An engineer from the Japanese electronics company Hitachi showed what is now possible should you be out and about, the mobile phone, the laptop and the personal organiser all having run out of juice. Gone, he explained, are the days of crawling behind airport pot-plants and groping for a mains socket.

He produced from his pocket a plastic canister of liquid gas slightly smaller than a cigarette lighter, and plugged it into a metallic box slightly larger than a packet of cigarettes.

Powered by the miniature fuel cell, which will be on sale in about 18 months, any three of the machines will happily run for the length of a short-haul flight. 

Nearby, a toy train was running round and round a track. The carriage it was pulling contained a different sort of fuel cell that runs directly on compressed hydrogen gas.
On a tiny 60cc “tank” of hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, the fuel-cell train can continue its journey for more than three hours. Nearby were cars, scooters, wheelchairs and aircraft propellers running on exactly the same principle.

These demonstrations were among hundreds at the first Fuel-Cell Expo, held in Japan where engineers are the acknowledged leaders in the fiercely contested global race to develop clean, cheap, limitless sources of power. The promise of fuel cells has built steadily over the years: sporadic breakthroughs in fuel cell size and efficiency have made the anticipation even more intense.

Vehicles have always appeared the obvious application for the technology, but the message of the convention was clear: as gadgets from iPods to mobile phones become more complicated, their power demands would be greater and batteries would never be up to the task. Fuel cells work on the principle that hydrogen, when passed through a carefully engineered “proton exchange” membrane, will split into its constituent positive and negatively charged ions. The difference between these charges creates an electrical current on demand.

Unlike batteries, there is no “charge” to run down. As long as the cell is provided with the appropriate source of hydrogen, either directly or by splitting a chemical like methanol with plenty of hydrogen in it, it will deliver power and emit only water as a by-product. Unfortunately, the neat science has long been obstructed by complicated engineering problems. Making the cells durable, light, efficient and from materials that normal people can afford has been a puzzle that has globally absorbed billions of pounds in research.
Until on Friday convention a mixture of layman’s scepticism and corporate secrecy meant that the world had never properly seen how far the concept had progressed. The effect of this sudden slew of fuel cells in working order surprised many: they have come so far that the technology is no longer the preserve of highly specialised companies unknown to the public.

Household brands are now in on the act. Casio makes a fuel cell so small it will fit inside a mobile phone and Bic has realised that its mastery of making disposable gas lighters puts it in a unique position to make disposable fuel cell cartridges. Filling stations are arguing about international standards in hydrogen nozzles for fuel-cell cars.

“You can feel the sense of this technology being ready at last,” said Tom Shaw, director of a company whose graphite plates are critical in Honda’s revolutionary fuel-cell car. “Certainly there are still technological issues to overcome, but we are starting to reach the point where the biggest hurdles to fuel cells may be political rather than scientific,” he said

Japan, a country with extremely scarce natural resources and which relies on imports for all its oil, is considering even wider use of fuel-cell technology than other countries.

One of the latest plans is from Sekisui House to market houses with home-use fuel cells in Tokyo from March. The cells, about the size of a refrigerator, will power the entire home from the gas mains. So in the future even homes may come with the warning: Batteries not included.