Automotive Engineering - November/December 2021 - 28

Innovating
the methanol
ADVANCED PROPULSION FEATURE
FUEL CELL
Liquid methanol has the potential to solve the market
barriers associated with gaseous hydrogen, says Blue World
Technologies' CEO Anders Korsgaard.
Innovations in fuel cell technology have enabled significant performance gains
compared with the low-temperature PEM-type cell stacks of the 1990s.
" The problem with that technology is that it is very sensitive to any
impurity, " Korsgaard noted. " Basically, what you do to overcome that
is to increase the temperature from typically 70-to-80-degrees C
[158° to 176° F] to 160-degrees C [320° F] and above. Anything
above let's say 150-degrees C [302°F] to 160 degrees would be pretty
tolerant to most impurities generated by the reformer. We are focused
on that temperature window of about 160 to 170 degrees C,
because this is where most of the problems disappear in supporting
liquid fuels. "
There also are efficiency gains generated by the thermal integration
between the reformer reaction and the fuel cell, he added. " And in that
way, you can say for a conventional hydrogen fuel cell, taking hydrogen
in and converting it into power, when we look at the combined system
with the methanol reformer and the fuel cell itself, we are looking into
pretty much the same peak efficiency as working with hydrogen. "
The high-temperature PEM fuel cell technology that Blue World
Technologies is working on was invented in the mid-1990s. According
to Korsgaard, the technology now is approaching the same power
density as low-temperature PEM fuel cells. The objective is to make it
more efficient than the low-temperature designs.
Cost parity with ICEs
Critics of the methanol fuel cell system highlight the fact that the
system does emit GHGs. Korsgaard contented that " clean methanol "
is often manufactured from biogas. " In that sense, it has potential " as
a " stepping stone, " he said, explaining that " it's a cheaper version of
getting bio-methanol than just going directly to getting carbon dioxide
from air capture. "
Among the " concentrated carbon dioxide sources " is biogas, which
contains roughly the same amount of methane as already exists in CO2,
28 November/December 2021
Korsgaard noted. " If you take the methane out and put
it into the grid or whatever you use it for, you are making
a lot of carbon dioxide. You can do it because it is
basically just re-cycling, going back to the farmlands
and so on. But alternatively, you can capture it there,
because you have a very concentrated carbon dioxide
source. " Combining the CO2 with hydrogen from electrolysis,
as in conventional hydrogen production, produces
methanol.
" Then you have something liquid and you don't
need to pressurize it, " he said. " You can distribute it
exactly like you do today. One of the benefits is that
you can also put it into combustion engines - just mixing
it with gasoline. We don't need to roll out hundreds
of gigawatts of fuel cells before you can actually
enable a take-up of bio-methanol, because you can
also use it in combustion engines. "
Improving the cost-efficiency of the system will take
time, however. Korsgaard noted that in time, the methanol
fuel cell will be on a par, in cost terms, with IC engines.
" We can see how solar technology and battery
technology have decreased by 15, 20, or 25 percent, depending
on which time you are looking at, per year, " he
said. " This will be at similar levels to ours - and at some
point, we predict that even the capital expenditure will
be comparable to IC engines. "
The bottleneck in commercializing the methanol
fuel cell has been the industrialization of the manufacturing
process. Korsgaard said Blue World
Technologies is building the largest fuel cell factory in
Europe, with production scheduled to start in the latter
half of 2022. " That's really our focus, it is actually
to make sure that we can drive down the cost to a certain
level where basically we can begin the commercial
rollout, " Korsgaard said.
AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING
BOTH IMAGES: BLUE WORLD TECHNOLOGIES
Automotive Engineering - November/December 2021

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