You know that several companies are busy designing fuel cells to power your future laptops. (Check this former column, Notebook overhaul on the horizon: lighter, faster, running on gas? to refresh your memory.) They should appear on the market between 2005 and 2007.
But will they be cheap? Rafe Needleman doesn't think so. The subtitle of his article gives the tone.
You'll be able to gas up future laptops with a few pennies' worth of methanol, but you'll pay a lot more than that to do so.
Here are some of his interesting thoughts.
\‘Alas!’ quoth he, \‘but newly born in fiery heats I fry,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I.
My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns;
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;
The fuel justice layeth on, and mercy blows the coals;
The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiled souls;
—Robert Southwell (1561?–1595)
Currently being developed and debugged by several firms, the fuel cells that power your electronic devices [.] might be made in the same size and shape as traditional laptop batteries, meaning you'll be able to swap one type of power source for the other.
Micro fuel cells use methanol and oxygen as fuel, and operate at room temperature. Most designs for micro fuel cells right now extract oxygen from the air, so the only fuel that users will have to carry is methanol, a flammable but nonexplosive liquid.
Methanol is cheap and easily stored in a bottle, but that doesn't mean you'll be able to glug a few ounces of chemicals into your laptop to recharge it.
And like ink for printers, you will almost certainly sealed fuel cartridges instead of bottles of liquid.
Beware the/easy griefs, that fool and fuel nothing./It is too easy to cry “AFRIKA!”/and shock thy street,/and purse thy mouth,/and go home to thy “Gunsmoke,” to/thy “Gilligan’s Island” and the NFL.
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)
Nobody knows yet what fuel-cell cartridges will sell for, but even though the costs of the raw materials will be very low, manufacturing, packaging, shipping, and marketing costs will all have to be recovered, and there will doubtless be substantial markups all along the supply chain. There's a reason a four-pack of AA batteries can cost more than $6 at Radio Shack, and it's not because the raw materials are expensive.
Needleman concludes.
I would not be surprised if the existing electrical battery vendors got into the cartridge business. They may have more experience with alkaline cells than with methanol cartridges, but they also have more experience with distribution and branding than the current fuel-cell technology companies do.
Source: Rafe Needleman, Business 2.0, February 18, 2003.