TOMORROW ALWAYS GETS HERE:

A cheaper fuel cell?: California firm says it can lower costs (Matthew L. Wald, October 06, 2004, NY Times)

With oil at around $50 a barrel, alternatives to gasoline are attracting more attention - including fuel cells, devices that convert hydrogen into electricity with no waste products except heat and water.

Fuel cells have found their way into power systems for laptop computers and into many experimental cars. The main drawback to automotive use of fuel cells, though, has been their cost, as much as $100,000, compared with $4,000 for a gasoline engine of equal power. Lately, some companies, including Honda, have been trying to design cheaper versions of the most expensive part of a fuel cell: the membrane that takes the hydrogen fuel and separates it into protons and electrons.

A California-based company, PolyFuel, plans to announce that it has achieved a breakthrough in fuel-cell membranes by using an alternative material, a hydrocarbon that it says costs only about half as much as the conventional material.

Compared with the fluorine compounds that are the most commonly used for membranes in fuel cells now under testing, PolyFuel says, hydrocarbon membranes allow production of more electricity per square centimeter of membrane. That could mean that a fuel cell could produce the same power as a fluorine-membrane version but would be smaller and lighter, according to the company.