Our technology's competitive advantages

Our technology today has approximately a five to eight times-higher power output, compared to the cost-base, than the closest direct methanol fuel cell competitor.

The products we sell are based upon patent-pending HT-PEM technology developed through the last seven years, and more than thirty man-years of dedicated research has been expended to result in these competitive advantages.

One of the characteristics of the technology our products are based on is scalability. If a customer needs a specific power-output, it is relatively easy to design and make a new version of the product that will meet the requirements exactly. This flexibility is even reflected in the product names: the Serenus 166 fuel cell, for example, simply consists of one (1) stack with 66 cells in it, while the Serenus 390 is three (3) stacks of 90 cells. These standard products themselves can now be employed very flexibly for most power requirements since they can be added to each other serially to produce most any desired level of output.

Competitive Advantages - It all comes down to money.
Our competitive advantage does not necessarily simply lie in our ability to produce methanol-powered fuel cells, as our products actually can be adjusted to operate on all known energy sources for fuel cells such as for example diesel, natural gas and LPG. Rather, it is reflected in a series of very important patent-pending innovations. The effect these have, put simply, is to enable us to produce at a lower cost and at the same time reach a higher energy output.

Our fuel cells are approximately a thousand time more resistant to carbon monoxide than low temperature-PEM and resistant to H2S (hydrogen sulfide) up to 10ppm and so maintain performance even while they still can be made out of conventional materials.

Besides these advantages, our systems are built using a very simple internal architecture which reducing costs for components to approximately only 25% of the fuel cell price itself, achieved by effectively eliminating a number of traditionally used components. This can be compared to the figure for one of the competitive technologies, low-temperature PEM, where these costs are up to 200% on top of the stack price. This focus on simple architecture also reduces the energy needed to operate the system around the fuel cell. Most fuel cell systems use around 25% of the energy from the fuel cell itself just to operate the system, whereas our system uses less than 5% for that purpose. This means that the amount of fuel cells, inside the products, needed for a given power output is lower. In general, high-temperature PEM technology in comparison to low temperature PEM has a number of advantages, such as that it can be air-cooled whereas low-temperature PEM requires an additional cooling system, which makes it non-viable in areas with a high surrounding air temperature. It all comes down to money.