Fuel Cells

The greatest demand for petroleum is concentrated in the transportation sector, where the internal combustion engine’s inherent inefciency and the staggering number of vehicles in use have helped put an ever-increasing amount of CO2 into the atmosphere. In the United States, transportation is responsible for 27% of our primary energy use, with the combustion of petroleum fuels being the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions (U.S. Energy Information Administration 2008). U.S. transportation, in fact, consumes almost 6% of the global primary energy supply (Armaroli and Balzani 2011). Given this unfortunate reality, one potential solution to the fossil fuel/CO2 emission problem is to power cars with hydrogen fuel cells. The U.S. Department of Energy has targeted a reduction in cost for a portable fuel cell system to $30/kW by 2017; as of 2011, the cost was $49/kW-a noteworthy 82% decrease since 2002 (U.S. Department of Energy 2011a). In addition to decreasing cost, increasing the durability of fuel cells over a wide breadth of operating conditions and through thousands of startup/shutdown cycles is an essential objective of fuel cell research.