FuelCellsWorks

AFC Energy plc (AIM: AFC), the developer of low cost alkaline fuel cells that generates clean electricity from by-product hydrogen, is pleased to announce it has raised net proceeds of £2 million by way of a placing of new ordinary shares to UK investors. The Company intends that the net proceeds of the Placing will be used to complete the development of its low cost fuel cell system.

Placing Highlights

• £2m net proceeds (£2.15m gross) 21,500,000 million new ordinary shares of 0.1 pence each are to be issued in connection with the placing, representing 14.4% of the enlarged issued share capital

• The new ordinary shares will be issued at a price of 10 pence per share, representing a discount of 13% to the closing price on AIM on 3 December 2009

• The proceeds from the placing will be used to provide operating capital for the development to commercialisation of AFC Energy’s fuel cell systems

• Six of the Company’s directors have participated in the placing, including all four executive directors

• Application will be made to the London Stock Exchange for the new shares to be admitted to trading on AIM. It is expected that admission will become effective and that dealing will commence on 10 December 2009

• When issued, the new ordinary shares will rank equally with the Company’s existing ordinary shares

Ian Balchin, Chief Executive, AFC Energy plc:

“We are delighted both to receive a combination of support from existing shareholders and to welcome new shareholders who recognise the enormous opportunity of AFC Energy’s fuel cell system.

The placing when combined with projected sales, licensing, grant income and other commercial opportunities provides AFC Energy with the additional working capital it needs to take its low cost fuel cell systems through to commercialisation and introduce this energy generating capability to the huge market opportunity that exists.

Our current rapid rate of progress is a reflection of the highly focused and skilled team of staff, suppliers and prospective customers that we have in place and we anticipate no need for any substantial increases in personnel.

We have a clearly laid out development programme in place during which we periodically freeze designs for testing. Work on our large scale c.50kW fuel cell system began earlier in the year and it is being developed in parallel with our 3.5kW Alpha System. Results from the extended customer testing of the Alpha System during 2010 will be directly applicable to the large scale system which enables us to accelerate its commercialisation. To benefit from economies of scale we shall be engaging with third parties who will assemble units on our behalf. We believe this approach is less capital intensive and lower risk than alternatives such as setting up our own assembly. We are highly confident that our first large scale commercial fuel cell system product will be available during 2011.“

Directors’ participation in the placing and beneficial shareholdings after the placing are as follows:

Following admission of the 21,500,000 new ordinary shares on 10 December 2009, which will rank pari passu in all respects with the existing ordinary shares of the Group, AFC Energy’s total issued and voting share capital will comprise 149,182,854 ordinary shares.

The above figure of 149,182,854 may be used by shareholders as the denominator for the calculations by which they will determine if they are required to notify their interest in, or a change to their interest in, AFC Energy plc under the FSA’s Disclosure and Transparency Rules.

Air Liquide has just been chosen to supply two new hydrogen filling stations, designed and developed by the Group’s Advanced Technologies teams

Access to sustainable mobility is a major issue to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, pollution in cities and to lower the dependency on fossil fuels. Hydrogen, used as an energy vector, is one of the solutions to meeting those challenges.

Air Liquide has just been chosen to supply two new hydrogen filling stations in Korea, designed and developed by the Group’s Advanced Technologies teams.

The first station, which will supply hydrogen at a pressure of 350 bars, will be delivered in the first quarter of 2010 for the government demonstration project, led by the automobile manufacturer Hyundai Motors. It will be installed within the Korea Institute of Energy Research(KIER), located on Jeju island. The KIER, a research and development institute for renewable energy, is one of the beneficiaries of the South-Korean government’s national plan to promote the development of hydrogen energy. This station will supply the new fuel cell vehicle developed by Hyundai Motors.

The second station will be delivered in the second quarter of 2010 to the Korea Automobile Testing & Research Institute (KATRI). It will include dual pressure technology developed by Air Liquide for the different types of fuel cell vehicles. It will be used to fuel a bus at a pressure of 350 bars and various cars at pressures of 350 and 700 bars. The station will be installed close to the KATRI Gyeonggi-do race track, used for testing and research to improve vehicle safety.

Based on Air Liquide’s patented technologies, these hydrogen filling stations enable vehicles to fill up in less than 5 minutes in the same conditions as traditional fuels, for a driving range that can reach up to 500 kilometers for some vehicles. Over the last four years, Air Liquide has designed, built and commissioned a growing number of hydrogen filling stations. Forty six Air Liquide stations have been installed throughout the world to date. In Canada, the Vancouver and Montreal airports will install these stations to supply part of their fleet of commercial vehicles. Another station will supply the largest fleet of hydrogen buses in the world – twenty vehicles – which will be deployed during the next Vancouver Winter Olympics.

François Darchis, Senior Vice-President Air Liquide Group, in charge of R&D, Advanced Technologies and Engineering & Construction, commented: “These new installations in Korea are contributing to putting in place all the conditions required for the successful deployment of hydrogen energy in transport by 2015. They illustrate the increasing number of demonstration projects and the development of this energy vector. Air Liquide believes that it is its responsibility, as the world leader, to support the introduction of technological innovations that will help to preserve the environment. Both Energy and the Environment are growth drivers of the Air Liquide Group.”

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has released the report titled Pathways to Commercial Success: Technologies and Products Supported by the Hydrogen, Fuel Cells and Infrastructure Technologies Program (PDF 7.6 MB).

This report documents the results of an effort to identify and characterize commercial and near-commercial (emerging) technologies and products that benefited from the support of the Hydrogen, Fuel Cells and Infrastructure Technologies Program and its predecessor programs within DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.

antherm Air Handling and Dantherm Power have developed the integrated outdoor cabinet solution, which has been chosen for Denmark’s new public safety network – SINE.

Graphic: Christine Daniloff

A new type of natural-gas electric power plant proposed by MIT researchers could provide electricity with zero carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere, at costs comparable to or less than conventional natural-gas plants, and even to coal-burning plants. But that can only come about if and when a price is set on the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases — a step the U.S. Congress and other governments are considering as a way to halt climate change.

In findings recently published online in the Journal of Power Sources, postdoctoral associate Thomas Adams and Paul I. Barton, the Lammot du Pont Professor of Chemical Engineering, propose a system that uses solid-oxide fuel cells, which can produce power from fuel without burning it. The system would not require any new technology, but would rather combine existing components, or ones that are already well under development, in a novel configuration (for which they have applied for a patent). The system would also have the advantage of running on natural gas, a relatively plentiful fuel source — proven global reserves of natural gas are expected to last about 60 years at current consumption rates — that is considered more environmentally friendly than coal or oil. (Present natural-gas power plants produce an average of 1,135 pounds of carbon dioxide for every megawatt-hour of electricity produced — half to one-third the emissions from coal plants, depending on the type of coal.)

Natural gas already accounts for 22 percent of all U.S. electricity production, and that percentage is likely to rise in coming years if carbon prices are put into effect. For these and other reasons, a system that can produce electricity from natural gas at a competitive price with zero greenhouse gas emissions could prove to be an attractive alternative to conventional power plants that use fossil fuels.

The system proposed by Adams and Barton would not emit into the air any carbon dioxide or other gases believed responsible for global warming, but would instead produce a stream of mostly pure carbon dioxide. This stream could be harnessed and stored underground relatively easily, a process known as carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). One additional advantage of the proposed system is that, unlike a conventional natural gas plant with CCS that would consume significant amounts of water, the fuel-cell based system actually produces clean water that could easily be treated to provide potable water as a side benefit, Adams says.

Although no full-scale plants using such systems have yet been built, the basic principles have been demonstrated in a number of smaller units including a 250-kilowatt plant, and prototype megawatt-scale plants are planned for completion around 2012. Actual utility-scale power plants would likely be on the order of 500 megawatts, Adams says. And because fuel cells, unlike conventional turbine-based generators, are inherently modular, once the system has been proved at small size it can easily be scaled up. “You don’t need one large unit,” Adams explains. “You can do hundreds or thousands of small ones, run in parallel.”

Adams says practical application of such systems is “not very far away at all,” and could probably be ready for commercialization within a few years. “This is near-horizon technology,” he says.

Costs and benefits

Adams and Barton, with funding from the BP-MIT Conversion Research Program,  used computer simulations to analyze the relative costs and performance of this system versus other existing or proposed generating systems, including natural gas or coal-powered systems incorporating carbon capture technologies.

Combined-cycle natural gas plants — the most efficient type of fossil-fuel power plants in use today — could be retrofitted with a carbon-capture system to reduce the output of greenhouse gases by 90 percent. But the MIT researchers’ study found that their proposed system could eliminate virtually 100 percent of these emissions, at a comparable cost for the electricity produced, and with even a higher efficiency (in terms of the amount of electricity produced from a given amount of fuel). Jack Brouwer, associate director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center at the University of California, Irvine, says that the high efficiency and the carbon separation capabilities of solid-oxide fuel cell technology “are indeed impressive.”

Absent any price for carbon emissions, Adams says, when it comes to generating electricity “the cheapest fuel will always be pulverized coal.” But as soon as there is some form of carbon pricing — which attempts to take into account the true price exacted on the environment by greenhouse gas emissions — “ours is the lowest price option,” he says, as long as the pricing is more than about $15 per metric ton of emitted carbon dioxide. Such a pricing mechanism would be put in place, for example, by the Waxman-Markey “American Clean Energy and Security Act” that was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in July, through its “cap and trade” provisions. (A corresponding bill has not yet reached the floor of the U.S. Senate.) If the program becomes law, the actual price per ton of carbon would vary, being determined through the free market.

CCS is considered the only practical way of meeting reduced emissions targets under a cap-and-trade program, because alternatives to the use of fossil fuels are not far enough advanced to be able to quickly replace them at reasonable cost. CCS involves separating out the carbon dioxide from other gases in the plant’s exhaust, and then injecting them into deep geological formations (for example, in depleted oil wells) to keep them from going into the atmosphere. Most approaches to capturing the carbon dioxide emissions from a fossil-fuel power plant require the use of a chemical solvent that absorbs the carbon dioxide from a mixture of gases — a process that is inherently inefficient and adds significantly to the cost of the power produced. Adams and Barton’s system eliminates this inefficient separation step.

One of the critiques most often leveled against proposals for fuel-cell power plants is that the technology has high initial costs compared to conventional combustion technologies. But the new study found that once carbon pricing is in effect, even if the cost of fuel cells remains more than double that targeted by the U.S. Department of Energy for 2010, the solid-oxide fuel cell system would be the cheapest option available in terms of lifecycle costs of electricity produced, even though the up-front capital costs could be three to four times greater than for natural gas or coal combustion systems.

In fact, the system’s predicted efficiency is so high that it beats the lifecycle cost of a combined-cycle natural gas plant, even without carbon pricing. And the study shows that a very low level of carbon tax, on the order of $5 to $10 per ton, would make this technology cheaper than coal plants, which are currently the lowest cost option for electricity generation.