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As follow up to our posting of Orja Protonics of March 18 Oorja Protonics Emerges and Raises the Stakes hereunder is their latest press release of April 14 anouncing a demonstration :

Oorja Announces First Public Demonstration of Ultra-Powerful New Methanol Fuel Cell for Material Handling Vehicles
Oorja Protonics CEO to Unveil OorjaPac^TM at NA2008 in Cleveland, Ohio April 21-24
FREMONT, California (April 14, 2008) Oorja Protonics, the industry leaders in ultra-powerful Direct Methanol Fuels Cells (DMFCs) will give the first public showing of their innovative OorjaPac^TM on-board battery charging system for the material handling industry.
The press conference at noon on Tuesday April, 22 in Cleveland’s IX Center Press Room will be the first public opportunity to hear Oorja’s CEO, Sanjiv Malhotra, PhD discuss the breakthrough technologies in these powerful new fuel cells. The fuel cell will be demonstrated at the press conference and at the Oorja booth #2639. OorjaPac will also be shown at NA 08 in conjunction with FMC Technologies and MHD Green Energy Solutions. Oorja Protonics is expected to make a big splash with this green technology at this year’s NA 2008 show hosted by the Material Handling Industry of America (MHIA).
“It made perfect sense for us to publicly display OorjaPac^TM for the first time at NA08 which is a leading expo for the material handling industry” said Sanjiv Malhotra, Founder and CEO of Oorja. “The NA08 show provides us with the ideal platform for demonstrating the value associated with onboard charging and address any technical questions on OorjaPac^TM.”
OorjaPac^TM is a breakthrough onboard charging system for forklifts, pallet loaders, and other material handling vehicles and charges their batteries both while they operate and under idling conditions. OorjaPac^TM addresses a number of critical problems faced by the material handling vehicle users. These include:
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Low runtime with batteries on a single charge, resulting in the need to purchase and maintain multiple batteries per vehicle and conduct battery swaps in order to get through one full day of operation
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Significant vehicle and labor downtime during non productive activities such as battery swapping, resulting in reduced operational productivity
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Reduced battery life due to inadequate charging and cooling processes
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High operational costs associate with the incumbent approach, namely maintaining real estate for battery swapping/charging rooms and the labor associated with the battery swapping process
Operating as an onboard battery charger, OorjaPac^TM addresses all of these concerns and provides a compelling ROI. For example, when installed onboard Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) in a pilot program with a global automotive OEM, OorjaPac^TM was able to deliver a savings of 82% in time - or 431 minutes of operation per vehicle, per week. The net result was a substantial increase in productivity and reduction in both capital and operational expenditure.

[~Mar~~18~]

Oorja Protonics emerges and raises the stakes

Direct Methanol Fuel Cells (DFMC) that claim to be ten to a hundred times more powerful than the existant!

No, it doesn’t appear to be blue sky, this would be the fifth generation developed and deployed with industrial end users since 2005 as a self contained retrofits for material handling vehicles like pallet loaders, tuggers, and automated guided vehicles. Oorja Protonics’s fuel cells are retrofitted into the battery compartment to operate as an on-board battery charger that continuously charges the smaller battery that appears to function as an energy storage buffer.

If our hopes of seeing a fuel cell crossover from the automotive sector to the marine recreational market were faded with recent announcements by GM and Toyota, perhaps we will see the migration from industrial applications such as materials handling equipment. Considering such equipment can weigh several tons, constantly demanding torque effort for traction and hydraulics, the simple math “guestimate” appears encouraging when preliminary data shows two full eight hour shifts for five gallons of methanol - less than a litre an hour. Try that with a 50 to 75 hp Yanmar or Volvo diesel, oversized to compensate for low torque at low RPM range at which sailors usually motor.

Borrowing from the company’s press release as published on Business Wire, “Oorja’s direct methanol fuel cells are novel in that they eliminate the barriers associated with hydrogen fuel cell adoption, namely the high price of compressed hydrogen gas, lack of hydrogen supply infrastructure, and hydrogen’s inherent volatility as a fuel source. Methanol is a much better alternative to hydrogen fuel cells due to its low cost, ready availability, and greatly reduced volatility.”

Already some weeks ago I was wondering on this blog what ever happened to the Daimler Chrysler’s NECAR 5 which as early as 2002 made a trip from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., the first attempt to drive a methanol charged fuel-cell-powered car cross-country. The car had to be refueled about every 300 miles. Again wondering about China’s push towards methanol as an alternative energy (leading world producer).

But today’s announcements of Oorja Protonics was but one response, add to this the EU-funded METHAPU (‘Validation of renewable methanol based auxiliary power systems for commercial vessels’) project, which after nearly one and a half years of research and development, is about to start trials on a prototype of a methanol-based solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) unit (imagine the Violet Fuel Cell Stick). The protoype will be tried and tested for performance and emissions under real-life conditions onboard a car transport vessel involved in international trade.

Oorja Protonics appears to be well prepared for a major push into the market, “while many hydrogen fuel cell providers are still developing their technology”, says CEO Sanjiv Malhotrahe “the OorjaPac is tested and ready for use. We are not selling an R&D dream, this is a full commercial solution we are selling.” Oorja Protonics is funded by venture capital firms Sequoia Capital (the main backer of YouTube) and DAG Ventures and others and plans to announce a major contract with a Tier I automotive manufacturing company very shortly.
Founded by Sanjiv Malhotra, for more than ten years he has been at the forefront of commercial development of alternative power generation and storage technologies. Early in his career as a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories in Berkeley California, he worked on pioneering developments with Zinc-Air batteries. In addition to his technical skills, he went on to take H-Power, a leading fuel cell company, public in August of 2000 and was also a senior executive at another prominent fuel cell company DCH Technologies. Before founding Oorja he was a consultant with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (who we have identified as backing other energy startups of great promise, notably EEStor and Ausra) where he assisted its venture partners with due diligence for energy related investment opportunities.

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