Posted on 02/12/2004 4:53:51 PM PST by wallcrawlr
University of Minnesota scientists have figured out an efficient way to capture hydrogen from ethanol, a development that could provide a simultaneous boost to efforts to create a “hydrogen economy’’ and the state’s ethanol industry.
The discovery, outlined in the Feb. 13 issue of Science magazine, appears to remove a key obstacle in the effort to reduce society’s dependence on imported fuels such as gasoline and natural gas.
Even though hydrogen is the most common element on earth, the process of isolating it has been costly, dirty and energy consuming, thereby limiting its appeal.
Enter Lanny Schmidt, Regents professor of chemical engineering at the university, and two assistants, Gregg Deluga and graduate student James Salge.
Over the past year, they’ve built a reactor that converts ethanol, a renewable corn-based product produced in 14 plants statewide, into hydrogen. That, in turn, can be used to power a fuel cell, a battery-like device that converts hydrogen and oxygen into electricity and heat.
Schmidt said the reactor can be built small enough to hold in a hand and could in five or more years provide electricity for houses, lighted billboards, and air-conditioning units in vehicles.
Eventually, he said, it could be used as an alternative fuel source in automobiles, as well as for decentralized power systems. “Every county or town could build its own local power system rather than having to have a megaplant,’’ Schmidt said.
The scientists accomplished the breakthrough by making two adjustments to a process already used to extract hydrogen from methane, natural gas and gasoline.
The first was altering the composition of a material that acted as a catalyst to convert the ethanol into hydrogen. The second was using an automotive fuel injector that vaporizes an ethanol-water mix.
“We really don’t understand why the catalyst works so very well,’’ said Deluga, who suggested the ceria option after reading about its properties’
Asked how he happened to focus on it, he said, “I just had an inkling it might work.’’
“He (Deluga) said it was brilliance,’’ Schmidt said jokingly. “I said it was a wild guess.’’
The effort was not without complications. For a long time, the project was plagued by fires in the reactor, but that problem eventually was solved.
“We were kind of surprised nobody had done it previously,’’ Schmidt explained. “But after you look at it, we see why people may have tired and given up.’’
Private industries, he said, have a keen interest in hydrogen technology and can be expected to expand on the technology’s opportunities and options.
The most obvious immediate boost, Schmidt said, is to the state’s ethanol industry, which relies on homegrown corn. Its energy content, he said, is similar to other fossil fuels such as natural gas.
“Someone made the line up that Minnesota is the Saudia Arabia of renewable products,’’ he said. “We could supply the energy needs of the country from the Upper Midwest.’’
The discovery comes as Minnesota and the rest of nation escalates efforts to make hydrogen more feasible as a power source.
President Bush, for example, has made widespread use of hydrogen fuel cells the centerpiece of his energy plan.
The Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, meanwhile, recently submitted a report to the Legislature examining ways to develop a hydrogen economy in Minnesota. In the report, it argues the technology should be developed across the state, where renewable resources such as ethanol are immediately accessible, rather than in specific, targeted enterprise areas.
In its most elementary form, the university’s process works this way: Ethanol is fed through a fuel injector, vaporized and heated, and then converted by a rhodium-ceria catalyst into hydrogen, which can then be fed to a fuel cell to produce electricity.
One of the benefits of converting ethanol into hydrogen for fuel cells, Schmidt and Deluga said, is improved energy efficiency. A bushel of corn, they said, yields three times as much power if its energy is channeled into hydrogen fuel cells rather than burned along with gasoline.
“Ethanol in car engines is burned with 20 percent efficiency, but if you used ethanol to make hydrogen for a fuel cell, you would get 60 percent efficiency,’’ Schmidt said.
The reason, Deluga said, is because all water must be removed from ethanol before it can be put into a gas tank. But he said the new process, which strips hydrogen from both ethanol and water, doesn’t require such a pure form of ethanol.
The work was funded in part by the University of Minnesota’s Initiative on Renewable Energy and the Environment, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy.
Schmidt and Deluga said the university can be proud of the accomplishment.
“The university wants to be, can be, and is in a position to make a major impact in this long-term solution,’’ Schmidt said. “It’s a long-term solution to a lot of problems in Minnesota.’’
That exactly what makes the potential of the fuel cell so intriguing. On the spot power generation with little (if any) pollution and the very high efficiency of electric motors. The battery approach is almost a hundred years old and hans't proven useful, or cost efficient, so far: Batteries will never work, but fuel cells have the potential to do most of the things we have unsuccessfully been trying to do with batteries for a hundred years.
First of all, you are relocating the pollution, not eliminating it. Fuel cells make a lot of sense if 1) you don't have cheap, abundant fossil fuels and/or 2) you have cheap, abundant nuclear energy. 2) could make 1) irrelevant, but the very greenies who supposedly care about the environment canned 2).
And touting the efficiency of the electric motor is misleading. You have to look at the efficiency of the entire energy life cycle. There is a very simple way to do this: Look at the price for one shaft horsepower from a fuel celled electric car vs one shaft horsepower for an IC engine car. Do that and you will find out why nobody is selling fuel celled cars.
Now your response will be that nobody has looked into the technology of fuel cells or spent the money required to improve it, and that is just ignorant. The problem is in the conversion from one form of energy to another. An IC engine turns chemical energy into mechanical energy with an efficiency of 25%.
For a fuel celled car, you first have to convert chemical energy into electrical (at the power plant), then electrical back into chemical (producing the hydrogen), then chemical back to electrical (the fuel cell), then electrical to mechanical (the motor).
The battery approach is almost a hundred years old and hans't proven useful, or cost efficient, so far: Batteries will never work, but fuel cells have the potential to do most of the things we have unsuccessfully been trying to do with batteries for a hundred years.
Batteries are useful and cost efficient for many things, more so than fuel cells or we would be using fuel cells rather than batteries.
Price reflects reality much more accurately than utopian fantasies ever will.
No that wouldn't have been my response. Stating another persons response for them in advance, and calling it ignorant in the process, is quite an ignorant thing to do though. And just when I thought you were actually trying to engage in intelligent discussion. No need to go any farther down this line.
Bye.
Easy way to bow out of a discussion you are losing: "You wounded me!" I just preempted your argument.
Others have explained the ethanol racket, so I'll address the hydrogen absurdity. (And maybe someone else has already addressed this too, I haven't read the whole thread yet.)
If the goal is cheap hydrogen, using clean, economical production, the only method that makes sense is to crack H2O using nuclear plants.
But, that is politically incorrect. It's so doubleplusunpc that we'd apparently rather have the whole country collapse due to extortion from the oil sheikhs than to build a series of nuke plants to crack water into fuel -- and, for a nearly free bonus, desalinate seawater for municipal supplies and irrigation, taking care of another "issue" at the same time.
We can address another "issue" too (even if it's not a real issue), just by dumping the oxygen (left over after cracking the hydrogen out of the water) into the atmosphere. Put up some pretty billboards, "This Nuclear Plant Produces As Much Clean, Pure Oxygen as 500 Square Miles of Rainforest!"
Three simple words explain the problem: We are stupid.
Resolve that problem, and everything else becomes trivial.
See my last post. What we should do is build a series of nuclear plants, and use the power to crack hydrogen out of water, and, desalinate seawater for municipal supply and irrigation. We'd have energy independence, and a major increase in arable land. It's 100% upside, but, we allow ourselves to be held hostage by our domestic leftist greenies, just as we allow ourselves to be held hostage by the Arab oil sheikhs.
We are stupid, and we pay the price -- and the price of our stupidiy will continue increasing, until it finished us off.
Yes, we are that stupid.
Spare us the eurothink socialista agitprop, OK?
This is a free country. If I feel like buying my comfort, then I'll buy my comfort. If I feel like living in the country, and driving my car, rather than allow "the planners" to shoehorn me into an "urban center", and "public transportation", well, you get the idea.
Frankly, your kind of talk reminds me of the UN plan for this country -- "green belts", made of land taken from its owners, with humans crammed into planned urban centers.
As we say where I come from, F that S.
What sources of energy do we use right now to crack and distil crude oil? The answer is oil & gas. Seems a net wash to me if you get the same rate of BTUs out the back end as we currently do.
But you don't. The same amount of energy input does not produce the same amount of energy output.
The first was altering the composition of a material that acted as a catalyst to convert the ethanol into hydrogen. The second was using an automotive fuel injector that vaporizes an ethanol-water mix.
I have no idea if it is potentially viable, but I do expect that if we ever get to a hydrogen economy, it will be via chemical/biological processes.
I agree. If I can significantly lower or eliminate and electricity bill, and maybe by heating/gas bill then I'm all for it.
Minnesota already has a glut of ethanol, and corn, and if this creates a benefit to the farm communities even better.
I believe in appropiate use as in what you(or the country) can afford. Now it strikes me as stupid to ignore our own resources and then have to fight wars for others' resources. I'd rather have young Americans working in American nuclear power plants,American oil fields and refineries,American solar,wind,geothermal and research than dying for oil. And if it WASN'T for the oil we wouldn't give a hoot about the Muddle East.
Spare us your name-calling. Besides ,I voted for Bush,am a NRA lifer who DIDN'T resign when the phrase"jack-booted thugs" was used, and have been threatened by PETA-types for blocking their agenda.
There is only one currently-viable source of hydrogen that does not consume more fossil fuel -- nuclear power. But the environmentalists have shut it down in the US (although France generates most of their electricity via nuke).
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