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.