University Unveils Method to Turn Ethanol into Hydrogen

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

[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.’’

[E.G.C.]

BTTT!!!!!

[Arkie2]

Americans choose to be dependant on foreign supplies of energy by failing to adequately develop our own resources by locking up ANWAR, large areas of the Gulf of Mexico and the East and West coast where large deposits of oil are known to be and placing restrictions on the use of coal. Americans feel good about the caribou and those on the coast don't have to look at the unsightly oilwells and that is apparently reason enough to place our country at the mercy of overseas suppliers.

[Axenolith]

The book doesn't really portray him or come across as anti-capitalist at all. It's just a good picture of the interactions of a brilliant man in days of the electrical equivalent of the internet.

Of course, he probably would have been more effective if he'd been employed at some type of Bell Labs type place where they put him in a warehouse, give him anything he wants and say "come up with neat stuff". For the genius, or the average scientist in general, running the research and the business at the same time often comes at odds.

[from occupied ga]

CU scientist terms corn-based ethanol 'subsidized food burning'

By Roger Segelken

Neither increases in government subsidies to corn-based ethanol fuel nor hikes in the price of petroleum can overcome what one Cornell agricultural scientist calls a fundamental input-yield problem: It takes more energy to make ethanol from grain than the combustion of ethanol produces.

At a time when ethanol-gasoline mixtures (gasohol) are touted as the American answer to fossil fuel shortages by corn producers, food processors and some lawmakers, Cornell's David Pimentel takes a longer range view.

"Abusing our precious croplands to grow corn for an energy-inefficient process that yields low-grade automobile fuel amounts to unsustainable, subsidized food burning," said the Cornell professor in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Pimentel, who chaired a U.S. Department of Energy panel that investigated the energetics, economics and environmental aspects of ethanol production several years ago, subsequently conducted a detailed analysis of the corn-to-car fuel process. His findings will be published next month in the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Physical Sciences and Technology.

Among his findings:

• An acre of U.S. corn yields about 7,110 pounds of corn for processing into 328 gallons of ethanol. But planting, growing and harvesting that much corn requires about 140 gallons of fossil fuels and costs $347 per acre, according to Pimentel's analysis. Thus, even before corn is converted to ethanol, the feedstock costs $1.05 per gallon of ethanol.

• The energy economics get worse at the processing plants, where the grain is crushed and fermented. As many as three distillation steps are needed to separate the 8 percent ethanol from the 92 percent water. Additional treatment and energy are required to produce the 99.8 percent pure ethanol for mixing with gasoline.

• Adding up the energy costs of corn production and its conversion to ethanol, 131,000 Btu are needed to make 1 gallon of ethanol. One gallon of ethanol has an energy value of only 77,000 Btu. "Put another way," Pimentel said, "about 70 percent more energy is required to produce ethanol than the energy that actually is in ethanol. Every time you make 1 gallon of ethanol, there is a net energy loss of 54,000 Btu."

• Ethanol from corn costs about $1.74 per gallon to produce, compared with about 95 cents to produce a gallon of gasoline. "That helps explain why fossil fuels -- not ethanol -- are used to produce ethanol," Pimentel said. "The growers and processors can't afford to burn ethanol to make ethanol. U.S. drivers couldn't afford it either, if it weren't for government subsidies to artificially lower the price."

• Most economic analyses of corn-to-ethanol production overlook the costs of environmental damages, which Pimentel says should add another 23 cents per gallon. "Corn production in the U.S. erodes soil about 12 times faster than the soil can be reformed, and irrigating corn mines groundwater 25 percent faster than the natural recharge rate of ground water. The environmental system in which corn is being produced is being rapidly degraded. Corn should not be considered a renewable resource for ethanol energy production, especially when human food is being converted into ethanol," Pimentel said.

• The approximately $1 billion a year in current federal and state subsidies (mainly to large corporations) for ethanol production are not the only costs to consumers, the Cornell scientist observes. Subsidized corn results in higher prices for meat, milk and eggs because about 70 percent of corn grain is fed to livestock and poultry in the United States. Increasing ethanol production would further inflate corn prices, Pimentel said, noting: "In addition to paying tax dollars for ethanol subsidies, consumers would be paying significantly higher food prices in the marketplace."

  Nickels and dimes aside, some drivers still would rather see their cars fueled by farms in the Midwest than by oil wells in the Middle East, Pimentel acknowledges, so he calculated the amount of corn needed to power an automobile:

• The average U.S. automobile, traveling 10,000 miles a year on pure ethanol (not a gasoline-ethanol mix), would need about 852 gallons of the corn-based fuel. This would take 11 acres to grow, based on net ethanol production. This is the same amount of cropland required to feed seven Americans.

• If all the automobiles in the United States were fueled with 100 percent ethanol, a total of about 97 percent of U.S. land area would be needed to grow the corn feedstock. Corn would cover nearly the total land area of the United States.

[templar]

It takes more energy to make ethanol from grain than the combustion of ethanol produces.

Unless there have been some really dramatic developments in physics lately that I missed, it also takes more energy to produce electricity at the local power plant than is generated as electricity and than is recovered in it's final application.

And why does ethanol have to be produced from corn only? Seems there are other crops available, and plenty of fermentable sugars are lost to waste products in the agricultural industry overall.

The whole thing seems to be centered around the use of highly efficient fuel cells for electricity production anyway, not highly inefficient IC engines using alternatives fuels. The fuel cell does not need to be run on ethanol, or methanol, or natural gas or gasoline (all of which could power it), it only needs a hydrogen input of some kind. Gaseous hydrogen is not necessarily the best fuel source for practical use at this time. The electric car, ignoring the power source, is far superior in every way to an IC powered car and would have a much lower overall cost to operate for it's lifetime than an equivalent IC powered car. The electric car also reduces the pollution of the vehicle to almost zero (which leads to the source of the fuel/power considerations).

Batteries have been the major stumbling blocks for electric vehicles since the first Baker rolled off the assembly line in 1908: Batteries are just too heavy, expensive, low powered, and take too long to recharge: Even the most advanced batteries.

The fuel cell seems to be the most promising technology on the horizon that offers the possibility of taking full advantage of the electric motor for vehicle design, and research into hydrogen sources to power electric vehicles is, IMO, a very valid pursuit, worthy of both public and private funding. I don't understand the almost blind hatred for hydrogen fuel cell technology that some people seem to have.

[templar]

Who cares about the Ethanol, why not just use water?

I think the wording in the statement is a bit misleading. If I understand it right, the device can get hydrogen from an ethanol/water mixture and doesn't require anhydrous ethanol other processes would. The water is basically being ignored, not used. The result is a whole lot less (energy consuming) processing of the ethanol than would otherwise be required, and no problem with trying to keep it anhydrous during storage and use.

[VOA]

bump

[from occupied ga]

Unless there have been some really dramatic developments in physics lately that I missed, it also takes more energy to produce electricity at the local power plant than is generated as electricity and than is recovered in it's final application.

I guess I miss how this is relevant to hydrogen as a fuel. Are you equating hydrogen to electricity?

And why does ethanol have to be produced from corn only?

Because it's the cheapest.

The electric car, ignoring the power source, is far superior in every way to an IC powered car and would have a much lower overall cost to operate for it's lifetime than an equivalent IC powered car.

You can't ignore the power source since the vehicle functions as a system. I presume that you have some sort of data to back up this literally fantastic statement. I would like a link, since it goes totally against everything that's happened in the electric car industry to date. The batteries alone which have to be replaced quite frequently cost as much as most small IC cars.

, a very valid pursuit, worthy of both public and private funding. I don't understand the almost blind hatred for hydrogen fuel cell technology that some people seem to have.

They don't hate it they're just educated enough to realize that the first and second laws of thermodynamics prove it's a total waste of resources anad it will always be a total waste of resources. Second law says that it will always take more fossil fuel to run a H2 car than you would use burning the fossil fuel directly. H2 and ethanol are just boondogles for funneling taxpayer money into unworthy corporate pockets. They are in effect perpetual motion scams. ADM's greedy grasping tentacles reach into the pockets of every taxpayer in the USA and provide no benefit to anyone except the stockholders and employees of ADM. (oh and of course to corrupt politicians like Bob Dole who front for them)

[wheels]

Wrong. Tesla was AC, Edison was DC.

[wheels]

Wrong. Tesla was AC, Edison was DC.

[wheels]

This Prof states that it takes 140 gallons of fossil fuel at a cost of $347 to harvest one acre of corn. I don't know where this farm is, but they better get out of the business right away. There is just no way these figures could be true. I have a feeling this Prof fudged the figures just to dump on the ethanol idea.

[templar]

Are you equating hydrogen to electricity?

Indirectly. The hydrogen involved here would be used to produce electricity at the point of use (vehicles, i.e.).

The batteries alone which have to be replaced quite frequently cost as much as most small IC cars.

I guess you missed the paragraph where I said "Batteries have been the major stumbling blocks for electric vehicles since the first Baker rolled off the assembly line in 1908: Batteries are just too heavy, expensive, low powered, and take too long to recharge: Even the most advanced batteries." ? That's why I went on to the use of fuel cells. Batteries are just no good for vehicles (submarines maybe, but not vehicles). BTW, there is also the consideration of all the total energy used to produce and operate the two types of vehicles, not just the micro scale look at the final energy use in driving the finished vehicles around town.

Electrics are far simpler, have only a fraction of the parts, weigh significantly less (making them more energy efficient and tearing up roads less) and last substantially longer without repair or maintenance (how often do you need to change the oil in your car, or lawnmower, and have it maintained vs how often do you even bother to think about that motor in your furnace blower as a practical example). Since fuel cells aren't being used currently, the overall evaluation of the energy used in it's production and lifespan is not avaialble to discuss.

Second law says that it will always take more fossil fuel to run a H2 car than you would use burning the fossil fuel directly.

I don't consider corn, waste straw, other agricultural and farm waste to be fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are only being considered in my statement in their possible use in fuel cells (natural gas, gasoline) where they would be used about three or four times as efficiently as in IC engines. And I'm no scientist, but I've never heard of fossil fuels being mentioned in the second law. I was under impression that the second law was the one about everything moving to a lower, not higher, state. Are fossil fuels somehow not subject to the same laws, depending on how they are being used, as everything else and therefore specifically mentioned? Do you also oppose the conversion of fossil fuels into electricity for the same reasons?

[templar]

. I have a feeling this Prof fudged the figures just to dump on the ethanol idea.

I have a feeling you are right. I also have a feeling the he thinks that farmers are so stupid, and American industry so regressive, that farm vehicles and equipment would continue running on fossil fuels long after everything else was converted to some form of ethanol use.

No wonder our Nation is starting to fall behind the rest of the world with people like this teaching our young, and supposedly educated people not seeing through him.

[aruanan]

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 formula is: Ethanol + Lots of taxpayer $$$$ = Hydrogen.

Man, you said it! First, we have to pay for the farming of fuel stock crops, then for the making of the ethanol, then for the refining of the ethanol into hydrogen. After that comes the BIG money of storing hydrogen, making vehicles big enough for the giant fuel tank required or eliminating passenger and cargo space to accomodate the larger fuel tank, creating all the new hydrogen gas stations, changing the insurance structure to allow for the vastly increased danger of using hydrogen fuel.

Of course, if we were allowed to build nuclear power plants with breeder reactors, we could generate enough cheap electricity to make having to use ethanol as a hydrogen source completely unnecessary and go directly to dissociation of water molecules. But Archer Daniels Midland wouldn't like that. And even if that were possible, it still wouldn't solve the problems of using hydrogen as fuel.

[from occupied ga]

I guess you missed the paragraph where I said "...

Nope I read it. I guess you missed where I said You can't ignore the power source since the vehicle functions as a system.

Electrics ... weigh significantly less (making them more energy efficient and tearing up roads less)

Absolutely false. Electric motors are much heavier per hp produced than IC motors. I have a 7.5 hp electric motor 3ph that I had to replace a bearing on. The motor was nearly 200 lb. I helped a friend take his lawn tractor motor out (8hp I think) and I could lift it without much trouble, but I had to have help with the electric motor.

I don't consider corn, waste straw, other agricultural and farm waste to be fossil fuels.

These things require fossil fuel to produce so they are just another unnecessary step on the way from fossil fuel to work done (transportation)

And I'm no scientist, but I've never heard of fossil fuels being mentioned in the second law.

2nd law applies to everything. It boils down that every time you convert from one form of energy to another you lose some energy to entropy. 1000 kcal of diesel converts to less than 1000 kcal of ethanol even with the sunlight adding energy to the system. Say 800 kcal. The 800 will necessarily convert to less than 800 of H2 say 80% efficient so you're down to 640 kcal. The fuel cell will convert it to electricity at say at 80% efficiency. Now you're down to 512 kcal. Your electricity won't go 100% into work done by the motor, let's us 80% again even though I'm fairly certain that the efficiency isn't this high. now you're down to 410 kcal of useful work. It's nothing new. This concept was explored in the '70s and even published in Science magazine. It's just that political hog feeding has totally distorted the reality on this one. Sort of like global warming. junk science, but lots of plundered taxpayer money for the hogs.

[nightdriver]

"They should put a municiple thermal depolymerization plant on it...."

How much would such a unit cost? It seems to me that having a ready fuel supply would be worth it's weight in gold.

I think your idea is ultimate times more worthy than just trashing the plant.

[from occupied ga]

100 hp electric motor specs

[Redcloak]

Sooooooooo.......we spent money to turn a difficult-to-produce, man-made fuel into the most abundant, naturally occurring element in the universe?

Suweet.

Teasing aside, it isn't the abundance that's the issue but the availability. Aluminum is the most abundant metal in the Earth's crust; but, it's always found as bauxite. Until a process was developed to efficiently extract aluminum from bauxite, aluminum was thought of as a precious metal.

Just as aluminum nuggets were a rarity, so to is pure hydrogen. Until now, pure hydrogen was usually obtained by dumping energy into water. Thus the hydrogen wasn't so much an energy source as an inefficient energy storage device and all the talk of hydrogen fueled cars was pie-in-the-sky. An efficient, catalytic process changes the game.

I've been fascinated by the idea of hydrogen powered vehicles for a while, though not for the same reasons the Greenies are. In fact, they'd scream in horror at my reasoning. I hunt. Because of that, I need a dreaded SUV. (There's something about getting stuck out in the boonies that really ruins a weekend!) A hydrogen powered SUV would be a very interesting thing.

Hydrogen is most efficiently used to drive fuel cells to produce electricity. A hydrogen fueled SUV would thus have electric motors on all four wheels. Why would this interest me? Because such a vehicle would be stealthy. It wouldn't produce stinky exhaust. It would be quiet. In other words, I could sneak into hunting areas without alerting every animal for ten miles. On top of that, if I ran out of fuel, solar cells and a battery could drive the vehicle in a pinch.

And to top it all off, such a "green SUV" already exists! The DoD has been experimenting with just such a "stealth" vehicle. Just imagine the horrified looks the tree and bunny huggers (though not psycho bunny huggers, of course) would have at a hydrogen powered SUV developed partly by the Bush military as it hauled Bambi's dressed carcass out of the woods. It brings a tear to my eye just thinking about it.

[dennisw]

The formula is: Ethanol + Lots of taxpayer $$$$ = Hydrogen.

Dumb dumb dumb. Ethanol comes from corn grown with huge petroleum inputs for machinery (ie tractors) and fertilizer.

[FourtySeven]

Actually, as an aside, to all those who are so "gung ho" about fuel cells and the "clean" water vapor they produce as waste:

Everyone (the liberal enviro whackos) is so up in arms about CO2 and how it's a "greenhouse gas", yet water vapor is a pretty good "greenhouse gas" itself!

I find this fact particularly amusing when fuel cells are touted as the "solution" to the greenhouse gas "problem" we have today.