20 hours of battery life?

[ThreeOnTheTree]

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30849

Fuel cell talk again stirs up. I wonder if we will ever see such a thing?

[dannyboy27]

I like the bit underneath that says

"See Also
Promise of fuel cells turns out to be Fool's Gold"

But if Casio do get this to work, presumably as well as better battery life there would be a pretty hefty size and weight saving if they can do away with the big Ni-CD/NiMH lump.

[Hoyle]

Might work... but there are a number of problems I can (still) think of. Like not being allowed to take Methanol on an airplane.

[ThreeOnTheTree]

Yeah, I see that as a big problem, especially if the fuel cell process releases more pollution into the air. I'm not an expert on the process, but Methanol is NH4OH, correct? If so, then I'd imagine the by-product of the reaction will be N2 and O2 gas. Help me out if I'm wrong on that part. However, I do now that both of those products already exist in the atmosphere in much more abundance than CO2. No one will complain about extra O2, but what will people say if we put more Nitrogen into the air?

[Hoyle]

No, it's CH3OH...

And fuel cells will exhaust carbon dioxide. It's a greenhouse gas, but fuel cells aren't every going to make a significant amount of it. The problem that I see is that it's a volitile, corrosive liquid and fairly toxic. Kind of a nightmare to market and distribute. Also, when people plug in their laptops, they don't pay to recharge the batteries. The electric costs a little, but unfortunately I can't imagine proprietary fuel 'cartridges' being reasonable... I have these awful premonitions of inkjet-like markups on these things... 20 hours of power... for a mere $24.99

[ThreeOnTheTree]

lol, chemistry has been so far forgotten for me. I was thinking of Ammonia or something. At least I got the alcohol group propterly attached. Yeah, the fact that you need to buy the battery life could be very interesting. That's all we need, gas stations for computers.