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.’’
Shouldn't be anything but CO2 and Water.
The former term has two words, while the latter has only one, making the latter more energy efficient.
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.)
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.
Imagine hillbillies as energy barons!
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.
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!
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