CLEVELAND — Cleveland entrepreneur Benson Lee has spent millions of dollars and worked 20 years with a team of engineers to develop a small fuel cell that can generate electricity from any fuel.
Now, he is in the home stretch and in search of a market.
The uses are wide open, from war zones to aerospace to long-haul trucking to remote African villages — and to your basement, where the device one day could generate electricity, make hot water and heat the entire house, all with natural gas.
Fuel cells at their simplest generate electricity by combining hydrogen fuel with oxygen from the air, producing only water as a byproduct. But the electro-chemical magic has turned out to be delicate. Many fuel cells are finicky and require pure hydrogen.
Lee and his engineers have gotten around that problem.
He calls his system the “Anywhere Energy System,” because the 1,000-watt fuel cell incorporates a high-temperature steam reformer that can strip the hydrogen out of common, and not-so-common fuels.
Here’s the concept: No natural gas? In the middle of a desert? Or the arctic? The little machine, about 3½ feet tall and a foot and a half square, can quietly turn vegetable oil into electricity.
Or it can swallow kerosene, jet fuel, diesel fuel, propane, biodiesel, ethanol, old cooking oil, ammonia or digester biogas. It can switch fuels on the fly, Lee says, and it doesn’t mind contaminates.
It’s hard to disprove Lee’s assertions. Fuel cell developers and researchers don’t know many details about Lee’s technology. They do know that he has been working on it for years, and he can be incredibly secretive.
One engineer said fuel reformers typically have to be adjusted in order to switch fuels as TMI’s reformer apparently does on the fly. Most fuel cells of the type that Lee is using operate at more than 1,600 degrees, high enough to handle many impurities.
Internationally known expert Tom Zawodzinski, a fuel cell scholar at Case Western Reserve University, said he thought the only engineering problems left were “to get the costs out.”
“The functionality is fine, he said of Lee’s fuel cell. “It is reasonably solid at its core. You can’t fake those things.”
The machine’s capabilities reflect the needs and policies of many of the organizations that have supported Lee. Since 2002, Lee’s company, Technology Management Inc., or TMI Inc. has received research grants totaling about $6 million.
Nearly all of the myriad internal parts are made in Ohio, and Lee intends to keep it that way — though many will have to be re-engineered to be able to run 24 hours a day for months.
TMI has received Ohio Third Frontier grants for high-tech development, and federal grants, including funding from the Defense Department, Agricultural Department, Environmental Protection Agency and Commerce Department.
TMI has collaborated extensively with the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center, a division of OSU, in Wooster, where biochemist Floyd Schanbacher must still test whether the fuel cell can handle raw digester bio-gas.
In April, Lee and his engineers set up a fuel cell in the barn at Hal Dalton’s soybean, corn and beef cattle farm in Wakeman, just outside Oberlin. The machine used soybean oil to generate power for Dalton’s work room and office for 30 days.
Ohio lawmakers on the Ohio House Alternative Energy Committee paid a visit to the farm to see for themselves – as did representatives of the Ohio Soybean Council who have contributed more than $100,000 to TMI’s research.
Lee hopes to target rural areas, here and around the world, for his first marketing areas. He intends that the commercial versions of the generator will be the equivalent of “plug and play”: Feed them the fuel of your choice and they will pump out up to 1,000 watts day and night, consuming about 2 gallons of oils per day.
But there is another client that probably could become the first large customer: The Department of Defense.
TMI and defense contractor Lockheed Martin are currently working with Stark State College of Technology to “rugged-ize” the 1,000-watt system, using a $1 million Ohio Third Frontier grant and Lockheed Martin funding over the next two years to develop auxiliary power on the battlefield in place of diesel generators.
“We worked with Lee in 1993,” said Steven Sinsabaugh, a Lockheed Martin fellow leading the company’s fuel cell activities.
“I have kept track of their technology as it evolved,” he said. “We think the core technology has matured to the point that we have only to do the final engineering and turn it into a product for the Army.”
To do that, the system will have to be a little smaller, much tougher and able to take the shock of air drops, bumping around in a truck or jeep and keep operating below zero, at 115 degrees in the shade or in a sandstorm, said Sinsabaugh.
At twice the efficiency and at a fraction of the noise of a typical diesel-powered generator the military now uses, TMI’s fuel cell “is definitely close to the finish line,” he said.
