The primary mission of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy (FE) is to ensure the nation can continue to rely on its indigenous fossil fuel resources for clean, secure, and affordable energy. A component of that effort is the Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC) Program, administered by FE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL). The SOFC Program is committed to: developing efficient, low-cost electricity from natural gas or coal with intrinsic carbon capture capabilities for distributed generation and central power generation applications; maintaining cell development and core technology research to increase the reliability, robustness, and durability of cell, stack, and system technology; and providing the technology base to permit cost-competitive distributed generation applications. The program recently initiated two focused efforts: addressing cell and system reliability and an Innovative Concepts initiative.

Based on feedback from several program participants, chromium contamination of cathode was identified as a major contributor to performance degradation and reduced system reliability. NETL has launched an initiative to address the issue of chromium contamination. The SOFC Program portfolio presently has 13 projects addressing this critical issue.

The SOFC Program is also funding an Innovative Concepts initiative that supports the research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) of SOFC technology that has the potential to surpass current anode supported planar SOFC technology in terms of cost and reliability. Program participants are developing novel cell and stack architectures and/or material sets. This next-generation SOFC technology development in the near-term includes nominally 5-10 kWe-scale stack tests using cells envisioned in the developer’s future commercial systems.

The status of these strategically oriented research programs, along with the status of the program’s integrated systems tests and the roadmap to deploy a MWe-class natural gas-fueled distributed generation system, will be presented.