Just my kind of article in this weeks Investors Chronicle - Cell Mates (subscription required) - by Ben Power, exploring listed Fuel Cell companies. Of particular interest was the coverage of Polyfuel - a US based company that was one of the first-wavers onto the Alternative Investment Market in London.

Polyfuel doesn't make fuel cells, it makes critical components for them - membranes. The big growth area for Polyfuel is decribed as being portable electronic devices, specifically methanol based membranes.

Anyway, what really caught my eye was this;

the citation of a PricewaterhouseCoopers report on fuel cells, which forecast $46 billion in sales by 2011 and $2.6 trillion by 2021. To give you some idea of how much growth that would be, sales last year were $1.2 Billion. From that same link, AEI followers will have probably noticed that this is way different to what Clean Edge forecast for Fuel Cells out to 2015 - $15.1 Billion, earlier this year.

The difference is time. The PWC figure stems from a very old report - 2002 vintage - which was actually produced jointly between Fuel Cells Canada (a lobby) and PricewaterhouseCoopers. More than a few people have scaled back the demand curve for fuel cells in the last 8 years - and that's an understatement.

Of course, no one really knows how big any market is going to be. But I think it is more likely than the more accurate projections are going to be the most up to date reports forecasting to the nearest point in time. And even Fuel Cells Canada seems to have downgraded its expectations since 2002 - see $18 Billion by 2013 here.

AIM listed Ceres Power seems to have had a run of good stories - exactly when things were looking pretty sticky for Alternative Energy stocks.

What fascinates me about the company is that this just might be the first mass market fuel cell application of combined heat and power with its low tech and supposedly inexpensive fuel cell. I tend to think think that cheap (not a bad word in UK English) short payback products trumps high tech almost every time in just about everything. And that's why fuel cells have not yet made a breakthrough - they're just more expensive than the perceived benefit. So can Ceres deliver?

Fuel cell companies have been around for a very long time - yet none of them have produced a commercially successful product - in scale. About 9 months ago I rang up a leading fuel cell company (who shall remain nameless) and asked them what a fuel cell would cost - ballpark - for a vehicle today. They couldn't tell me. Instead they wanted to offer me projections of what it might be in 2010. So excuse my caution about Ceres fuel cells because you can't actually buy them - yet.

To get a balanced view on fuel cells beyond the sometimes breathless optimism, I do reccomend reading "The Hype About Hydrogen" by Joseph J. Romm. I've always got time for someone who labours to debunk hype, but it's very techy and not an always easy read.

Then go to the other extreme and read Jeremy Rifkin's The Hydrogen Economy. He gives the most optimistic forward analysis I've yet seen. It's also extremely well-written and appeals to the broader issues facing the world, past, present and future. Although I certainly don't buy into his explanation that the Roman Empire collapsed because of environmental mismanagement.

Right now, I'm somewhere between the two of them. Romm is now, Rifkin is more a deep future scenario, which is probably much further ahead than he would like. I'm thinking about 10 years out.

Any further than that is more like science fiction and way beyond the return horizon for most investors.