FuelCell Energy Gets $1.5 Million Contract

(Comment on this article at http://www.financialwire.net/2009/10/06/fuelcell-energy-gets-15-million-contract/)

October 6, 2009 (FinancialWire) -- FuelCell Energy, Inc. (NASDAQ: FCEL), a leading manufacturer of high efficiency ultra-clean power plants using renewable and other fuels for commercial, industrial, government, and utility customers, announced that the U.S. Department of Defense's Engineer Research and Development Center - Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (ERDC-CERL) awarded it approximately $1.5 million to continue development of its electrochemical hydrogen separator.

The EHS system separates pure hydrogen from gas internally generated in a fuel cell that can be used for industrial and transportation applications.

The EHS research contributes to the development of FuelCell Energy's DFC-H2 product. The DFC-H2 integrates an EHS system with the company's high-efficiency Direct FuelCell power plant to produce ultra-clean electricity, heat and pure hydrogen. A DFC300 combined with an EHS would produce 300 kilowatts of power, heat for combined heat and power applications, and up to 300 lbs. per day of hydrogen. If successful, this combination may produce hydrogen more economically than other methods.

Conventional methods of separating hydrogen rely on a complex separation step using mechanical compression. FuelCell Energy's proprietary EHS technology has no moving parts and does not use compression, potentially offering higher reliability and efficiency, resulting in the need for only half the energy compared to conventional compression methods of producing hydrogen.

FuelCell Energy's DFC stationary power plants use biofuels and fossil fuels more efficiently than the electric grid and other distributed generation their size. Their high efficiency results in low CO2 and, because they produce power without combustion, they produce near-zero nitrous oxides, sulfur oxides, and particulate matter.

The $1.5 million ERDC-CERL program will span twenty months and will support the scale-up of the EHS technology and establish readiness for a field demonstration.

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