By Marc Roca
General Electric Co. (GE) studied fuel cells and determined the technology is too dependent on platinum to be more than a niche product.
“It’s almost impossible to do a good fuel cell without platinum as a catalyst,” Vlatko Vlatkovic, chief engineering officer of GE’s Power Conversion division, said in an interview in London. “Very little goes in, but if you scale it up, there’s not enough platinum in the world.”
GE’s comments reveal constraints that may keep fuel cells from penetrating the energy market as a mainstream technology. Fuel cells use hydrogen or natural gas to generate power through a chemical reaction, and the most common technology needs the scarce element as a catalyst.
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