The headline is misleading.

This research relates to making hydrogen fuel cells more affordable and practical.

Hydrogen fuel cells turn hydrogen and oxygen into water and electricity.

The production of hydrogen is still the bottleneck and the tech in TFA does not change that.

> [1]Hydrogen Dreams Fading [slashdot.org]

Hydrogen is eventually coming one day. Just not for cars. Your grandkids will probably fly on airliners running hydrogen fuel, and there will probably be big power generation facilities running it. But running it on common automobiles cheaply and efficiently is just too big a hump to get over. It's a lot easier for an airport to manage hydrogen than a gas station on the Interstate. As the Japanese have proved, you can do hydrogen automobiles, it's just really, really impractical at that vehicle size. Kind o

[1] https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/08/11/1814206/americas-clean-hydrogen-dreams-are-fading-again

From a purely numeral point of view, it's correct, as 300 is less than a half of 650. It just does not mean that the normal operating temperature of fuel cells is "twice as hot", or as my father used to say: "The only thing hot is the old woman's coffee."

Perhaps you should learn to recognise colloquialisms. To 99.99% of people 300 is less than half of 700. No one measures in kelvins outside of the lab.

There's more. In TFA, it says 300ÂC is 500ÂF. (It's 572ÂF.)

it's wrong, but essentially correct. The important figure here is the distance from "room temperature", because that's what thermal dissipation depends on. You get technical when deciding on the materials to use, etc., but this isn't about that (except for the claim that they could use cheaper materials).

From Wikipedia's Fuel Cell article:

> The first fuel cells were invented by Sir William Grove in 1838. The first commercial use of fuel cells came almost a century later following the invention of the hydrogen–oxygen fuel cell by Francis Thomas Bacon in 1932.

This has been a LONG time coming! Also, unless I'm missing something, this lower-temp SOFC can also be fueled with hydrocarbons not just plain hydrogen gas.

Finally, this is the same temperature as the Sodium-Sulfur battery, so keeping it hot is NOT t

Sending electricity 100km, whatever made up ass units those are is trivial because there's a pipe for that already, nearly universally. Hydrogen doesn't have a pipe installed yetz and they shouldn't make one.

These cells are made with another hard to find rare earth, Scandium.

> It has way to many issues to be viable in the near future - power cells are only one, storing, generation, transport - it is all much more difficult than alternatives.

This device works in reverse too, taking in power to produce hydrogen. I'm thinking that's a far more valuable application than as a power source.

> Hydrogen is just an excuse by Big Oil to pump gas and oil as usual...

A quick search of the web tells me about 15% of petroleum ends up as non-fuel products like lubricants, coolants, waxes, tars, asphalt, coke, and plastics. While they do a lot of cracking of hydrogen atoms off of carbon atoms to produce hydrogen for varied uses they also take hydrogen atoms to stick to carbon atoms, and other atoms like nitrogen. This was even

Like you, I'm all for improving Hydrogen technology. I still don't understand why we aren't cracking H2 out of the excess methane that is currently "flared" off of the remote NG pump sites. I'm not certain the exact process, but in places like West Texas it sure seems like we could park a windmill next to it to provide the power, eliminating the need for extending the power grid all the way out there, or even running a pipeline although you'd have to transport the H2 eventually.

The real problem I see with

Its just makes it slightly easier for them to push their nonsense about hydrogen being a green fuel when in some cases its even worse than hydrocarbons for well (if its streamed from gas) to wheel CO2 released per BTU.

It doubles as an oven!

With the appropriate heat dissipation, you can cook a thanksgiving dinner under the hood of your truck on the way to grandma's house.

Internal parts of a gasoline engine routinely reach over 300C in normal operation. The combustion event itself can hit something like 2500C.

The temperature isn't really an issue.

=Smidge=

Up until now, hydrogen people were talking about 10,000 psi tanks of hydrogen - because that's the point where the energy density starts to match petroleum fuels.

The question is really, why would we ever care about commerical hydrogen at all, when we have electric batteries pretty sewn up for now.

I can power my house and my car off a battery not much bigger than the filing cabinet sitting next to me now. What makes anyone think we need to worry about anything but shrinking that down a little more?

Normal batteries can't fuel of the energy requirement for aviation and shipping. Primary metal air batteries could in theory, but you need electrolysis to recycle those too after they are spent, at equally poor efficiency.

As for synthetic fuel, that would have to compete with plain hydrogen and in many niches would lose the fight. Hydrogen forklifts prove the problems are somewhat exagerated.

Oil executives and the Toyota executives they've had a gun trained on for the past.. decades

Could be used for forklifts in 24/7 applications, the need for the fuel cell to heat up isn't really relevant if it runs continuously.

Even though it's not a proper application, it might be used for some experimental class in LeMans. SOFC can more easily be used for extreme power densities than PEM.