Carbon Fuel Cells  

While I'm generally in favour of reducing the amount of carbon that we burn, in the hope that we don't cook ourselves in the coming decades, this typically rosy-eyed Wired report on carbon fuel cells is quite interesting - if we have to burn the stuff we should at least try and do it as efficiently and cleanly as possible.

Mad scientist Doc Brown powers his time machine by feeding coffee grounds and other biowaste into the DeLorean in Back to the Future.

While time travel is still in the realm of science fiction, carbon-based fuel cells are about to become science fact -- rendering a similar scenario all the more possible. SRI announced in November that it has developed direct carbon fuel-cell technology.

The process is 70 percent efficient, double that of traditional coal power plants, according to Larry Dubois, vice president of the physical sciences division at SRI.

SRI researchers have shown that in a single step, they can take pulverized coal -- or anything else that contains carbon, including human waste or banana peels, for example -- and directly transform the fuel's chemical energy into electricity by electrochemically oxidizing the carbon.

The byproduct is carbon dioxide -- but it is emitted in such a pure form, Dubois said, that it's easy to contain. "If you have a conventional gas-fired coal plant and capture the (carbon dioxide) -- 75 percent of the cost is separating carbon dioxide from air," he said.

The new technology could also help to reduce dependence on foreign oil, he said.

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For now, the carbon fuel cells are producing small amounts of power on the scale of a few watts at SRI's laboratory in Menlo Park, California. But Dubois expects their capability to rise to 10 kilowatts by 2009, to 100 kilowatts by 2011 and to 500 kilowatts by 2015.

"Is this early stage?" he said. "Absolutely. Is it risky? Absolutely. But the payoff potential is tremendous."