University Unveils Method to Turn Ethanol into Hydrogen

Pioneer Press ^ | Thu, Feb. 12, 2004 | DENNIS LIEN

[hoosierham]

TESLA was the genius behind Alternating Current; Edison stubbornly insisted Direct Current was better.

[templar]

what're the waste products?

Shouldn't be anything but CO2 and Water.

[secretagent]

Tax breaks are different than subsidies.

The former term has two words, while the latter has only one, making the latter more energy efficient.

[nightdriver]

So what's the advantage? You start with a fuel, invest a lot of energy in it and have another fuel?

Sorta looks like the contemporary practice of natural gas-fired gas turbine engines driving electric generators. They take enough gas to warm 100 homes and convert it into enough electricity to warm 40 homes.

Wah-hoo! What an accomplishment! (/sarc.)

[hoosierham]

Americans CHOOSE to be at the mercy of foreign energy suppliers by insisting on limiting energy development in the U.S., by driving vehicles that are oversized and overpowered for the task at hand, by keeping their ENTIRE home either cooled to 65 in the summer or heated to 75 in the winter (while being hostile to those who design homes to take advantage of natural heating/cooling),and by electing or tolerating planners who zone such that everyone MUST travel mechanically to work,shop, or play.

[dpwiener]

Maybe i am missing something on all the hate for ethanol?

I don't think it's hatred for ethanol per se. It just a negative reaction to what appears to be a major scam. Ethanol is only economical if you include the huge agricultural subsidies and special tax breaks that other energy sources are denied. This mainly benefits Archer-Daniels-Midland, which pours plenty of money into buying off politicians promoting ethanol production and enacting regulations requiring its addition to gasoline.

The worst part of this scam is that there is a strong argument (which Cornell University scientist David Pimentel has advanced) that it takes more energy to produce ethanol than that ethanol contains. In other words, ethanol is a net energy loser. Obviously the ethanol industry has attempted to rebut Pimentel, and others have in turn attempted to rebut the rebuttal.

So it's hard to get excited about a method of turning ethanol into hydrogen. If ethanol itself is of questionable economic value, taking the addition step (and the additional expense) of converting it to hydrogen doesn't solve that underlying problem even if hydrogen can power a car more efficiently than ethanol.

[reg45]

Every county, town and home could build its own still!

Imagine hillbillies as energy barons!

[Rockitz]

Yet, there still may be storage advantages to ethanol that would ultimately make this technology viable.

[Free Vulcan]

"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."

This is a huge point. Anhydrous or 100% ethanol is expensive to produce because it takes alot of heat to get out that last 5% of water. 90-95% ethanol is radically cheaper to produce, far cheaper than gasoline. Add to that the higher conversion ratio, and you should have a winner, if this technology can be proven on a practical scale.

[Moonman62]

Alternating current and the power grid, Radio, Television, Radar, electonics, most all of our modern technology.

Yes, he contributed some fundamental inventions to those fields, but it took other people to turn them into mass markets.

For instance, he was right about alternating current, but he wanted to transmit power through the air rather than wires. And other people who wanted to transmit information rather than power through the air came up with another useful market, while Tesla was burning through other people's money.

Had Tesla stuck to inventing, rather than trying to show how superior he was to everyone else, especially business people, he would be more well known today.

[Straight Vermonter]

Leave corn in a silo and it produces its own ethanol. Its called fermentation.

[StevieB]

Although I risk incuring the wrath of the anti-ethanol crowd around here, I think this could be a very valuable technology if they can get it to work. Once we have a technology that decreases our potential dependence on foreign oil, we can start looking at ways of producing ethanol more efficiently.

About a year ago I saw a presentation on a project (at the Idaho National Laboratories) that is looking at approaches for capturing the sugars in the straw left in the fields when grains are harvested. Currently over half the weight of the straw is "fermentable materials." Harvesting this will involve designing new combines and coming up with new fermentation techniques (i.e., they are working on adapting technologies currently used in the sugar beet refining industry). They are also investigating ways of creating grain stocks that generate more sugars in the stalk.

There is no guarentee that their approach will succeed, but I like the creative thinking going into the process. Just think, the energy source that pumps the future economy of this country may today be laying in the fields in the Dakotas!

[Rodney King]

There is a lot more to it than just letting it sit in a vat.

[XBob]

41 - "TESLA was the genius behind Alternating Current; Edison stubbornly insisted Direct Current was better."

There seems to be some substance to this argument, since Edison's original light bulbs in his lab are still burning, without interruption some 80+ years later.

[edwin hubble]

"...the most abundant, naturally occurring element in the universe" does not occur in elemental form naturally on Earth.

That seems like an irony. Hydrogen is not an energy source in that sense at all, but a temporary storage medium. (like electricity moving on a wire).

We make it.
We use it.
We make more.

It just burns clean. Water vapor is the product of combustion.

[expatpat]

I thought it took more energy to produce ethanol from corn than it releases when burned.

[expatpat]

Yeah, I remember several years ago someone pointing out that, if they didn't exist already, gas stations would now be totally unacceptable on street corners near residential and commercial areas.

[stylin19a]

beautiful.....how many silos are needed to produce enough ethanol for these guys to convert it into hydrogen for the purpose of powering cars ?

[Doctor Stochastic]

Weight is still a problem. Ethanol is C2H5OH thus giving at best 6 gm hyrrogen from 48 gms ethanol. The far more energetic carbon-oxygen combustion from the ethanol is being wasted here. Why not just burn the ethanol (externally) to power a steam car?

Hydrogen seems to attract scientifically illerate politicians.

[m18436572]

Actually, that's relatively good efficiency.
Bigger the better!