photo credit: fingle

In search of forever

As a source of power for cars, fuel cells have been a disappointment. For laptops and mobile phones, they are just about to take off.

METHANOL is nasty stuff. Careless distillation in many a backwoods still has caused it to blind the imbibers of “alternative” alcoholic drinks. Yet it has its uses, and one of them may be to restore fuel cells to their oft-vaunted role as the power packs of the future—but with a twist. The main role that has been discussed for fuel cells over the past few decades is as replacements for the internal-combustion engine. Their actual use may turn out to be to provide power for portable electronic devices.

A fuel cell is a device that combines hydrogen with oxygen to generate electricity. The traditional approach has been to use the gas itself in the cell—and that is the approach taken by the world’s carmakers in their so-far not very successful attempts to make a commercial fuel-cell-driven car. Since gaseous hydrogen is hard to store and handle, an alternative that some people have considered is to lock the hydrogen up in methanol, a liquid whose molecules are made of a carbon atom, an oxygen atom and four hydrogen atoms. Methanol will react with water in the form of steam to make hydrogen and carbon dioxide—a process known as steam reformation. Put a steam reformer in a car along with the fuel cell and you can fill the tank with methanol instead of hydrogen.

That idea has not gone very far, either. But it has provoked another thought. What if it were possible to decompose the methanol without steam, and within the fuel cell itself? And that has, indeed, turned out to be possible. The resulting cells are nowhere near powerful enough to run cars, but they are plenty powerful enough to stand in for small batteries. What is more, they last far longer than batteries and when they do need recharging, it is the work of a moment.

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