Two scientific breakthroughs need to reach mass production in order for the hydrogen economy to get off the ground:
- Solar panels which turn the Sun’s light into electricity far more efficiently.
- Fuel cells that cost much less to make and to run.
The problem with fuel cells, in a word, is platinum. Not only do you need platinum to make a fuel cell that will power a car, but the platinum tends to wear out. Platinum is also very expensive.
The breakthroughs we’re seeing today come along two tracks:
- Polyfuel in Mountain View, Calif. is a spin-off from the Stanford Research Institute which has been working on hydrocarbons for fuel cell membranes. Department of Energy Research is also working with platinum-nickel alloys which, they say, cost less to produce than platinum and last longer.
- Microfabrication, the use of techniques from computer chip production into fuel cells, lowers costs directly, while also enabling breakthroughs in the width (and thus size) of practical fuel cells. We’re talking here of fuel cells replacing batteries.
Even with Polyfuel’s high intellectual property costs, we’re talking about membranes which cost half what current technology allows. All of which leads to a concluding question:
Given the urgency of fuel cell cost reduction, how can
intellectual property be pooled to guarantee rapid production,
compensating inventors adequately but not lavishly so this doesn’t turn
into another branch of the drug business?
I have written here that we need to treat the War Against Oil as just
that, a war. In terms of that war, breakthroughs in fuel cell
technology or solar panel efficiency are like the synthetic rubber
which won World War II.
If we let patent attorneys sit on these
breakthroughs, searching for the best-possible, longest-lasting deals,
refusing to proceed until they are totally, completely satisfied, we’re not going to reach the mass production quantities we need to make
a difference in time.
This looks like a job for open source science.
