Slashdot Mirror
Canon's Fuel Cell May Drive Portable Gear
RX8 writes "Canon, Inc., has taken the wraps off prototype rechargeable hydrogen fuel cells, the likes of which may one day power digital cameras, media players, and printers. Canon's demonstrated fuel cells win even more points on the environmental front: while companies such as Toshiba, Sanyo, and NEC have also been working on fuel cells (and had been expected to have developed fuel cell-driven notebook computers by now), those efforts are based on DMFC technology which derives hydrogen from methanol, producing small amounts of carbon dioxide (itself a greenhouse gas) in the process. Canon's cells obtain hydrogen from a refillable cartridge with no toxic byproducts."
I love the extremely scientific description of the mystery cartridge that has no toxic byproducts.. especially after taking half of the article to describe how the competition is less "green" in great detail!
so where do they get the electricity to refine the hydrogen?
As long as we're considering small quantities of C02 a 'toxic byproduct' as a greenhouse gas, I would like to point out that that all hydrogen fuel cells generate dihydrogen monoxide as their principle biproduct, which is an even worse greenhouse gas.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Has that site been slashdotted or the content taken down? I keep getting a blank page and mirrordot doesn't have it either?
I've got mod points but how do I mod the parent down? Another press release packaged as news....
He has made a joke, not written an informative statement...
In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
but in the future, as a hydrogen infrastructure matures, the electricity will come from some hydrogen based generator.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
As you can see, it also causes dyslexia. I'm referring to DHMO, of course, not DMHO. 100% of all dyslexics have DHMO in their diets!
i get the feeling that such unscientific articles (although i haven't read it; it's offline now) are intented to get the scientifically unenlightened but economically endowed to pump money into their company. it sounds good, buy Canon!
and those of us familiar with the laws of thermodynamics probably won't penalize them when it comes time to buy a new camera. alas.
owing to many recent less-than-science articles, it would be fun if the community could collectively evaluate articles in terms of merit/originality, placing them into single-word/phrase categories such as "lies" or "propaganda" or "dog poop" or "good stuff" or "the holy grail"...
Another press release about a breakthrough that (assuming we actually get it working reliably and cheaply) may possibly dubut in a high end product nobody would buy for sticker-shock reasons in Japan in three years.
Really, wake me up when it's actually in a shipping product. I'll be excited then. Until it's working in the real world, it's just vaporware.
Would the fuel cell batteries last longer than the current lithium batteries when subject to cold tempuratures?
A hydrogen cartridge wouldn't have the same energy density as an ethnol cartridge, it would have to be pressurized in a strong container, whereas ethnol can be poured into the camera. Sounds like a bad idea from the get go. When are they going to come out with a camera that is powered by the push of the button? They could put a nuclear fuel cell on the camera, but that doesn't make a very handy camera, IMO. No battery at all, now that would be marvelous.
Try these instead:
Canon develops fuel cell prototypes
Canon shows prototype hydrogen fuel cell
Canon to develop fuel cells for printers, cameras
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Yeah well I'd like for my grandchildren not to have to deal with cleaning up all the disposable toxic batteries that you want to use instead.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Long ago everyone was happy just breathing oxygen.
/. effect, but I am curious, where is the hydrogen coming from that fills the mystery containers? It is not just a middle step between generating free hydrogen putting hydrogen in the cell? I don't see why the process has anything to do with the cartridge. :)
Now everybody is breathing toxic biproducts like "Nitrogen" and "Argon" and "Carbon Dioxide"...
Damned technology...
On a side note, I don't get to read TFA because of
Many thanks for any answers
"...While companies such as Toshiba, Sanyo, and NEC have also been working on fuel cells (and had been expected to have developed fuel cell-driven notebook computers by now)"
Because I really want explosive materials right on my crotch...
What I have to say will probably provoke a response from Canon. It may label me "nettlesome" or even "prodigal". I realize and accept that as a consequence of what I am about to say.
Ok, then. Yes, you are nettleseome, prodigal, and even a bit ebullient.
Canon is a drooling, hydra-headed monster of force and terror.
And so are you.
Here we go again. Someone will say that hydrogen is a power source and then a bunch of pedants will jump on him / her claiming that it's not a power sources it's a power store as it uses more energy to create it. Then there will be an argument over what constitutes a power source. Does that about sum up the discussion?
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Well, some people have their own hydrogen-generating machines. Of course, these run on electricity; see, the generation of hydrogen costs more energy than the hydrogen contains - that is, it has an EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) less than one. Whatever you're processing to make hydrogen, you have to use up energy to get the reaction happening. Even if you wanted to do this, every home in the industrialised world would need a hydrogen-generating machine that ran on electricity - the manufacturing of which would cost enormous amounts of energy and materials, even if it worked at generating energy.
In some places, hydrogen is generated in big power plants and delivered "on tap" to your home or office. This might sound dangerous, but then again, people had gas stoves once, until natural gas production peaked and the price tripled overnight. Again, you'd need to retro-fit an enormous amount of infrastructure in which to deliver the hydrogen - the laying of which would cost enormous amounts of energy and materials, even if it worked at generating energy.
In any case, we need to do something. I mean, we've got all these gadgets - the manufacturing of which cost us enormous amounts of energy and materials - and they're all powered by billions of hydrogen fuel cells - the manufacturing of which cost us enormous amounts of energy and materials. Even though the average electronic device consumes ten times its weight in fossil fuels during its manufacture, and even though the generation of hydrogen costs twice as much energy as the resulting hydrogen contains, people still bought into this sham in droves, believing that it's better for the environment.
In reality, it's made the problem more widespread because we demand more energy than ever before, and it hasn't solved anything because we haven't really found a new source of energy with which to replace fossil fuels. Made me think twice about buying that hybrid car, too.
You try telling people this was a bad idea, though. They'll look up from their plates of raw vegetables and mugs of rain water, and tell you to keep your big mouth shut.
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
I didn't bother to read the article, did it mention how big a hole in an airplane this fuel cell could make? THey won't let me bring a lighter on board, and that isn't even a realistic threat!
All of these are still based on the simple air cooled pot with two electrodes format. No-one has yet commercialised a single fuel cell technology for anything other than the most niche of applications, partly because storage cells really are quite efficient. And yet we are expected to believe that a technology based on an unproven delivery system involving a substance that has never been deployed in volume in the field, is somehow going to come to market in a foreseeable future.
I suspect that the oil industry is behind all of this. They are desperate to promote hydrogen technology - why? Because many of the alternatives - biodiesel, bioethanol, wind, do not require large scale infrastructure. The oil industry maintains its grip because it controls the means of distribution as well as production. The difficulties of hydrogen storage and transmission mean that the expensively developed business model of the oil industry continues to work for them because they have the infratructure. Biodiesel or bioethanol can be produced and sold by a single farmer. (which is why the oil industry wouldn't want alcohol-fulled cells.) Wind farms use the electrical grid that competes with the oil industry. Technologies like coal burning with CO2 resequestering use disused oil wells but not the distribution infrastructure.
Constantly hacking away at "hydrogen this and hydrogen that is just around the corner" is intended to promote acceptance in the public mind.
It would be interesting to know whether it would be more efficient to use nuclear power stations to produce hydrogen from water, or use the waste heat to help drive fermentation/distillation plants for producing bioethanol and biomethanol.
Pining for the fjords
Japan will get them in everything before everyone else, by the time we get the replacement fuel cell in our hands the Japanese will have added cameras, out-of-fuel-crazy-frog-alert-tones, flashing lights, colourful straps and furry attachments.
Our first batch of these things will look like a grey brick with wires.
Task Mangler
If a liquid electrolyte is involved, expect performance to degrade as temperatures go down. It is quite possible that, at a certain temperature, your device (laptop, phone, etc.) would not get enough energy to operate. Of course, not many laptops are used in sub-zero temperatures. Fuel cells rely on an electrochemical reaction as do regular batteries and they are subject to many of the same problems.
An advantage to using hydrogen, as these Canon cells do, rather than a hydrocarbon, is that the cells might be expected to last longer. One of the limits on the useful life of a fuel cell is electrode poisoning with carbon. Of course, to solve that problem completely, you would have to supply the cell with both purified hydrogen and purified oxygen. That's not a huge deal, electrolysis of water provides the right quantities of both, but it means that you now need two storage tanks.
``I love how the moderators around here are on crack. +4 Interesting? Dihydrogen monoxide is WATER.
He has made a joke, not written an informative statement...''
Regardless of how he meant it, water does have a much stronger greenhouse effect than CO2. See the entry in the WikiPedia article.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I have not read the article yet, (seems to be slashdotted) What folks seem to forget that since hydrogen is the smallest atom, it will ALWAYS leak from any container, right?. Also, where are they getting all this hydrogen? Are they creating it with DMFC technology? If so, wouldn't that cause just as much CO2 initially?
call me silly.
- ben
Methanol CAN be green, but right now methanol is mostly manufactured from FOSSIL FULES. Methanol is highly toxic, even upon contact with skin.
The article is also wrong. Methanol fuel cells do not reform into hydrogen. If it did, the fuel cell would suffer from all of the cost of materials problems as conventional fuel cells.
Again all of this is old news, as Toshiba has already done a press release about a 100mw direct methanol fuel cell.
I would rather be ashes than dust!
Since you have to grow large crops of sugar-cane to produce the Methanol, and these will consume large quantities of CO2. In the end, there will be no "new" CO2 released to the atmosphere, and the greenhouse effect will stop to increase.
Methanol is a good choice for fuelling cars too, since it generates more power than gasoline, less CO2 and it's cheaper to produce. The only problem is the oxidation it produces, but this will not be a issue when we switch over to eletric cars, powered by fuel cells!
The problem with fossil combustibles, like gasoline and diesel, is the oil they come from. Since it was trapped under the ground for millions of years, the CO2 contained on it is no longer part of the planet ecosystem. When we burn it, were injecting new CO2 to the atmosphere, and that's the main cause of the greenhouse effect.
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
*YAWN* Old news. Been around since Sept 16t ml
http://www.imaging-resource.com/NEWS/1126887991.h
Seeing as Canon are involved, they'll probably contain 5ml of Hydrogen, cost half the price of the camera and be chipped to prevent unauthorized refilling.
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
Oh well if it's written in Wikipedia it must be factually correct
Nothing costs nothing
I lol'd!
Since when did Carbon Dioxide become toxic? Doesn't the topic author mean "bad for the environment" or some other such rubbish?
I really don't want a fuel cell in my camera or laptop or portable consumer electronics product. While they may be better than regular batteries in the output and recharge speed categories, what will happen when I want to take my nice fuel cell powered laptop onto a plane?
Any type of compressed gas is already forbidden in cabins - especially nice flammable ones. The airlines and aviation authorities will probably try to completely ban any fuel cell based battery in a cabin space. This would either lead to a market in short duration regualar rechargables for flights, and/or the installation of power points in all areas of aircraft, although this would then mean that everyone would have to buy adaptors and also I don't want to have to be tripping over power cables every time I get up to go to the toilet;->
I say consumer electronics as my heavy duty professional stuff will be travelling in the hold in a nice pelican case anyway...
[All Your Fish Are Belong To Us]
Don't underestimate the problems with storing hydrogen. It's pesky and diffuses through everything.
There's another use of windmill power that requires no fancy conversion electronics, or fancy electrolysis setups. Run whatever horrible waveform you get out of your alternator on a stick into a big old resistor that gets hot. This is cost-effective for me (in a rural setting) to heat my home with now, versus using diesel (heating oil). Nicely enough, periods that use more heat often are much more windy.
More interesting would be an engineering comparison on the efficiencies if using windmill-heated steam versus direct hydrogen combustion. Both would be mobile, but the steam could easily drive a turbine.
Either way, you'd need millions of windmills to replace the energy consumed daily in the form of oil. It's important to keep that in perspective. There is NO good mass volume alternative to oil in the near future, people should be planning accordingly. Unfortunately, that seems unlikely to happen.
..don't panic
The above links are incorrect—the "&cid=" part should be removed. As a service, here they are as clickable links:
www.tgdaily.com/2005/10/26/canon_fuelcell/
www.itworld.com/Comp/1774/051026canonfuelcell/
Check out Chad's News
As a concerned member I did some research on DHMO and found the following facts
* Death due to accidental inhalation of DHMO, even in small quantities.
* Prolonged exposure to solid DHMO causes severe tissue damage.
* Excessive ingestion produces a number of unpleasant though not typically life-threatening side-effects.
* DHMO is a major component of acid rain.
* Gaseous DHMO can cause severe burns.
* Contributes to soil erosion.
* Leads to corrosion and oxidation of many metals.
* Contamination of electrical systems often causes short-circuits.
* Exposure decreases effectiveness of automobile brakes.
* Found in biopsies of pre-cancerous tumors and lesions.
* Often associated with killer cyclones in the U.S. Midwest and elsewhere.
* Thermal variations in DHMO are a suspected contributor to the El Nino weather effect.
I say we try to stop these hydrogen fuel cells as soon as possible before more DHMO is produced.
Losers whine about their best, Winners go home to fuck the prom queen
I'm in no way opposed to fuel cells - in fact a distant cousin more or less invented the modern fuel cell - but I have considerable experience of pressurised hydrogen and believe me, it is a pig to contain and a pig to manage. Metal hydrides have consistently failed to live up to expectations for hydrogen storage. The advantage of hydrogen is that leaks indoors are relatively safe compared to propane or butane, and unlike methanol it is not toxic. The other advantage, that no CO2 is produced, is lessened because the oil industry's proposals for making the hydrogen result in a lot of CO2 at point of manufacture. The system may be overall carbon neutral, but so are the biofuels.
I don't doubt that in the long term we will come up with a better localised storage/generation technology. I just doubt it will take over in my lifetime.
Pining for the fjords
if it's written in Wikipedia it must be factually correct
No, it would be wrong to say that it MUST be correct, and clearly you meant that as sarcasm.
But it's far more likely to be correct than to be incorrect, because most people aim for accuracy rather than poisoning entries. Therefore your anti-Wikipedia comment is ill-founded and lacks merit.
At least in high enough concentrations.
If I can't carry a butane lighter or nail clippers on a plane, how am I going to get a laptop with a container full of rocket propellant on board? Fuel cells in portable devices are yet another fine example of a good technology poorly applied.
how are they making the hydrogen. It costs energy to create because it generally does not occur in it's pure form with great abundance.
.. for instance, water.
You either have to apply acids to various metals, which themselves require energy, or use electricity itself which comes.. oh yeah.. from fossil fuels most likely. This article rips on the use of ethanol, but ethanol is actually more energy efficient than this product because you lose a percentage of the original energy source with each conversion...
for instance: the energy in the hydrogen used in this touted fuel cell starts out in.. say.. coal, which is then converted into heat, some of which is lost when it's used on water to create steam, which loses some more energy as it goes to the turbines, which lose some energy to friction creating electricity which is used to separate hydrogen from
so you have 3 different points of energy "leakage" to produce the hydrogen from a fossil fuel power plant source.
compare that to ethanol.. which from my foggiest memories of intro chem comes from fermenting plants, and is then put straight into fuel cells.
They don't get my approval on environmental savings unless they can show they're using natural power like wind or water to get the energy needed to produce hydrogen.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
All these articles, about hydrogen fuel cells always lead to the same argument being posted. Ie: Hydrogen isn't a better fuel source than oil because it requires electricity to produce. To get electricity you have to burn more oil, and due to losses in the circuit you'd be better off just burning the oil in the first place. This argument is flawed (at least IMOA). Don't look at hydrogen or oil as competing fuel sources, consider them to be simply different mediums for transfer energy. With oil the circuit is Sun -> Plants->Dinosaurs->Oil, Coal, whatever. An awful lot of energy is lost in that circuit. The Oil itself requires energy to extract and refine for a start, and plants and animals are not very efficient. Anyway bottom line is, oil just represents loads of stored solar energy, which we're using faster than we're replacing. With hydrogen you can store energy from multiple sources, solar wind, nuclear, etc. As long as those sources don't release pollutants etc it's a much cleaner and faster energy transfer medium. It's not as energy dense, but it's easily more energy efficient and cost effective than growing a butt load of plants and dinosaurs and waiting for thousands of years while they turn into Oil.
OK, folks - if you are going to obsess over CO2 emissions, here are some other CO2 producing items you should be worried about:
And not the least of all:
www.eFax.com are spammers
So send 'em to college.
I don't understand all this excitement over fuel cells being used in mobile devices. No electricity isn't everywhere, but then again, neither are hydrogen stations to buy refills at. If you think electricity is spotty in the 3rd world, just wait till you try to get hydrogen. This whole idea is dumb. Electricity is the most commonly available energy source. I can understand making cars and other bigger machines run on hydrogen, since they already have refueling infrastructure, but the energy problem could be better served by using higher efficiency transmission of electricity with something like the SuperGrid would be a much more achievable goal and easier to phase in then a switch to hydrogen.
With so many places in the world don't have enough water already, or their water is poor quality, for them getting hydrogen for water would not be a good thing.
I hate stupid environmental claims.
h tml
http://www.siu.edu/~techtransfer/techavail/dave2.
Pretty much all energy systems (except nuclear) are two-way streets.
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"Regardless of how he meant it, water does have a much stronger greenhouse effect than CO2."
In a lab, not in the troposphere. Net effect of H2O is very low. Read a little further down in the Wikipedia entry: "Water vapor in the troposphere, unlike the better-known greenhouse gases such as CO2, is essentially passive in terms of climate: the residence time for water vapor in the atmosphere is short (about a week) so perturbations to water vapor rapidly re-equilibriate. In contrast, the lifetimes of CO2, methane, etc, are long (hundreds of years) and hence perturbations remain. Thus, in response to a temperature perturbation caused by enhanced CO2, water vapor would increase, resulting in a (limited) positive feedback and higher temperatures. In response to a perturbation from enhanced water vapor, the atmosphere would re-equilibriate due to clouds causing reflective cooling and water-removing rain."
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Of course, the cartridges will not be refillable, just like their ink cartridges -- and they'll be coded with special chips that can't be modified, will tell you that you have no "fuel" left when you have a half-full cartridge, and uses .5% of the cartridges' power every boot-up to go through an "initialization" cycle.
It's the same as their current strategy of selling ink for $10,000 a liter.
If they're REALLY good, they'll make the screen that transfers the energy clog irrecoverably from time to time so they can sell you special "cleaning cartridges" (only available to dealers) or the consumer has to replace the whole printer.
new industry uses of paladium and platinum are found every day but there is only very little to go around.
That's because Microsoft's hogging all the palladium for its Next Generation Secure Computing Base ;-)
One of the most toxic substances on earth is the salt water in our oceans. Drink a couple of quarts/liters and you'll go stark raving mad before dying. Yet that never becomes a story. But if someone spills a few gallons of some chemical in a large bay of salt water, it suddenly becomes "toxic."
Perhaps TV should be like cigarette packages. When a news announcer is speaking, there should be text at the bottom that says, "Common sense and long experience has taught us that the person you're hearing now doesn't have the foggest idea what he is talking about. He's talking hysterical nonsense to keep you watching, so this network can sell time to advertisers."
For an example, recall all the hysterical stories about New Orleans after Katrina. To make more money, the TV networks and news wireservices hyped dubious reports and created confusion that hampered and delayed relief efforts.
Re-equilibrate, sure, but it happens through additional precipitation and may be a result of the formation of more clouds than without the additional water vapor output. From other articles, nobody knows exactly what more clouds will do to our global temperatures. It could lower temperatures because more sunlight is reflected, it could raise them because clouds are good at trapping radiated heat and keeping it from escaping harmlessly into outer space.
Today is all we really have. We should all live it well: it is our stepping stone to all of our tomorrows.
Yes, but the point is also that the re-equibrilation occurs within a week or so; you've an increase in tropospheric H2O that reaches its peak very quickly. Whereas, for CO2, or CH4, you won't reach the peak for decades or even centuries, even assuming constant levels of production. Mediation of eleveated tropospheric CO2 and CH4 will also take decades or centuries.
Even if CO2 were to "trap" radiation at only 5% the efficiency of H2O, the extended duration of the CO2 being free in the troposphere would mean that each quanta of CO2 emitted would trap more radiation than each quanta of H2O.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Could I see some kind of comparison between the amount of CO2 emitted by these fuel cells versus other sources of CO2. Every time I read about these fuel cells on Slashdot, I see the same caveat that they emit CO2. My suspicion is that if they emit so much CO2 that they'll measurably impact the atmosphere, they'll also be unsafe to operate indoors.
Greenhouse emissions may kill us all, but I think we have to worry a lot more about the Chinese burning coal than these fuel cells.
We need to keep some perspective here. Afterall humans generate CO2, too.
While it is true that methanol contains about half as much energy as gasoline by volume, that does not mean you need twice as much to go the same distance. Methanol burns much better in a standard engine (high octane), and in an engine designed for it can get nearly the same range per volume of fuel even though there is less energy in that fuel.
SAAB has a car that gets the same gas milage on ethanol (not methanol which is the subject of this message, but ethanol is similar to methanol so this example is instructive) as gasoline, but it gets 50 more horsepower on ethanol because the fuel is better.
Ignoring breeder reactors for a moment, nuclear waste is a resource. Currently our supply of helium comes from oil wells (trapped alpha particles from decayed radioactive materials.)
If oil runs out, helium will too. It's non-reactive and so light that our planet's atmosphere can't hold it.
One alternative to this is to get the helium from decaying nuclear waste. I have no clue why people aren't doing this. Are they?
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Just gotta wonder what the shelf life of those cartridges is going to be. Transporting pure hydrogen and storing it over long periods of time is far from trivial.
I predict this'll be a flop. Storing hydrogen in carbohydrates seems like a more viable solution.
First, I have read your post several times and don't see any actual information. Second, as someone who has worked for Canon in the US for some 18 years, and who currently manages several divisions, I can honestly tell you that, as a company, Canon basically believes those "litanies", is committed to "working together for the common good" and the environment. It is ingrained into all of us who work here.
I take it you live in a warm climate.
Solar is useless in much of Canada, where I live, anyway. You need heat when it is stormy. Solar cells don't work in snowstorms, covered in snow, or at night. However, storms and high winds go together very nicely, making windmill powered heat a GREAT idea, and a 1kW unit can have a payback in one or two years.
..don't panic
Some people mod funny comments Interesting or Informative so the poster actually gains karma, as opposed to a Funny mod which only gives the post a higher score.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere