By Cyrus Farivar

02:00 AM Dec. 02, 2005 PT 

Story location:  

http://www.wired.com/news/planet/0,2782,69713,00.html

   

                

                

                

                

                

                

 

Mad scientist Doc Brown powers his time machine by feeding coffee grounds and other biowaste into the DeLorean in Back to the Future.

While time travel is still in the realm of science fiction, carbon-based fuel cells are about to become science fact — rendering a similar scenario all the more possible. SRI announced in November that it has developed direct carbon fuel-cell technology.

The process is 70 percent efficient, double that of traditional coal power plants, according to Larry Dubois, vice president of the physical sciences division at SRI.

SRI researchers have shown that in a single step, they can take pulverized coal — or anything else that contains carbon, including human waste or banana peels, for example — and directly transform the fuel’s chemical energy into electricity by electrochemically oxidizing the carbon.

The byproduct is carbon dioxide — but it is emitted in such a pure form, Dubois said, that it’s easy to contain. “If you have a conventional gas-fired coal plant and capture the (carbon dioxide) — 75 percent of the cost is separating carbon dioxide from air,” he said.

The new technology could also help to reduce dependence on foreign oil, he said.

“(The United States has) a 250 year supply of coal,” he said. “If you think about that as a strategic asset for the U.S., exploring the ability to use coal in a clean efficient manner is beneficial.”

Dubois said that while it is theoretically possible to power a small business, a home or even a car with carbon-based fuel, SRI has its eyes on larger power plants.

Another bonus is that unlike hydrogen, the other alternative-energy option, carbon fuel is very easy to come by, said Roberta Gamble, an energy analyst at Frost and Sullivan.

Despite its benefits, however, carbon fuel cells may be too costly, she added.

“If it’s prohibitively expensive you’ll be hard pressed to find a restaurant that’s going to give up perfectly good traditional energy,” she said. She suggested it might take a decade before a carbon fuel system paid for itself, which is probably longer than most users are willing to wait.

“We’re finding if (new fuel sources) can provide an economic benefit within five years then there is a potential benefit to that,” she said.

For now, the carbon fuel cells are producing small amounts of power on the scale of a few watts at SRI’s laboratory in Menlo Park, California. But Dubois expects their capability to rise to 10 kilowatts by 2009, to 100 kilowatts by 2011 and to 500 kilowatts by 2015.

“Is this early stage?” he said. “Absolutely. Is it risky? Absolutely. But the payoff potential is tremendous.”

The peak oil theory predicts that the world’s oil production output, like any nonrenewable resource, will eventually reach an all-time high and afterward gradually decline. Although it will be impossible to tell precisely when the peak occurs until it has already occurred and the world is in a definite production decrease, many experts are already predicting that the moment will happen in a few short years.

Deffeyes is one of the more pessimistic of the prognosticators. If he is correct, the global oil peak will just have occurred when he presents his Caltech lecture on December 1. Afterward, the commodity will become more and more scarce–and therefore more and more expensive and hard to obtain. The end result will be massive economic and social disruptions in a 21st-century world that has fueled itself for decades with cheap and plentiful energy.

Deffeyes has spent a lifetime in the oil business and the academic study of petroleum. Born in the middle of an Oklahoma City oilfield to a pioneering petroleum engineer, Deffeyes joined the Shell research lab in Houston after graduate school. At Shell he was a colleague of M. King Hubbert, who was the first person to predict that production peaks were even possible.

Hubbert’s prediction that U.S. oil production would peak around 1970 was at first laughed at by industry analysts, but was later taken quite seriously when domestic production indeed peaked in much the manner that he had forecasted. Experts then realized that the entire planet would eventually reach a production peak, and that the effects would be highly disruptive.

Deffeyes joined the Princeton faculty in 1967 and continued to be involved in the oil industry as a consultant and expert witness. After his retirement in 1998, he published two books on the subject, Hubbert’s Peak and Beyond Oil.

His prediction that the global oil peak will occur at Thanksgiving comes with stern warnings that severe consequences are to be expected for transportation and agriculture. In fact, he advises that the possibility of a “soft landing” may have already passed.

Ken Deffeyes will discuss the evidence supporting his theory at the Lauritsen Memorial Lecture, to take place at 8 p.m. on Thursday, December 1, in Beckman Auditorium on the California Institute of Technology campus.

The Lauritsen Memorial Lecture at Caltech commemorates two former professors of physics at Caltech, Charles C. and Thomas Lauritsen. Together, they served the Institute for more than 68 years, playing a significant role in Caltech’s development and accomplishments.

Source: Caltech