PolyFuel gets balance of grant from DOE

Fuel cell membrane company PolyFuel (AIM: PYF), based in Mountain View, California, announced today that the U.S. Congress and Department of Energy (DOE) has restored $2 million in funding to the company.

A three year, $3 million grant, originally awarded in late 2004, had been temporarily suspended in early 2006 due to US budgetary constraints after approximately $1 million had been funded.

The program is designed to encourage the development of next-generation mobile fuel cell power supplies. 

Because of the growing “runtime gap”—the difference between the burgeoning power needs of mobile devices and the ultimate ability of batteries to provide for them—the DOE believes that portable electronics will be one of the earliest commercial applications for fuel cells, and will help catalyze the adoption of fuel cell technology in the automotive and stationary power markets, the company said.

The DOE has said its goal is to encourage the development of working Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC) power supplies that can replace the battery pack in portable devices where extended runtimes are desired.

PolyFuel believes that its hydrocarbon-based membranes, which are increasingly replacing older membrane technologies in fuel cell development efforts around the world, will be a critical component of the final solution.

The fuel cell membrane, which resembles a sheet of stiff cellophane, is the "heart" of the fuel cell – the location where electricity is essentially created.

PolyFuel was spun out of SRI International (formerly the Stanford Research Institute) in 1999, after 14 years of applied membrane research.

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