Fuel Cells - Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering - page 148

Fuel Cells
In his 2003 State of the Union Address, President George W. Bush called for promoting energy
independence for the United States, while at the same time making dramatic improvements in the
environment. The familiar rhetoric alluded to a comprehensive plan involving efficiency and con-
servation, as well as developing cleaner technologies for domestic energy production. But the pres-
ident soon departed from the familiar and entered the realm of the exotic when he asked Congress
to take “a crucial step, and protect our environment” in distinctly new ways. In the twenty-first
century, he continued, “the greatest environmental progress will come about, not through endless
lawsuits or command and control legislation, but through technology and innovation.” He proposed
spending $1.2 billion on research on hydrogen-powered automobiles, which employ fuel cells.
The president went on to give an admirably concise definition of the principle of a fuel cell: “A
simple chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen generates energy, which can be used to
power a car producing only water, not exhaust fumes.” He challenged scientists and engineers to
overcome obstacles to taking fuel-cell-powered automobiles “from laboratory to showroom” in a
time frame expressed not in cold calendar years but in the very warm and human image of growing
up, “so that the first car driven by a child born today could be powered by hydrogen.” Such pro-
gress, the president asserted, opened up ways to protect the environment “that generations before us
could not have imagined.”
It was only in the summer before President Bush's address that I was introduced to fuel cells in a
more than passing way. Evidently because I had written about invention and the evolution of a wide
variety of technologies, I was invited to join an industry advisory committee that was being formed
by Chrysalix Energy, a Vancouver-based venture-capital firm investing in early-stage fuel-cell tech-
nology, among the founding partners of which is Ballard Power Systems. It was as a member of that
committee, the purpose of which was to bring outside perspectives to discussions about an imagined
hydrogen economy, that I received my introduction to fuel cells and became increasingly interested
in the history, status, and future of the technology.
Applications of the fuel cell may seem futuristic, but the device itself dates from 1839, when the
Welsh-born British jurist and scientist Sir William Robert Groves devised a “gas battery.” Unlike
Alessandro Volta's invention in 1800 of the now-familiar dry cell, the energy-producing ingredi-
ents of which are all contained within the battery casing and can produce electricity only as long as
they can sustain the chemical reaction, Groves's gas battery produced electricity as long as it was
fueled by an external source. In one modern version of the fuel cell, cathodes are separated by a thin
electrolytic membrane. When hydrogen is introduced under pressure, it is decomposed by a catalyst
at the anode into electrons and protons. The electrons naturally make electricity, which can power
a motor or other electrical device. The protons move through the membrane toward the cathode,
where another catalyst recombines them with spent electrons and oxygen from the ambient air to
produce water. But even before the fuel cell was invented, the simpler voltaic pile had been deve-