AirShip Technologies Group

There are a number of different kinds of fuel cells, but the one that has everyone excited today is the Direct Methanol Fuel Cell.  Fuel cells have to have hydrogen to react with oxygen and produce an electrical current.  But we all know the problems of storing hydrogen.  Normally it has to be contained in a high pressure vessel, or in a cryogenic state as a super-cold liquid, or using some other technically challenging method.   But there’s more hydrogen in a gallon of liquid methanol than in a gallon of pure cryogenic hydrogen.  So methanol turns out to be a very good carrier fuel for the hydrogen that fuel cells need.   All that’s required is a way to get the methanol to give up its hydrogen, it turns out that methanol does this very easily. 

In the past, PEM cells that run on methanol have used a separate reformer to release the hydrogen from liquid methanol, then the pure hydrogen is fed into the fuel cell stack.  But in the last couple of years, industry has discovered a way to feed a methanol/water mix directly into a slightly modified PEM cell and release the hydrogen to do its work internally  -  without a separate reformer.   This tremendously simplifies the fuel cell, and holds the promise of a cheap, highly efficient replacement for the internal combustion engine.   Perfected direct methanol fuel cell are only a few years away. 

On the downside, however, when hydrogen is removed from methanol, carbon is released in the process.  So when methanol is made from natural gas, there is a net gain of CO2 emissions.  Not as much as with a gasoline car, but the emissions do exist.  In contrast, pure hydrogen fuel cells have no CO2 emissions, and bio-ethanol or bio-methanol fuel cells result in a zero net gain of CO2 emissions.