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."

Mystery Cartridge!

[Cruithne]

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

[fredistheking]

so where do they get the electricity to refine the hydrogen?

Infotainment

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got mod points but how do I mod the parent down? Another press release packaged as news....

Re:fossil fuels for now

[weighn]

Most fuel cells technology derives hydrogen from methanol fuel. Canon's prototype uses hydrogen as the fuel. The coolness about these things will be more power from a cell the size of a standard battery and you will recharge them in a few seconds.

It can be hard to hear over the clipped-signal of the marketing hype - but I think the jury is still out on the "environmentally friendly" claims.

Re:Great

[benjamindees]

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.

Not again

[squoozer]

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?

Re:so where

[PsiPsiStar]

Theoretically, they could get it from nuclear power or from wind power, which is beginning to mature. A machine that runs on gas can only run on gas. A machine that runs on electricity can effectively run on coal, wind, nuclear, or any number of sources produced in a central location and sold across the grid in a market based fashion that helps keep the cost down.

So anything that helps products run on electricity more effectively is a good thing. Of course, Canon's stuff wasn't running on gasoline to begin with

I haven't been able to access TFA though.

New fuel source eh?

[Centurix]

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.

Re:A letter from the hydrogen-powered future

[Kelvie]

Right now, anyway, the whole point of hydrogen fuel cells is not to see hydrogen as a PRODUCER of energy; the current goal is to use fuel cells as a hydrogen transport mechanism. The rationale behind this is simple; the only byproducts (at least with proton-exchange membrane fuel stacks) are water and heat, which is not a pollutant. The manufacture of hydrogen will produce pollutants, however the vehicle (or in this case, the electronic device) has far from an ideal methods to deal with these pollutants compared to say a power plant. Fuel cells have other uses, also, e.g. they charge instantly. The point of fuel cells is to avoid pollutants at the consumer level, and to bring the majority of it to the industrial level, where it may be dealt with in a much more socially responsible way (compared to your tailpipe). This is the current goal with fuel cells, whether or not this will be a viable solution for our dependency on fossil fuels is limited to the minds of the engineers in the R+D sector.

Re:so where

[FireFury03]

Theoretically, they could get it from nuclear power or from wind power

Infact, wind power should be better suited to hydrogen generation than generation of grid electricity. Generating electricity for the grid has problems since wind is unpredictable so you can't have your wind farms match the current demand on the grid. For hydrogen generation this doesn't matter since you can just adjust the amount of hydrogen you generate depending on how much electricity your wind farm is generating and then _store_ the excess hydrogen, which you can then use during the periods when you don't have enough wind to meet demand directly. Storing hydrogen is much less of a problem than storing electricity.

Maybe this is what the future holds for us - use predictable power generation systems (fisson, hydro, tide, fusion and orbital solar arrays) for electricity generation and less predictable (e.g. wind) for hydrogen generation, where the hydrogen can be used in cars and most things that currently contain high capacity batteries such as laptops.

Re:fossil fuels for now

[JonathanR]

Most hydrogen generated today comes from steam reformed methane (natural gas). Not much difference, since most methanol is created from natural gas too.

Sure, you can use hydrolysis, but you can also charge a LiPo or other type of battery.

Re:fossil fuels for now

[Anonymous Coward]

Toxic gas....
Hell - /we/ breathe out CO2. It's not like my laptop could possibly put out as much CO2 as my neighbors Ford Expidition - and considering the power in my wall-outlet comes from a fossil-fuel burning power plant - bring on the methane fuel cell.

Re:Cleaner?

[Young Master Ploppy]

"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."

...so does that make this fuel cell the ultimate vapourware?

(wince)

Re:A letter from the hydrogen-powered future

[grqb]

Yeah...guess what? Batteries also have a negative EROI. They work exactly the same way as fuel cells do. Batteries are more efficient overall, and there is talk of fast recharging batteries. For this reason, hydrogen is not the best energy storage mechanism, but until I can charge my battery fully in 5 minutes or so, I'm afraid it looks like these all in one electronics have no choice but to try and use fuel cells.

PS. Methanol would be best for portable electronics unless we find a good solid state hydrogen storage method (because compressed hydrogen wouldn't be good for portable electronics). Most of these direct methanol fuel cells only have about 10% methanol/90%water mixtures, so there's lots of room for improvement here.

Re:Mystery Cartridge!

[Agarax]

The great thing about fuel cells is that once you have people using hydrogen, you can change the back end production without having to retool everything else down the line.

One year we could have the hydrogen being produced in a coal/oil fired plant, 5 years later nuclear/wind/solar, and even 50 years later with Fusion. But the end user would never notice because all you need to produce the hydrogen is electricity and water.

humans produce CO2, too

[technoCon]

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.