Or, you could just use an old-fashioned alkaline fuel cell cooled by circulating the electrolyte. The latter also has to be changed on a regular basis as any CO2 dissolved in it reduces performance. This would be analogous to an oil change in a regular ICE-powered vehicle.

http://www.fuelcelltoday.com/media/pdf/archive/Article_1087_AFC.pdf

Of course, like all low-temperature fuel cells, AFCs require hydrogen fuel. That is the fundamental barrier to market entry and, likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

"Of course, like all low-temperature fuel cells, AFCs require hydrogen fuel. That is the fundamental barrier to market entry and, likely to remain so for the foreseeable future."

isn't it fairly simple to include a reformer to extract the hydrogen from natural gas?

I agree with the alkaline fuel cell comments, why did people forget those, CO2 poisoning was not a serious problem.

Can't you just use solar to make the Hydrogen via electrolysis? and even though you could only make it durung the daylight hours the goodthing is its always sunny somewhere around the world all the time. So we would be making hydrogen 24 hours a day. Now we would just need to figure out the storage and shipping of it.

Venter is promising more than he is able to deliver in a timely fashion. Waiting for Venter would be a bad idea.

There is nothing wrong with reforming methane to hydrogen for fuel cells. Better to approach the ideal incrementally than to postpone the good and the do-able in favor of a mythical ideal.

CO2 hysteria is all the fashion, but it is making humans stupid.

"CO2 hysteria is all the fashion, but it is making humans stupid."

Al, how you can deny the geophysical impact of a trace gas representing .038% of the Earth's atmosphere is hard to comprehend.

@ HealthyBreeze -

don't forget King Coal has a lot of political clout and will do all he can to prevent renewable electricity from ever encroaching on his turf. Also, algae would let him earn money twice off each carbon atom he drags out of the ground.

Note that photosynthesis can only use a few percent of incident light intensity on a sunny day, so even diffuse ambient winter light in the Northeast will permit significant production volumes - provided only that the temperature inside the bioreactors is high enough.

If required, CO2 can be piped over significant distances, so the land used for the algae wouldn't need to be immediately adjacent to the power plants. Alternatively, you could increase surface area by going vertical (e.g. Valcent Vertigro). Insulate the pipelines and you can even use the CO2 to transport low-grade heat to the bioreactor farm at a remote location.

Finally, consider that electric vehicle technology is expensive. Even then, relative to ICEs, you have to sacrifice either performance or range, two features the average consumer has become very accustomed to.

Nice job indeed and quite promising for clean electric generation. Not relying on Pt is definitely a big step but that doesn't solve all the problems of producing, storing and distributing the H2 which make H2 impractical for transportation any time soon.

But nice job indeed

They have done work on Direct Methanol Fuel Cells. The slide set talks about the work done to reduce the need for expensive catalysts. CO and CO2 both poison that catalyst in PEM fuel cells and if you change the catalyst, you might just reduce the sensitivity.