Technology and Application of Molten Carbonate Fuel Cells

In recent years increasing attention has been given to Fuel Cell plants for the production of electric energy. Fuel Cell plants represent one of the promising technologies for environmentally-friendly production of energy and are now available commercially. Interest in these power-generation devices has grown considerably recently and it is believed that they could play an essential role in the future of distributed energy supply. At the moment many types of fuel cells are being studied at different stages of development. Of these, Molten Carbonate Fuel Cells belong to the group of hydrogen-fed intermediate temperature Fuel Cells. Molten Carbonate Fuel Cells have received a great deal of attention in recent years in view of the EU climate and energy targets to be met by 2020, known as the "20-20-20" targets. In fact, Molten Carbonate Fuel Cells systems: • have electrical efficiencies comparable to state-of-the-art Combined Cycle power plants; • can be coupled with the use of different renewable sources, in particular biomass, and consequently fed by biogas, landfill gas, syngas, etc.; • have the peculiarity of concentrating carbon dioxide on the anode. Nevertheless there are still techno-economical issues to solve before Molten Carbonate Fuel Cells can be placed on the market in direct competition with existing mature technologies. The open issues are: • the high cost of installation; • limited stack life time in terms of operating hours; • limited tolerance of pollutants and sulfur or halogen compounds. In the present chapter Molten Carbonate Fuel Cells technology is described in terms of cell components and performance, providing details on some critical behavior, followed by a description of traditional and innovative applications and a discussion of the future perspectives of this technology.