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Jeff Stevenson is a Laboratory Fellow in the Energy Materials Group at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and has been working on SOFCs for more than a decade. This video, shot at the recent ICACC’10 conference in Daytona Beach, Fla., provides some history on the development of these fuel cells, and discusses some of the remaining science and manufacturing challenges that are hindering their widespread commercialization.

Stevenson also discusses some of the work being done by the Solid State Energy Conversion Alliance, a government-industry collaboration, that is working on methods to employ SOFCs that can make cleaner use of coal and other fossil fuels for energy generation, and describes some of the “early adopters” of SOFC systems, such as systems being used for auxiliary power units (APUs) used by some tractor-trailer operators.

Besides working at PNNL, Stevenson serves as an associate editor of the Journal of the American Ceramic Society and reviews and edits manuscripts in the field of SOFCs.

7 minutes.

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Credit: Thomas Adams

Two researchers at MIT say they have what will be “the lowest price option” for power generation in the future if a carbon tax is every levied in the United States (as long as the tax is $5 - $15 per metric ton of emitted CO₂).

The duo - Thomas Adams and Paul Barton – have proposed a novel electricity generation process that weds natural gas and solid oxide fuel cells using off-the-shelf technology, and have applied for a patent for their concept. A paper on their work has been printed in the Journal of Power Sources.

Their process contains a steam reformer that prepares the gas for use within the fuel cells. The reformer and water-gas shift reactor creates a fuel mix absent carbon monoxide, thus avoiding the problems created by carbon deposition issues in SOFCs when CO is present. CO₂ is generated, but they say it will be “mostly pure” and can be captured with very little energy penalty using a multistage flash cascade process. High-purity water is another byproduct.

Adams and Barton developed the concept while looking at possible “clean-coal” approaches, and they admit their system could also work with pulverized coal. But, the relatively greater abundance of natural gas and its smaller amount of CO₂ emissions (an MIT news story reports that existing natural-gas power plants produce one-third to one-half the CO₂ of coal-burning plants) provide two strong reasons for using this fuel.

And price - under the right circumstances - could be a third reason. Adams and Barton developed and used a computer simulation methodology to analyze the relative costs and performance of their system versus other existing or proposed generating systems, including natural-gas or coal-powered systems incorporating carbon capture technologies.

They found that even if the cost of fuel cells remains more than double the DOE’s target for 2010, their SOFC system has the lowest lifecycle costs of electricity produced, even though the up-front capital costs could be three to four times greater than for natural gas or coal combustion systems.

The simulation even indicated that the lifecycle cost of this novel system is lower than that of a combined-cycle natural gas plant, even without carbon pricing. They say that even with a carbon tax around $5 to $10 per ton, their system would be cheaper than coal plants, currently the lowest-cost option for electricity generation.

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Finding a way to safely transport hydrogen is an important concern for researchers and engineers investigating ways to introduce fuel cell-powered vehicles. In June 2008, the ACerS Bulletin published an article on Savannah River National Lab and Toyota research on some prototype systems based an a system of chemical absorbents contained within porous-walled glass microspheres. The idea then was that these microspheres would carry encapsulated absorbent and when the hydrogen was needed, the gas would be released either through a chemical or mechanical means. The benefit of the microspheres, themselves, is that they are strong, recyclable and, at the macro scale, flow like a liquid and therefore can be pumped.

Although our article didn’t provide details about what kind of absorbents were being tested, a different group of investigators from the University of Alabama and the Los Alamos National Lab say they have one: ammonia borane. The general concept is that AB can act as a hydride and soak up the hydrogen. Then, once the hydrogen is released, the AB could then be regenerated and reused.

There are some basic requirements for such a hydrogen fuel system. It needs to be lightweight, it needs to have a relative high energy density (higher than just hydrogen gas), be recyclable, be safe, and, ultimately, meet the DOE 300 miles per fuel tank benchmark.

The LANL and UA, working together under the umbrella of the DOE’s Chemical Hydrogen Storage Center of Excellence, tackled the energy density issue by focusing on hydrides, in particular AB, because as noted in a press release, “its hydrogen storage capacity approaches a whopping 20 percent by weight.”

The easy part was identifying the hydrogen storage capacity of AB; the hard part was figuring out a way to economically recycle it. Eventually, the team realized that one form of dehydrogenated AB – polyborazylene – could be reused fairly efficiently, i.e., without a great dead of additional energy.

One of the LANL researchers, John Gordon, praised the collaborative work with UA. “At the outset there were myriad potential reagents with which to attempt this chemistry. The predictive calculations carried out by University of Alabama professor Dave Dixon’s group were crucial in guiding the experimental work of Los Alamos postdoctoral researcher Ben Davis,” Gordon added. “The excellent synergy between these two groups clearly enabled this advance.”

The team reports that is also working with Dow Chemical to tweak the chemical processes in the AB–hydrogen system and develop prototype applications.

A paper on this research appears in Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

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The two house of Congress passed their own versions of the Energy and Water appropriations bill that includes Department of Energy funding. Now the bill will go to committee before a final version is passed by both house before it is sent to President Obama to be signed into law.

Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) told the New York Times that merging the House and Senate bills should not be too difficult. “I don’t anticipate that this process is going to be full of controversy. I think we will be able to do this in fairly short order. We have somewhat different numbers on water issues and certain areas of energy, but I think we will get this done,” he said.

Overall, the House’s version of the bill (pdf) provides $26.9 billion for DOE. According to the House Appropriations Committee, this is $86 million above current spending. The Senate’s version of the bill (pdf) provides almost $27.4 billion for DOE, $5.4 billion for the corps and almost $1.2 billion for Interior water programs.” House and Senate lawmakers will have the task of ironing out the differences.

Some of the funds will be funneled as follows:

$2.25 billion for renewable energy and energy efficiency programs.

$4.94 billion for DOE’s Office of Science.

$15 million into district energy and combined heat and power systems.

$812 million for nuclear energy research.

$618 million for research and development for carbon capture and storage projects and alternative fuel technologies.

$15 million into district energy and combined heat and power systems.

Both versions also apparently contain funding for hydrogen vehicle research.

Congress is currently adjourned for summer recess and as a result, final passage of the bill is likely to occur in the early autumn.

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Elsevier, publisher of scientific, technical and medical information, announced the results of its SciVal Spotlight Alternative Energy Research Leadership study. Analyzing the work of 3,000 research institutions world-wide, the study identifies the top 25 based on the number of alternative energy research papers produced in distinctive competencies (DCs).

Highlights of the findings were shared in a recent webcast, “Research Leadership Redefined: Measuring Performance in a Multidisciplinary Landscape.”

Distinctive competencies represent expertise in specific research areas. They reveal the degree to which institutions have constructed multidisciplinary networks within their organization focused on achieving specific breakthroughs. Indicating that research within the university is not being done in isolated silos, examining output in distinctive competencies offers a more accurate way of determining leadership in a given area than traditional measurement methods.

The following table ranks institutions based on the number of alternative energy research papers produced in DCs.

“As research becomes more multidisciplinary in nature, it is increasingly difficult to find actionable information with respect to output,” said Jay Katzen, managing director of Elsevier’s Academic & Government Products, and one of the webcast presenters. “In today’s uncertain economic times, it is even more critical that academic executives get the right insight to make strategic decisions on everything from funding allocations to hiring.”

“There is a common misperception that the most significant research is being conducted at only a handful of top-ranked universities,” added Dick Klavans, senior development adviser for Elsevier A&G and also a presenter at the webcast. “There is a need to look beyond total paper counts as leaders in specific subtopics exist within all levels of the university rankings. Examining distinctive competencies shines a light on overlooked output and unrecognized leaders.”

Based on the top 50 institutions globally, the study also analyzes country output in the three main alternative energy sub-topics or topic groups including solar/photovoltaic, fuel cells and environmentally related areas (such as efficiency, renewable energy, biomass, wind, etc.).

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