Bloom Box Launch Is "Big Hype"--Invention Nothing New?

Source: National Geographic Daily News

The Bloom Box—an as yet unbuilt in-home "power plant" designed to be about the size of a mini-fridge—could provide cheap, environmentally friendly electricity to U.S. households within ten years, according to Bloom Energy. Or not.

After days of speculation and hype, the fuel cell company unveiled their plans for Bloom Box mass production—but no prototype—at a press conference today with California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and former U.S. secretary of state and Bloom Energy board member Colin Powell, among others.

But fuel cell experts say that, based on the information the company made public today, the Bloom Box technology is not revolutionary, nor is it the cheapest or most efficient fuel cell system available.

"It's a big hype. I'm actually pretty pissed off about it, to be quite honest," said Nigel Sammes, a ceramic engineer and fuel cell expert at the Colorado School of Mines.


Read more: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/02/100224-bloom-box-launch-bloom-energy-press-conference-update/

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Like the man said: "...based on the information the company made public today, the Bloom Box technology is not revolutionary, nor is it the cheapest or most efficient fuel cell system available."

brought them to a test market? Lots of sour grapes among the undoubtedly valid criticism, it seems.

It isn't "sour grapes" it is recognition of a scam, which reflects poorly on all technologies that are trying to move us away from fossil fuels.

for the clueles/new to the internets:

from what I've read. You put gas in, get electricity out. Other than its size, it doesn't seem that special.

A traditional generator has an engine. You can figure on seeing 20 percent of the potential energy from the input fuel become electricity.

This is a fuel cell generator that runs on methane--natural gas, biogas, if you could figure out a way to tape a funnel to your cow's ass you could run it on steer farts. Its efficiency is over 50 percent, which is real good. There aren't any precious-metal electrodes in it, and it doesn't contain any of the outrageously-priced Nafion membrane that's in a proton-exchange fuel cell. You can order one of these, stick it on the ground, hook up your gas line and electric meter, and be running quickly.

I think within five years you'll see a LOT of these behind Walmart and Target stores. Imagine never having to worry about a drunk driver knocking out all the lights in the store by running into the power pole that feeds you. Or having one less utility bill to pay. These will put the gas company into direct competition with the electric company. By and large most electric companies do a decent job, but a little healthy competition is good for anyone.

Seems I read about a gas in the soil that seeps upward under houses. How about hydrogen gas from water?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2m3jmN_jTc

The most recent 60 minutes had a full report on it.
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6228923n

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9160238/Could_Bloom_Box_revolutionize_power_industry_

This link indicates that not only does it have prototypes, but it has working prototypes powering several major corporations, including Google and Wal-Mart. Maybe it is neither the cheapest or most efficient fuel cell system, but it also does not combust the fuel to create energy. Like was said elsewhere - any effort to reduce GHGs at this point should probably be examined, though not focused on as the sole savior for fuel.

The challenges that fuel cells fail to meet. I wrote it because I posted information on a new type of energy storage that looks like a real step forward, and the people who llike this fuel cell tried to say the battery isn't significant but the Bloom box was. (BTW, I do not advocate investing money in either technology or company as they are both, for different reasons, extremely risky.) This is my response:

The challenges that fuel cells fail to meet.

What is the difference between energy storage and energy generation? If I have a gallon of gasoline I have X amount of energy stored in a container. If I have a charged lithium battery pack I have X amount of energy stored in a container.

If I need to use this energy for something I have to convert it to power. An internal combustion engine converts the solar energy stored chemically in the gasoline to heat and mechanical energy. The heat is largely wasted and losses to heat accounts for 70-88% ff the gasoline's energy.

If I use fuel cell, I have to run the gasoline (or natural gas etc) through a "reformer" and change the nature of the stored energy from one chemistry to a different chemistry. This results in lost energy, but now I can use a fuel cell to process the chemical energy into electricity and heat. Total losses for process in the fuel cells now on the market are around 60-80% of the energy contained in the gasoline. For the Bloom box the loss is stated to be 52%.

Another term to be familiar with is "energy carrier". That describes the portability characteristic that is associated with liquid fuels, but you should remember that liquid fuels are really stored energy. While the portability factor is the one most people focus on for gasoline, it's important to bear the fact that it is stored energy in mind because when we seek an alternative to gasoline, we are dealing with both the storage issue and with the portability issue. I can store a lot of energy cheaply in a pumped hydro system, but I can't carry that around in my car.

So the application is very important when evaluating these technologies. In the case of fuel cells, the efficiency of the fuel cell with a reformer is better than an internal combustion engine, but it still emits a lot of CO2. We can get the portability but we are using stored energy in fossil fuels and that means CO2.

An alternative is to operate a separate process that uses electricity (from fossil, renewables, or nuclear) to produce pure hydrogen. Of course, that incurs an energy loss from whatever energy state we begin with. The H2 then must be made portable. That incurs another loss. When pure H2 is used in a fuel cell, the conversion efficiency is about 50-60%, meaning we lose 40-50% as heat. But when we look at the process of getting the H2 to the fuel cell.

The alternative for automobiles (where portability is important) is the use of lithium batteries. When we track the same route for energy made portable by storage in lithium batteries as we do for fuel cells, this is what we find. Starting with 100kwh of electricity, for the two methods of making H2 portable for the fuel cell we end up with between 19-23kwh pushing the vehicle down the road; starting with the same 100 KWH for batteries we end up with 69kwh pushing the vehicle down the road - it is simply no contest.



From "Why a Hydrogen Economy Doesn't Make Sense" at http://www.physorg.com/news85074285.html

This chart is 4 years old, so there are some improvements on both sides of the chart, but there is nothing that has been developed that alters the basic relationship that strongly favors batteries.

If we look for applications outside the transportation sector, we need to ask how relevant the portability factor is. If we are looking for a system for our home, business or local housing development, what are the characteristics the system must possess to best meet our needs?

I'd argue that the first point is that it should be carbon neutral. If we are not concerned about carbon, the present grid system is pretty darned good at meeting our energy needs for home use. But if we move to carbon free energy what then? The use of nuclear power fits into the present grid system so we can make the transition by building an additional 400-500 nuclear plants in the US and changing nothing else. To use that strategy throughout the world will require about 17,000 nuclear plants.

The vast majority of independent energy policy analysts do not see that as a viable strategy for a number of reasons. There are quite a few plans for making a transition away from fossil fuels and very few from outside of the nuclear industry advocate for expansion of our nuclear fleet. The particulars of that argument are not relevant for this discussion about applications for energy storage and recovery within a distributed grid system, which would be built around renewables. If we go with the nuclear option, the use of fuel cells from any maker have little value.

So (presuming you are interested in a transition to renewables) what about using fuel cells to meet needs at the home, business or local housing development level?

At the home level the chance seems fairly low since the same efficiency issue with input is at play. In our chart above, we find the answer at the level above the end use level for we want to compare the output of the device delivering the electricty, not what the final efficiency through our refrigerator might be, right? The chart gives us an efficiency range of 21-26% for the fuel cell and 77% for the lithium batteries.

If we go to larger scale systems we are looking at the same issue, only the battery is different. For transportation lithium is best because it sores a lot of energy by weight and volume compared to other types of batteries. But for these stationary applications in the microgeneration range, there are other batteries that are very functional.

What about biofuels? They also have to go through a reformer for the fuel cell and when they do, the fuel cell compares poorly to combined cycle gas turbines in the area of efficiency.

The bottom line is that with a fuel cell because you have to go from electricity, to chemical and back to electricity, the system efficiency is too low. If we look at using the fuel cell with hydrocarbons, then it must go through the reformer, and that is even worse than if we manufacture H2.

If we use of manufactured H2 from renewable sources we have essentially no carbon carbon emissions. But there is still the low efficiency rating. We can use the same no carbon renewable sources with batteries of all sorts much more efficiently.

That's why the low cost, scalable rock battery at 72-80% round trip efficiency that can be used anywhere is a breakthough and why a new iteration of an old design of the fuel cell isn't.

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/breakthrough-in-utility-scale-energy-storage-isentropic

Compressed natural gas works for transportation. We know it does. Fort Worth's buses are CNG-powered. Plenty of cop cars are CNG-powered.

According to the 60 Minutes piece on Bloom, one pair of plates generates 100 watts and one pair of plates, with the ceramic separator, probably weighs two ounces.

Playtime: A 60-horse high-efficiency motor (Baldor's P36G563) needs 32kw (68 amps at 460v)--this from Baldor's website. To get there we'll put 450 plates in the fuel cell, which will give us enough power to run the headlights. If they weigh two ounces a pair, the whole pack will weigh 57 pounds. Add 100 pounds for the gas storage, and you're looking at under 160 pounds for this whole subsystem: The Honda EV+ battery pack weighs 843 pounds according to Honda. If it's a zinc-air battery, you'll go 360 miles on a charge before spending hours recharging it. Compare that with going as far as the gas in the tank will take you, and being able to be refueled in minutes, and this looks pretty damn promising.

Of course, they can do this right now so Kristopher won't like it.

That's the point. The move is AWAY from fossil fuels, not to another system that USES fossil fuels. And the Bloom box is touted as being suitable for all types of fossil fuels, which means it has to either have a reformer in place, or it is subject to lowered efficiency when they integrate one.

Some people who have these (note: as opposed to the rock battery you like, these are in use, right now, generating electricity) are running biologically-produced methane through it, which brings us to a whole new application: dealing with hog manure.

In North Carolina we have more commercial hog farming than anywhere else in the world except for Iowa. We generally deal with the manure they generate by putting it in lagoons. In 1999, Vestal Farms' new treatment system screwed up, forcing them to pump 170,000 gallons of wastewater into a lagoon...on April 19, 1999, the lagoon failed and poured over one million gallons of concentrated pig shit into the Cape Fear River. These are open-top lagoons, meaning all the methane they produce goes straight up. The only difference between natural gas and manure-produced methane is the presence of liquid manure--they're both CH4.

You get the farmers around here into a contract with the utilities to put lids on the lagoons, capture the methane and pipe it through Bloom Boxes and everyone's happy. The utility's happy they don't have to pay very much for fuel. The farmers are happy they don't have so many environmental issues. The people who live downwind of these farms are happy.

The anode is hot and surrounded by waste steam. That combination plus the semi-permeable nature of the anode creates a no cost (in terms of external energy) internal reformer. There energy for reforming comes from waste heat which would be lost anyways. It also has the distinct advantage of cooling the stack (reforming is endothermic).

This is a major advantage of Solid Oxide Fuel Cells (SOFC) over the more traditional Proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC).

The stack (as will any SOFC) will internally reform natural gas, methane, propane and butane

Heavy hydro carbons will require an external reformer but despite the claims of some it won't reduce efficiency. PEMFC are low temp so to steam reform hydro carbons requires external energy to boil water into steam. This reduces net output and thus efficiency. The Bloom box like all SOFC operates at almost 1000 degrees and produces a substantial amount of steam and waste heat which could be piped to external reformer at no energy cost.

SAN JOSE, California — Bloom Energy made its long-anticipated debut Wednesday and while the company didn’t share all of the details behind its so-called energy servers, it did give some.

An energy server can provide 100 kilowatts of power by converting natural gas or other hydrocarbons into electricity, pretty much on demand. A single server is about the size of an industrial shipping crate, consists of four 25-kilowatt modules, and costs $700,000 to $800,000. In all, that means power for 9 to 10 cents after incentives in California.

But how does it work inside and what makes Bloom’s technology better than the fuel cells designed by others? CEO and founder K.R. Sridhar gave us an explanation in the video.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/02/video-qa-with-bloom-energy-founder-next-gen-fuel-cells-and-more/

The SOFC operates at high temps and that changes the economics of fuel cells

No expensive catalyst
Higher efficiency
No need for external reformer
Operates of a variety of fuels
No complex chemical process (CO scrubbing)

Essentially SOFC operating at 1000 degrees makes everything "easier" however it has a flaw. In every other design the plates can't handle the heat and break down. Lifespan for most prototypes is 10K to 15K hours and are expensive.

So the major challenges to a SOFC are:
plate life
plate cost

Bloom claims 10 year plate life (80K hours) and they have patents on plate design (painting on cathode and anode) that lower plate cost. So plates that last longer and are cheaper. You have a geometric reduction in cost.


51.6% efficiency is just the beginning. There is no reason why a Bloom 2.0 released in a decade doesn't push that to 55%, 60% or higher.

A friend of mine suggested geothermal. I advocate nuclear power, but Geothermal sounds promising to me. He said they need the technology to drill a horizontal shaft miles under ground.

But please, don't let balance throw you off.

That sounds consistent with the OP.

And it's currently being tested by several large customers, Walmart and Ebay among them. Anyone who watched the CBS 60 Minutes report would be aware that the developer doesn't claim any new technology but merely a good design representing a novel use of old technology. Some of those who are poo-pooing the idea are probably just pissed that they didn't think of it!

and the customer is always riiiiiiiight. or so I hear

In the case of the BloomBox customers, the answer to "would you buy another one" seems to be yes.

Solid Oxide Fuel Cells have been around for decades. They have a lot of promise because they eliminate the two major problems plaguing Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell.
* PEMFC suffer from CO2 poisoning. Less than 10 ppm of CO2 will degrade the anode.
* PEMFC use platinum in the anode which greatly increases cost.

The combination is especially bad. When you reform hydrocarbons into hydrogen there is always some CO2 left. To protect the PEMFC you then need to scrub the H2 to remove trace CO2. Even a tiny amount of CO2 left in hydrogen (or a leak in fuel cell allowing atmosphere CO2 in) will destroy a thousand dollar anode.

So SOFC like Bloom Box has a lot of promise but they have their own issues.
* Current SOFC have a limited lifespan of 10,000 hours. DOE has a project to increase that to 40,000 by 2020.
* Since the stack plates need to be replaced they need to be low cost. The plates are 3 layers (anode, electrolyte, cathode). The process to build existing plates is complex and that raises replacement cost.

Bloom box isn't revolutionary but it is evolutionary. They have 20+ patents on the plate creation process. They had two breakthroughs, first is substantially increased lifespan. The stack is rated with 10 year warranty so that shows some confidence in the company on the lifespan.

The second breakthrough is the anode and cathode aren't separate layers. They are simply "inks" with the right physical properties which are painted onto a ceramic disc made out of sand. How much this reduces annualized stack cost we don't know but it seems to be substantial.

The combination of longer plate life and lower replacement cost just brought SOFC into mainstream.

Maybe it's more efficient than other fuel cells, I don't know. But the hype has been way over the top. I keep hearing things like "all it needs is OXYGEN... oh and some other fuel... natural gas or methane or something".

They emphasize "oxygen" as if it's the most important aspect and throw in the need for fuel almost as an afterthought. Everything that uses fuel needs oxygen, that's hardly a new or novel aspect. There's no reason to emphasize it unless it's to mislead people into thinking it's something new and spectacular. "IT RUNS ON OXYGEN"!

It's all marketing BS.

You know, POWERING IT.

Nigel Sammes might be pissed off about it, but the people who have purchased them seem to like them a LOT.

As opposed to your fucking rock battery which won't do what the company says it will simply because the efficiency figures are based on "isentropic efficiency"--a schoolhouse construct which means "ignore all parasitic losses."

And that quote from Nigel, at the Colorado School of ---> MINES <---

Seems like someone feels his MINING job may be threatened by a device that doesn't involve any type of material resulting from MINING, but rather biomass.

:hi:

Driving heating costs through the roof nationwide in the process, as demand for NG increases exponentially. 20 years from now, we'll all be talking about "Peak Gas", and how our homes are all going to go dark when the last gas wells dry up.

http://www.scientificblogging.com/news_releases/methanogen_microbes_making_methane_from_co2_could_be_energys_killer_app

Methanogens are bacteria who make methane from carbon dioxide--which a solid oxide fuel cell produces, right? The equation is:

CO2 + 2H2O = CH4 + 2O2

I'm probably missing something here, but assuming the methanogens work fast enough to convert most of the CO2 coming off the Bloom Box into methane at the rate the Box is producing CO2, and said methane gets compressed and fed into a tank for later consumption, it's going to cut down on a LOT of the requirement to bring new fuel into the system. (You'd want to put a "catalytic converter" like a scuba rebreather has on it into the system to sop up any extra CO2 in the generated methane, and you'd want to store the CO2 in a tank and release it into the methanogen container at the rate they want to see it so you don't get much CO2 in the product gas stream.)

If all that happened was you stored your waste CO2 in a tank and a guy came by once a week to pick it up, that's something. People pay good money for CO2--it is a gas with many uses.

Joule Biotechnologies recently unveiled Helioculture™, a process that uses microorganisms to convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into ethanol or diesel fuel. Unlike algae and other biomass-based fuel production strategies, Helio-culture does not generate biomass, requires no agricultural feedstock, uses unpurified brackish water, and operates on any terrain including nonarable land, the company says. The process also reportedly produces fuels directly, with little or no post-production processing.

Helioculture far outproduces production methods based on distilling or fermenting crops, according to the company. Joule estimates that it can manufacture 20,000 gallons of ethanol or hydrocarbon fuel per acre—a factor of between eight and ten times higher than corn-derived ethanol or distillation from cellulosic feedstock.

The company uses genetically engineered photosynthetic microorganisms to generate organic fuels that are collected by sweeping them, in gaseous form, from the headspace above their culture medium. The identity of the photosynthetic microorganism and its extensive genetic modifications are, for now, a trade secret.

Organics are purified by centrifugation or distillation. The vessels, dubbed SolarConverters™, are modular, fully scalable, and resemble solar panels more than bioreactors. The microorganisms take three days to grow from seed cultures and work for up to eight weeks. Because it uses waste CO2 generated from industrial processes and energy production, Helioculture is carbon-negative, says CEO Bill Sims.

“What differentiates Helioculture is that it does not involve biomass, but the direct conversion of sunlight into fuel. Other technologies have attempted to do this, unsuccessfully, using photobioreactors.”

Sims believes Helioculture is close to being cost-competitive with oil and plant sources of ethanol and hydrocarbon fuels. Target prices for those two fuels are $80 and $50 per barrel equivalent, respectively

http://www.genengnews.com/articles/chitem.aspx?aid=3124&nc=1

I was thinking of something that looked like...well, I was going to say "a diesel particulate filter" but "a big muffler" is something everyone's familiar with. Essentially, you'd have three huge cans and some plumbing.

Can one is a CO2 tank. It connects to the CO2 exhaust port on the fuel cell via a compressor. You may need two tanks here--if one of them builds up to 2500psi it's full, and the system switches over to filling the other and sends an e-mail to the local Air Liquide depot: we have a full tank at Acme Corporation, come change it out. Ideally you wouldn't NEED to do this--the second tank would be converting CO2 to CH4 fast enough you should never need to worry about an excess of CO2, but we take care of all eventualities here.

Can two is the methanogen reactor. CO2 from can one is piped into here, converted to CH4 and oxygen, and ideally the two gases are separated. I don't know about y'all, but a tank full of the exact stochiometric ratio of methane and oxygen is an accident waiting to happen. Assuming they can be economically separated, releasing the oxygen back into the atmosphere would be a very good thing. Recovering it into a tank for the Air Liquide guy to pick up would be a better thing, since people buy O2 in cylinders already. At worst, you could just stick an oxygen adsorber before the compressor feeding tank three and chemically scrub it out.

Can three is the methane storage tank. Once again, we take care of all eventualities here. Fuel cells are good for "on demand electricity." If you've got one running your hammer factory, and you're not making product on the weekend, you don't need a lot of power when you're closed--enough to run security lights and the air conditioner, but not enough to power the machinery. Your methanogens aren't taking the weekend off, tho--they're still busy making methane, which needs to be stored somehow.

The thing is, if you CAN do it, why not? Best-case is one 100-pound tank of methane would provide all the fuel you'd ever need--the methanogens would react fast enough to recycle all the CO2 into methane which goes right back into your fuel cell. Probable scenario is you get SOME methane reformation, and wind up selling the excess CO2 to an industrial user. Worst-case is the methanogen idea doesn't work at all and you become the official CO2 supplier for the local Coca-Cola plant.

It may not be worth it to sell CO2. CO2 has low value per unit and needs to be compressed substantially (energy) to be transported efficiently.

Given the relatively small amounts of CO2 produces (yeah 50% efficiency) it may not be economical for industrial companies to purchase it. However we often "do the right thing" and donate items with valuable. Recyclables have value but most people simply "give them away".

A system where homeowner signs up and a "CO2 recyler" comes by once a week to pickup CO2. The recyler aggregates the CO2, purifies, compresses it, and then sells it to companies that need CO2.

Still there are a lot of options. Sell the CO@, donate the CO2, make more fuel from the CO2 (methanogens), etc.

I was thinking more in terms of the industrial users who could fill a tube trailer in a week's time. But anything's better than just offgassing it.

It's so much fun! You all should check it out if you have a Wii.

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If the box delivers, then it will deliver and if it doesn't, it doesn't. Until then, they don't have to bother us with what it's going to do. They can show us when and if it does it.

It may deliver, but by consuming fossil fuels and emitting CO2. And while it's delivering, it may cause more and more energy consumers to move off the grid, and a grid is what's needed to properly utilize truly renewable resources like wind and sun.

It strikes me as a step backward.