Fuel Cell Energy has just landed an additional $2.5m to to complete a land-based demonstration of its ship service fuel cell (SSFC) power plant and begin design work on a next generation ship-based prototype.

What singles out FCE from many other fuel cell companies is that they view the Hydrogen Economy and its associated infrastructure as decades off. So they are concentrating on an interim solution - direct fuel cells DFCs. These fuel cells are typically stationary power stations that can do the reforming (extracting the hydrogen) themselves, using a mixture of off the shelf fossil fuels.

In the case of the US Navy, FCE has adapted its DFC technology to run on naval liquid fuels - diesel and jet fuel.