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FuelCell Energy and DOE Finalize $36.2-Million Award for Coal-Fueled Multi-Megawatt Solid Oxide Fuel Cell System

FuelCell Energy, a leading manufacturer of stationary fuel-cell power generation systems, has finalized terms with the US Department of Energy (DOE) for a $36.2 million Phase I award to develop a coal-based, multi-megawatt solid oxide fuel cell-based hybrid power generation system.

This award provides funding for the first stage of the 10-year, three-phased Fuel Cell Coal-Based Systems project, part of the DOE Office of Fossil Energy’s Solid State Energy Conversion Alliance (SECA). Total project funding for this and the other two planned phases is anticipated to be approximately $180 million.

The program’s overall objective is to develop solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) technology, fueled by coal synthesis gas (syngas) that will be used in central generation power plant facilities.

The advanced fuel cell-hybrid system will have an overall efficiency of at least 50% in converting energy contained in coal to grid electrical power. In contrast, today’s conventional US coal-based power plant has an electrical efficiency of approximately 35%.

The envisioned SOFC-hybrid system is expected to capture 90% or more of the system’s carbon dioxide emissions for disposal while being cost-competitive with other base load power generating technologies.

The project will culminate with the fabrication and operation of a multi-MW proof-of-concept SOFC-hybrid power plant at a suitable location, using coal-derived syngas as fuel.

FuelCell Energy may consider submitting the project to the FutureGen Alliance Inc. for possible inclusion in the FutureGen Power Plant. FutureGen is a planned DOE research facility for advanced power systems that emit near-zero emissions, with a substantial increase over today’s electric generating efficiency. As well as generating electricity, the system will produce hydrogen and sequester carbon dioxide.

Phase I project objectives include scale-up and performance enhancement of the existing SOFC cell and stack configuration, engineering design analysis for a proof-of-concept power plant and cost analysis. The Phase I project deliverable will be testing of a stack building block unit operating on simulated coal syngas.

A further objective of the FuelCell Energy project will be to construct an 80-100kW capacity stack tower, comprised of these building block units, to validate design components associated with a multi-stack tower. The stack tower will be validation tested at the company’s test facility toward the end of the Phase I program.

FuelCell Energy utilizes the cell and stack design of its technology team partner, Versa Power Systems Inc. (VPS), for all its SOFC development programs. VPS has been engaged in SOFC development since 1997.

VPS provided the 3kW prototype stack and system for FuelCell Energy’s DOE SECA Cost Reduction project, initiated in April 2003. In recently-completed Phase I testing, the 3kW SOFC prototype system operated for more than 2,000 hours and successfully met or surpassed all DOE performance metrics for power output, efficiency and degradation (life). Applicable elements of this existing SECA project will be integrated into the new project’s technical objectives, based on similarities in cell and stack development.

In February, FuelCell Energy was selected by the DOE as a prime contractor for this award and is responsible for the overall systems development of the power plant. Other team members for the newly awarded Fuel Cell Coal-Based Systems project include: Gas Technology Institute (GTI), providing advanced gasification clean-up technology; Nexant, Inc. providing coal gasification and carbon sequestration expertise; WorleyParsons Group Inc. providing engineering, procurement and construction support and SatCon Technology Corporation, providing power conditioning system engineering.

In August, FuelCell Energy announced an advanced fuel-cell stack design that boosts the power output of its stationary Direct FuelCell (DFC) power plants by 20%. (Earlier post.)

SECA is an alliance formed between three groups: Industrial Teams, Core Technology Program teams, and Federal Government experts. Fuel Cell Energy and its partners constitute one SECA team. The others are:

  • Acumentrics – 10 kW tubular SOFC power generation system;
  • Cummins Power Generation (with SOFCo) – 10 kW SOFC net generator system for recreational vehicles, commercial vehicles, and telcommunications emergency power;
  • Delphi Automotive Systems (with Battelle) – 5 kW planar SOFC for distributed generation systems and automotive auxiliary power units;
  • General Electric Power Systems – 3 kW to 10 kW SOFC system; and
  • Siemens Westinghouse Power Corporation – 7kW to 10 kW SOFC combined heat and power system for residential applications and a 3 kW to 10 kW SOFC auxiliary power unit for transportation applications.

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Comments

SJC

Syngas is a good fuel for SOFCs. Both the H2 and CO are used as fuel in these types of cells. Santa Clara, Ca. did a large SOFC program more than a decade ago, which helped sort out some of the issues.

allen_Z

IF they can use the waste heat (for electric generation or...paper/plywood recycling/production), efficiencies can rise even further, perhaps to 75-85%.

Neil

Do these SOFCs require any rare or limited materials? (eg PEMs use of platinum)

allen_Z

Neil,
The point of SOFC is to utilise high operating temperatures in order to circumvent the need for rare/precious metal catalysts. They tend to work with abundant materials like nickel, and can use CO for energy conversion, instead of being contaminated by it like in the case of platinum. If you want more info, google SOFC, or wiki it. There is a cousin to SOFC, MCFC. They too can use C as well as H2 to convert chmical energy to electric and thermal energy. With both, advanced thermoelectrics and insulation may be advantageous for increased efficiency.

Rafael Seidl

Note that the project calls for a multi-MW installation but the partners in this project only have demo units in the 1-10 kW range. They need to scale up by a factor 1000 to obtain a plant with just a handful of stacks to manage.

Some of that will come from integration with a gas turbine stage (the hybrid part of the proposal) to increase the gas pressure in the stacks.

Neil

Is there any efficiency advantages to large stacks over many small ones? Many small stacks would seem to have more flexability and fewer technical problems.

Bob

Re: ".. coal-based, .. fuel cell-based ..". This really sounds stange when you first read it. Like, ok, which is it?

allen_Z

Bob,
It is both. The fuel is based on coal, for the time being. It is a SOFC, solid oxide fuel cell, and can use the syngas made from coal.

Rafael Seidl

Neil -

you want some redundancy to allow for scheduled maintenance but not 1000s of little units. Something, somewhere would break down all the time in such a plant, and for utilities reliability is mission-critical. Besides, given the high temperatures involved in SOFC stacks, larger stacks should require less insulation (scales with physical volume to the power of 2/3), making them cheaper to build.

Roger Pham

For distributed generation and heat + electricity co-generation, SOFC is ideal in the 5-100 Kw range because of the high efficiency and low maintenance associated. Small gas turbines for distributed generation is not efficient and Otto-cycle piston engine would not have the necessary reliablity for continous use. However, natural gas thru gas pipeline must be used, as there'll be problem using H2 in current pipeline, and CO is a deadly poison.

For concentrated power generation in the MW range, the combined-cycle gas turbine and steam bottoming cycle is the proven industrial standard with efficiency up to 60%. Of course, if bottoming steam cycle is used on the waste heat of SOFC, efficiency will be even higher, as Allen Z mentioned, but harnessing the heat from a large number of SOFC stacks may increase cost.

At any rate, these "clean coal" technologies will be much better for the environment than standard coal-fired plants, but cannot as yet compete with cost with conventional plants because coal is still dirt cheap.

What's needed is legislation to gradually phasing out all these dirty coal plants and requiring clean coal plants, in the interest of efficiency and environment preservation.

Rafael Seidl

Roger -

"Otto-cycle piston engine would not have the necessary reliablity for continous use"

This is incorrect. There are in fact plenty of large, stationary natural gas engines in operation around the world, typically derived from two-stroke diesel designs. These units drive electrical generators for industrial users and/or in places not connected to the national grid. Spark plugs and oil need to be changed every once in a blue moon in scheduled maintenance, but the timescales of both are being stretched (laser ignition, long life oils, ...) Major overhauls are only required after ~50,000 hours, i.e. 5.7 years of virtually continous operation. For units in the 1-3MW range, thermodynamic efficiency is >50%.

The heat of the exhaust gas can be used for a secondary steam cycle or thermal applications such as drying processes or space heating and cooling (via absorption chillers). In such combined processes, thermodynamic efficiency can exceed 80%.

With modifications, especially to the engine oil, such gensets can also be operated on special gases from landfills, coal mines, coking plants, sewage plants, biomass gasification etc. In many cases, these gases ould otherwise be vented or flared.

http://www.gepower.com/businesses/ge_jenbacher/en/index.htm
http://www.lec.at/

The far more expensive and still immature SOFC technology promises higher primary efficiency (in addition to combined-cycle options) and cleaner emissions, especially wrt NOx. However, afaik SOFCs are not suitable for special gases.

SJC

Some of the SOFCs use a tubular design rather than stacks. Tubular has been popular in larger devices for quite a while for several reasons.

Andrey

Rafael:

Last generation of lean-burn high-compression NG diesel (using SI, but traditionally called “diesel”)generators are four stroke turbocharged units using, naturally, Miller cycle. They are the cheapest and most efficient one-stage means of generating electricity, and are quite clean. Availability and price of NG is limiting factor. They are increasingly used for peak electricity generation and in distributed and co-generation applications.

Roger Pham

Rafael,
You obviously must have more updated info than what I had in mind. A piston engine is most typically associated with a time between overhaul of 2,000 hours in small aircraft engines, to 10,000 to 15,000 hrs in a diesel truck engine after running 750,000 to 1 million miles at 65 mph. A car engine won't make anywhere nearly as far. 200,000 miles at 65 mph will completely wear out a car's engine at 3000 hours. What kind internal structure do these 50,000-hr piston engines have? Ceramic-coated cylinder liner? What kind of oil was used?

50% efficiency is also new info to me. Diesel typically gets 40-42% peak efficiency. What do these power plants have that allow it to get 50% efficiency?

Rafael Seidl

Roger -

I suggest you look at the GE Jenbacher link I provided. These are large bore engines running at fixed low speeds, so they can be optimized for and operated in a much smaller portion of the torque-speed map than any vehicle engine. They also feature huge oil carters and special oil additive packages.

Btw, no ceramics involved - just honking big pistons with fancy internal cooling, large stroke-to-bore ratios and very efficient turbos. Marine two-stroke diesels feature a similar concept, though they are much bigger still. Hyundai still uses MAN designs in their container ships - no gear box, the prop attaches directly to the crankshaft. A person can easily climb inside these monsters.

Engineer-Poet

GE claims up to 49.9% effciency for the LMS100 gas turbine, and that's in a package a tiny fraction of the size and weight of an equivalent diesel (like the 80 MW Wartsila-Sulzer).  Fuel cells are about to kick gas turbine butt in the efficiency department.

What neither gas turbines nor fuel cells will do is operate on waxy, nasty, high-sulfur bunker fuel.  This mattered when bunker fuel was practically a waste product, but today's refineries are buying worse stuff as feedstock.  Prices have soared.

This probably means we're going to see shipping start to move to either gas turbines or fuel cells to cut fuel consumption further and shrink the bulk and weight penalty of the powerplant.  Direct drive engines have little to break, but multiple fuel cells feeding multiple motors are redundant and hard to strand.

This will be something to watch.

Roger Pham

Again, thanks, Rafael, for the info.

I calculate, assuming electrical generation efficiency of 90%, that the 300-kw genset piston engine running on natural gas has about 42% maximal efficiency. This is quite impressive for a natural gas engine running on lean combustion mode.
From this data, it would be reasonable to expect a H2-ICE running on ultra-lean combustion mode to achieve 45% to 50% efficiency, given the leaner combustibility of H2 at equally high compression ratio. A H2-PEM FC can get over 60% efficiency but at higher cost and lower durability for automotive application. FCV now seems less practical in comparison to a H2-ICE-HEV.

Eng-Poet,
Gas turbines and FC's are more efficient but a lot more expensive than piston engine optimized for high efficiency. If high performance is not required, like slow cargo ships, piston engines can give you a lot more bangs for the buck (no pun intended :)

Ulf Bossel

"Clean Coal" and "Carbon Sequestration" are two more wishful thoughts of the energy lobby proposed without due consideration of some basic laws of physics. For every ton of carbon (coal) converted to energy, be it with coal-fired power plants or as syngas with fuel cells, 3.67 tons of carbon dioxide are produced. Much of the generated energy is needed to separate this atmpospheric pollutant from the coal gas, to compact it to about 1000 psi for transport to the dump site, and to pump it into the ground or the deep sea. The problem is not raising the coal and transporting it to the boiler, but to deposit almost four times more mass safely somewhere for all times. Sequestration techniques and CO2 storage sites have not yet been identified or developed. It seems resonable to first solve the fundamental questions related to a safe and permanent CO2 burrial before public money is spent on the development of "clean coal" and "syngas" technologies.

After "freedom fuel" (hydrogen) and "freedom cars" (hydrogen fuel cell vehicles) "clean coal" is another attempt of the energy lobby to defend its territory. The energy problem can only be solved in a clean and sustainable way by harvesting energy from renewable sources and by using it with highest efficiency. It seems that people and local governments in the US begin to understand this equation while the officials in Washington DC continue to dream.

Engineer-Poet

Mr. Bossel!  Good of you to stop by.  I've become a big fan of yours after reading about the ECFC dropping coverage of PEM fuel cells.

My own appraisal is that the best near-term technology for vehicles is lithium-ion batteries, and the best technology for conversion of biomass to energy is probably direct-carbon fuel cells for charcoal and solid-oxide fuel cells for gas.  However, repairing the damage we've done to the environment will require sequestration even if we use 100% biofuels.  Depleted oil and gas fields are obvious sites for liquid CO2, and deep aquifers appear to be good also.

Greg Woulf

This sounds like a straight SoFC system, I'm having trouble seeing the Hybrid part.

If they do go Hybrid SoFC has a benefit at higher pressure, but not enough to offset the cost of pressurization. In Gas turbines they us the SoFC Heat in a pressure after the burners and the pressure has the dual benefit of driving the turbine.

If they went to a true hybrid, coal burning turbine, mixed with gassified-coal drive SoFC they could probably use the same pressure to gain a bit more efficiency.

Of course burning coal adds back in gases, especially NOx, SO2 and CO2, but until we get past a transition stage of power generation we're going to have to make some compromises I think.

Engineer-Poet

Using the FC waste heat to drive a steam cycle makes it a hybrid of sorts, though I'd call it a combined-cycle.  Unfortunately, the press release does not link to any technical info which might illuminate this issue.

Roger Pham

Ulf Bossel,
Are you the same person who wrote an article against Hydrogen in "Home Power" magazine 1-2 months ago?

I hope that you have read some of my postings here in GCC, but if not, I would like to inform you that H2 can be produced and utilized just as efficiently as electricity when calculated from well to wheel, from
all possible sources such as coal, natural gas, biomass, crude oil, wind, solar and nuclear energy, etc...
H2 should be produced locally (within the same city) for local use to eliminate the difficulty and inefficiency of transporting H2 over long distances. Locally produced and use, H2 distribution can be 2-3 times more efficient than electrical transmission, which incurs a loss of 8-10% when transmitted from the powerplants to home sockets.

The advantage of H2-ICE-HEV vehicle over the BEV or PHEV is rapid fill-up, no need to change expensive battery, no rapid battery deterioration in hot climates, and no battery performance problem in frigid weather. The advantage of H2-ICE-HEV over gasoline cars is very clean exhaust emission, and elimination of carcinogenic environmental pollution.

Engineer-Poet

The crippling disadvantage of H2-ICE vehicles is the enormous fuel tank volumes, extreme high storage pressures and long filling times required.  Do you think that heat of compression of the gas already in the tank just disappears?

Available lithium-ion cells already charge faster than a high-pressure hydrogen tank can fill, and the end-to-end efficiency is much higher.  Doctor Bossel and I have run the same numbers (he, years before I did) and come to the only possible conclusion:  hydrogen is a boondoggle, a diversion, a red herring.

Roger Pham

Eng-Poet,

Please kindly look at the table in the bottom of GCC's article regarding Quantum's compressed Hydrogen Storage, http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006/09/quantums_compre.html
You'll find that Quantum Compressed H2 tank has a max fill rate of 2kg of H2/minute. If your car contains 4kg of H2, you'll need but ~over 2 minutes for a fillup. Can any Li-ion battery do that? I don't think so.
Quantum's compressed H2 tank has cycle life of 15,000 fillups without loss of capacity. Can any Li-ion battery do that? Nope!

Cost-wise, Quantum's tank costs $10-17 per kwh of energy! 120 kwh tank that contains ~4 kg of H2 that is good for 270 mi range in the latest Honda FCX will cost about $1500 USD. The lowest-cost Li battery is priced at ~$600 USD per kwh, if multiply by 120 will set you back $72,000!! Ouch!!!

Now, can you see why many Auto MFG's are announcing FCV's development (Honda and GM and Toyota) or H2-ICE cars (BMW and Ford) but except for Mitsubishi, no major car maker are announcing BEV's to come?

Engineer-Poet
You'll find that Quantum Compressed H2 tank has a max fill rate of 2kg of H2/minute. If your car contains 4kg of H2, you'll need but ~over 2 minutes for a fillup.
If my car is using an ICE, it'll take more like 20 kg to give me decent range.  Make that 10 minutes, not 2.
Can any Li-ion battery do that?
A123Systems is rumored to charge in as little as 5 minutes, though 1 hour is recommended.
The lowest-cost Li battery is priced at ~$600 USD per kwh
That's retail; I understand that Tesla Motors is getting theirs in bulk for something like $400/kWh.  And the materials for Li-ion are cheap; there is a long way for prices to fall.
Cost-wise, Quantum's tank costs $10-17 per kwh of energy!
So a tank holding 20 kg (~600 kWH) would cost $6000-$10000.  Sounds a lot less competitive right off the bat.

Now let's talk operating cost.  If I'm making electricity from e.g. wind at 8¢/kWh, I have perhaps 10% losses in transmission and charger and 5% losses in the Li-ion battery.  Delivered to my motor controller, I get energy at 9.36¢/kWh.

If I go the hydrogen/FC route, I still have 10% losses in transmission.  I also have ~25% losses in electrolysis, plus another 20% energy overhead for compression; 1.15 kWh of juice to the electrolyzer and compressor to get 0.75 kWh of compressed hydrogen out.  The typical PEM fuel cell is about 60% efficient, bringing the electrical output down to 0.45 kWh for 1.28 kWh in.  At the motor terminals, that juice is costing me about 22.7¢/kWh.  And I have to generate almost 2.5 times as much energy to do the same work.

Hydrogen/ICE is worst of all.  Engine efficiency might hit 40%, if I'm lucky.  So I pay 8.9¢ at the fuel unit, 13.6¢ at the fuel hose, and a whopping 34¢/kWh at the crankshaft.  I have to generate almost FOUR TIMES as much energy to get the same work out.  And if you looked at BMW's car, it gets roughly half the horsepower of the same engine running on hydrocarbons.  How can you tout such pathetic things?

On the other hand, hydrogen works better than electricity... IF you're starting from coal or gas!  That's why the fossil lobbies love it.

I spelled this out fifteen months ago.  Dr. Ulf Bossel did it years earlier.  If you think hydrogen makes sense for anything except chemistry, you haven't been paying attention.

Automakers have been announcing hydrogen vehicles because that's what governments (lobbied by the fossil interests) have been paying them to work on.  But Toyota and Honda are actually selling cars with batteries, not fuel cells.  They run on liquids (and can be supplemented with wall current), not hydrogen.  And all it takes is one advance like Firefly Energy to supply Li-ion performance at lead-acid prices, and the argument for hydrogen collapses.

We don't just have one such battery/capacitor advance waiting.  We have at least four, and it's just a question of which one makes it to market first.

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