The Bloom Box: robbing the air of oxygen for cheap electricity

The following is from Aug 30, 2010. These Bloom Boxes are being set up all over the world, as a cheep source of electricity. Like anything generating heat or other power, it eats oxygen. But is this artificial production help to disrupt the global balance of O2 and CO2?

It’s an interesting story to revisit with the stories of massive bird-and-fish kills.

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These Bloom Boxes are getting a lot of attention, especially after 60 Minutes did a feature on Bloom Energy and their boxes. The $700,000 to $800,000 needed to buy the Boxes can be a wonderful investment for a business in the long run — especially if the business eats a lot of power.

Google, FedEx, Walmart, Staples, and Ebay are among the big name companies that use the boxes. The connection is a simple as using a forklift to park the Boxes and then, according to a Bloom Energy employee in one of CBS’s Web exclusive clips. “[The forklift] brings the box up and it gets guided into place and as we lift it into place, we’re gonna make three simple mechanical connections and connect the box and start it up.” Easy!

This is indeed a great market-driven answer to less expensive energy, and it is a fairly clean and green answer. But there is one thing that bugs me, and that one thing seems to be very “non-green.” In fact, that one thing is damn deadly for all of us.

The Bloom Boxes eat oxygen.

This is a machine that requires a small investment of energy, and provides a great return of energy in the form of electricity. What gets my attention is this: it soaks up oxygen as it produces electricity. Check this out, from Christian Science Monitor:

In case you’ve not read how the Bloom Box system works, each “power plant-in-a-box” come chock full of thin fuel cells, bundled and packaged into an outdoor-safe case.

The individual cells soak up oxygen on one side, “and fuel on the other. The two combine within the cell to create a chemical reaction that produces electricity,” reported CBS last night. “There’s no need for burning or combustion” but it still requires some form of fuel to work. What kind is up to the owner.

“Our system can use fossil fuels like natural gas. Our system can use renewable fuels like landfill gas, bio-gas,” Sridhar says. “We can use solar.”

This is an energy generator that soaks up oxygen, but depending on what additional fuel is used, it doesn’t always emit carbon dioxide? How does this not dramatically unbalance the ecosystem?

Continue reading, from the original post at DATELINE ZERO.