Jump-Starting the Hydrogen Economy: AFC Energy Takes a Back to Basics, Commercial Approach

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Updating an Overlooked Fuel Cell Technology

Updating well-known and proven alkaline fuel cell technology is another key to AFC’s commercialization strategy. “One of the advantages of alkaline fuel cells is that we’re using the oldest, proven fuel cell technology.

“It’s been used to run the Apollo and Challenger space missions. Everyone knows that they work, and they work to ‘five-nines’ reliability.

“We’re pretty much there on power output at the moment, and that was originally done some 20 or 30 years ago. Now we’re focused on delivering that at low cost,” White related.

Eliminating platinum as a catalyst has moved AFC a big step towards realizing that goal. So is conservative financial management and working with industry partners, such as AkzoNobel, to further develop and refine its alkaline fuel cell system.

“Our burn rate in a year is a half or quarter of what Ballard or FuelCell Energy burn in a quarter – around $5 million a year. Either we’re mad or we’ve got a total cost breakthrough. We’ve burned through $14 million since inception, and we’ve got about $10 million in banks, enough to last two years.”

“We’re at a point where we’ll have a reference site in Germany; we’ve got a frozen commercial design, and now we’re optimizing the technology.

Though a milestone, AFC sees achieving the four UK pence (6 US cents) per kWh capex/opex cost target as a “transitional number; it’s not our final destination,” White said.

“We’re now getting down into the numbers at which we will start to compete directly with turbines, and their costs will certainly be going up, especially if they use hydrocarbons.”

Mapping the Path to Zero Emissions Electricity

AFC views itself as a clean energy company, “one that just happens to design and build fuel cells,” White explained. Using pure hydrogen at chlor-alkali plants, as opposed to syngas, biogas or natural gas, means that its fuel cells produce zero emissions.

“We see fuel cells as the transitional technology to achieving zero emissions electricity,” he told Clean Technica. “You not only have to compete with existing technologies, but show a path to a lower cost with de-carbonization.

“If you look at the big picture where we’re producing massive amounts of carbon dioxide and want to go carbon-free, we’re looking at a 50-year window of transition. We have to be using fossil fuels sensibly, and that’s where the de-carbonization of electricity production comes in.

“But you have to increase the efficiency and bring the costs [of such technologies] down. You can’t throw huge amounts of money at the problem and watch as everyone goes broke. It has to be done in a politically and economically adept fashion.”

Microsoft in a Garage

By and large, excessively high costs of capital continue to hold back commercialization of fuel cells, according to White. “I want every fuel cell company to work, to succeed,” but for the industry in general, “the cost base is just too high to be commercial.”

In contrast, AFC’s low cost hydrogen fuel cells have been referred to “as Microsoft in a garage,” White stated. “[Alkaline fuel cells] are an overlooked technology. What’s happened is very simple. In the past 15 years, materials science and new manufacturing processes have produced products that didn’t exist then [when Sir William Grove invented the first fuel cell in 1839].

“We applied these to an older technology and came up with a very low cost engineering solution that works. We have not reinvented the wheel.”

AFC’s brought on a new CEO to lead the company into what it sees as the home stretch to commercialization. “Ian Williamson is one who knows our market extremely well,” White commented, “and he sees this as a market that’s going to happen. He is ‘Mr. Hydrogen Solution’ in Europe.”

For more on fuel cells and the hydrogen economy, check out:

Residential Use of Fuel Cells on the Rise
Fuel Cell-Coal Plant CO2 Capture: Clean Tech Breakthrough or Ill-Conceived Diversion?
Hydrogen Storage-Fuel Cell System to Smooth Out Intermittent Wind Power in Germany


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