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Nice... but it's not an energy source--it's a conversion unit from a fuel to electricity. It's like a combustion process, but without the conversion to mechanical energy in the middle. But the original source of the energy is still not addressed. That, apparently, is what you haven't yet grasped. The bulk of our total energy comes from high energy density molecules created by the sun thousands or more years ago by way of plants. In effect, they're the ultimate "solar batteries", making "carbohydrates" that later became "hydrocarbons" due to being buried with very little oxygen present. Those processes formed molecules with heats of formation that when reacted with oxygen to produce CO2 and H2O net us energy that we can use. For methane:(1)CH4 + (2)O2 --> (1)CO2 + 2(H2O) + ENERGY RELEASEDThe BloomBox or other "fuel cell" technologies merely provide a surface area that catalyzes that selfsame type of chemical conversion and harvests the released energy in a manner probably a lot cooler than straight combustion. Given that there's a highly porous surface area, your biggest long term problem will likely be keeping contaminants from filling up the tiny holes and choking such systems off. But you still didn't create energy, you're just converting it from one type to another.
Nice... but it's not an energy source--it's a conversion unit from a fuel to electricity. It's like a combustion process, but without the conversion to mechanical energy in the middle. But the original source of the energy is still not addressed. That, apparently, is what you haven't yet grasped. The bulk of our total energy comes from high energy density molecules created by the sun thousands or more years ago by way of plants. In effect, they're the ultimate "solar batteries", making "carbohydrates" that later became "hydrocarbons" due to being buried with very little oxygen present. Those processes formed molecules with heats of formation that when reacted with oxygen to produce CO2 and H2O net us energy that we can use. For methane:
(1)CH4 + (2)O2 --> (1)CO2 + 2(H2O) + ENERGY RELEASED
The BloomBox or other "fuel cell" technologies merely provide a surface area that catalyzes that selfsame type of chemical conversion and harvests the released energy in a manner probably a lot cooler than straight combustion. Given that there's a highly porous surface area, your biggest long term problem will likely be keeping contaminants from filling up the tiny holes and choking such systems off.
But you still didn't create energy, you're just converting it from one type to another.
