enuff so that doofusses like dynachrome won’t blow themselves and the neighborhood to bits!
(I’ve worked with hydrogen. I don’t like.)
ping
But yoy still have to split the H from the O2 and that takes energy.
It begins with the first station, in the first pilot city.
And that has allready happened..in a couple of cities.
Sure you have yto have a supporting infrastructure, but then even horse driven cabs and the Overland and pony express, needed to build out their support structure.
There will be pilot cities, and the fuel cell cars will be sold there, then there will be highway corridors between the pilot cities...then there will be more cities and more corridors with hydrogen refilling stations...just the same way the original gas station networks were built up, only much, much faster.
That’s what nuclear reactors are for. The new “pebble” reactors, are smaller, cheaper and faster to build, will use standard parts and a boilerplate design, so that any employee can go from one site to the next, and not have to re-learn everything,about the new plant, the way the ones we have now are, as they were all “custom built” and have many more faiilure points than the newer safer “pebble” reactors.
Or not. Carbon has been used for a long time in electrode stacks. It's reducing the amount of expensive rare catalytic metals like platinum that's important and would bring these things into the affordable range.
There is a lot of research going on in this area and several different methods for reducing cost and improving electrode efficiency such as carbon nano tubes.
Direct methanol fuel cells will probably be the first fuel cells you see in autos because of their high power output- if they can get the cost of the fuel cell down.
I agree that nuclear is the way to go. Proven technology for sixty years. Once we have cheap and plentiful electricity again, we can free up natural gas for transportation fuel which is now being burned in powerplants, and petroleum for the petrochemical industry.
The oil producing nations may be raking it in now, but that goose they’re savoring now..is their proverbial golden egg laying gander.
Except it isn't cost effective. It takes more energy to make hydrogen than the energy produced by using that hydrogen in a fuel cell.
Methanol fuel cells are more cost effective because methanol is cheaper to produce.
using regular gasoline in a fuel cell would be even cheaper, but because "fossil" fuels has sulpher in it it poisons the cell eventually.
Why use gas in a fuel cell you say? because the fuel cell converts it into energy many times more efficiently than burning it does, and it does it much cleaner.
Methanol is a better fuel for a fuel cell because it has no sulfur in it.
I would have guessed 1/100th as much at Pt.
Carbon’s funny stuff. The price goes from about $300/ton to about $35,000,000,000/ton.
(Charcoal to diamond)...
Yes, but there is value in converting from a wire tied to a fixed source to portable.
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