The key to being a successful inventor, thought Jeffrey Bentley, is to invent something that people will want to buy. As obvious as this old saw sounds, Bentley struggled for years to reconcile it with his growing conviction that fuel cells would someday replace the internal combustion engine in automobiles. Fuel cells work by combining hydrogen and oxygen to create electricity, without the noise and pollution of conventional engines. Since engineers have not found a safe and acceptable way to store hydrogen fuel in cars, Bentley made a prototype fuel cell that could operate on methanol or ethanol, using a chemical process known as partial oxidation to break these hydrocarbons down into hydrogen plus carbon dioxide. Then he realized his folly. His local service station was offering neither methanol nor ethanol at its pumps. So who would buy a fuel-cell car?
"I came to the conclusion," says Bentley, "that you've got to adapt to the current infrastructure."
Bentley went back to the drawing board. The big problem with gasoline is that it contains sulfur, which would destroy a fuel cell. Bentley added a catalyst to remove the sulfur and demonstrated his prototype last October. "The environmentalists didn't like it," he remembers--they didn't want to encourage burning more fossil fuels. But his gasoline-powered fuel-cell system should double mileage and cut down on emissions as well. And, Bentley notes, the system can burn ethanol and methanol as well as gasoline, so it offers an intermediate step between gas-powered cars and those running on renewable fuels.
Bentley, who is now chief operating officer of Epyx Corporation, a spin-off company formed to commercialize the hydrogen-producing system, said fuel cells must get a lot cheaper if they are to have a chance of pushing the internal combustion engine off the road.
