Day 2 got off to an early start at 8am with the Plenary Session. The Session room was fairly well filled, with around 300 people in attendance. After opening remarks from the Chair of the 2006 Technical Programme Committee Sunita Satayapal and a welcome by Karl Stahlkhopf of the Hawaiian Electric Company, the Fuel Cell Seminar Award was presented to John OSullivan.
John then gave his keynote speech on his views of the progress made and still to be made in the wider fuel cell industry. His speech focussed on what has gone well in fuel cell development, what has not gone well, and what we still need to do. Successes to date were mainly technical in nature, and he singled out the vast improvements in energy density for special mention. Companies which he thought had led the way in early fuel cell commercialisation were UTC and Siemens Westinghouse. Areas where with hindsight things could have been done differently were the habitually over optimistic tone of fuel cell developers, and the fragmentation of technical efforts which has led in some cases to a misallocation of R&D funding. Looking to the future, he said the focus should now be on the exploitation of low or zero carbon fuels for hydrogen sourcing, including the use of nuclear power. Finally, John highlighted a need for a more comprehensive National Energy Policy in the US which was geared towards supporting integrated hydrogen and fuel cell programmes than at the present time.
John was followed by the presentation of a number of awards for papers and posters, and then a video presentation was shown by Professor Thorsteinn Sigfusson of the University of Iceland. Thorsteinn was unable to attend the Seminar because of a recent family bereavement but he was still able to record and send over an admirably upbeat presentation, which turned out to be the highlight of the morning. He called for a renewed effort to achieve Hytopia a hydrogen based economy. He said we need to progress from the Carnot era to the Gibbs era, referring to the rules of thermo-combustion and electrochemical combustion respectively. He talked about the progress made in his home country of Iceland towards realising this vision. It is always good to hear these positive speeches from time to time, and this one was all the more remarkable given the situation in which Thorsteinn recorded his presentation.
Koji Kuramoto of METI in Japan presented the diverse R&D efforts currently underway and planned in his country. The Japanese approach to fuel cell technology development is highly structured, well funded and has clear targets. He talked about the current and past priority given to residential and transport PEM-based development, and said that there would in the near future be a new focus on materials research into hydrogen storage and transportation.
Next was Simon Westinghouse from Australia, leader of the HyFLEET: CUTE project. He concentrated on what he said was a frequently overlooked aspect of deploying fuel cell technologies the people that would ultimately adopt them. His assertion was, he said, supported by the Stern Report, recently published in the UK, which emphasised the role in gaining the support of the public in order to keep the cost of the hydrogen transition down.
The last speaker was Dustin Shindo of local company Hoku Scientific. He outlined his companys history from its early beginnings, where the laboratory was in the CTOs kitchen and the hydrogen used for testing was stored under his bed! Hoku, meaning star or guiding light in Hawaiian, is now one of two Hawaiian companies listed on NASDAQ and have begun to diversify their work into materials and photovoltaic cells as well as the core business of PEM membranes.
These were all interesting presentations, and a solid start to the second day of the Seminar.
Session 1A on Day Two focused on policy across different global regions, and also was the session FCT presented our work on using spider diagrams for policy best practice analysis. Alistair Nimmons of PWC kicked off with the results of the 2007 Fuel Cell Survey. This annual survey has been going since 2003 and is going from strength to strength. This year saw 181 respondents, interestingly most of which (over 40%) focused on work on PEM fuel cells. In terms of other data presented Alistair reported on sales up from US$331 million (2005) to US$353 million (2006) since last year. 48% of these sales were in the US, Japan 14%, Germany 12%, Korea 5% and Canada 4%. R&D dollars increased 11% up to 796US$ million most R&D dollars in the US and Canada, and employment is also up to 7074. (the survey which is free to download will be available from Fuel Cell Today and the public pages of the US Fuel Cell Council website). Sunita outlined the (US) Presidents Hydrogen fuel Cell Initiative and the work being done in the US to push forward the technology. Yours truly came next with a well received (thank goodness!) presentation of how to compare different country policies and that in fact best practice for the industry might in fact be what is happening right now, with different countries having different foci. Peter Malinowski, Forschung Zentrum Julich, flew the flag for Germany showing that Germany is still very much interested in fuel cells and is backing up funding from the European Union with a substantial pot of R&D money from its government. This pot is 500 million Euro (available on a 50:50 project cost sharing) over the next ten years under the new Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Innovation Programme, which was launched August this year. This Programme will have a detailed work outline by the end of this year. Anthony Nickens of the US Navy Advanced Ship Board Fuel Cell Programme gave a really good presentation of the why, problems and when of this high profile programme. The why is that fuel cells are more efficient, and have a good fit for ships - 80% of the time the ship travels at below 60 knots of speed perfect for fuel cells. Above this speed gas turbines can kick in. The problem is the fuel. The Navy uses JP5 and JP8 which are very heavily sulfphinated (3000 10000 ppm), so the research that is being undertaken now is two strand. 1 to remove the sulphur and 2. to improve reforming capability. The end goal of the programme is to have a 1-2MWe electric unit on board.
Afternoon - High temperature fuel cells session.
Three consecutive technical sessions were held this afternoon, on high temperature fuel cells, low temperature fuel cells, and applications. I attended the session on high temperature fuel cells, which consisted of updates on progress made by a number of companies involved this area.
First up was Brian Borglum of Versa Power systems. Versa has been heavily involved in the US DODs SECA programme, and results from two solid oxide systems developed with the help of SECA funding were presented. Brian reported that for both systems the key SECA benchmark targets for availability, power quality and (importantly) cost were all met and exceeded.
Nguyen Minh of GE Global Research then presented his companys progress with SOFCs, followed by Norman Bassette of Acumentrics. Karl Haltiner presented Delphis operational experience, and gave an account of system performance, problems, and how these problems were solved. As with Versa, Delphi will be benefiting from the SECA programme as it will take part in SECA Phase 2. An interesting fact from this presentation their actual stack accounts for just 39% of total system costs.
There were no MCFC presentations in todays high temperature session, and looking ahead in the programme SOFCs dominate the topic - there are only two MCFC presentations out of a total of 21 in this session track.