Scientists develop new hydrogen reactor | CNN

[Ediacara]

Scientists develop new hydrogen reactor

Friday, February 13, 2004 Posted: 12:19 PM EST (1719 GMT)


Professor Lanny Schmidt stands near
an autothermal chemical reactor that
he says converts ethanol into hydrogen.

MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota (AP) -- Researchers say they have produced hydrogen from ethanol in a prototype reactor small enough and efficient enough to heat small homes and power cars.

The development could help open the way for cleaner-burning technology at home and on the road.

Current methods of producing hydrogen from ethanol require large refineries and copious amounts of fossil fuels, the University of Minnesota researchers said.

The reactor is a relatively tiny 2-foot-high apparatus of tubes and wires that creates hydrogen from corn-based ethanol. A fuel cell, which acts like a battery, then generates power.

More at CNN

[rogerashton]

1. Great news, no doubt,

but I shudder a little to think of the transportation network.

[lastknowngood]

2. Texaco will buy it up and shelve it like they have every

alternate fuel source. There will be no get out of oil card for Merica as long as they run the world energy supply. They need to publish every detail so it can be made at home all over the world that is the only way they stay safe. You will in all likelihood never hear from these scientists again.

[Vogon_Glory]

3. My Fear Too, But I Hope I'm Wrong

I'm also afraid that some petroleum company will buy up the patents and designs for this device and bury the specs in some dark, quiet place, extracting them only to file patent infringement lawsuits when some other inventor independently discovers the principles and techniques by which this reactor works. I hope I'm wrong, though, or that corporate executives who could do such a thing stay lazy and complacent for just a bit too long.

This hydrogen reactor design wouldn't just be a heaven-send for the USA. There are a lot of places in eastern Europe, for example, that import most of their energy supplies from other places--notably the Ukraine and Belarus. Argentina also could use the process for supplementing its own energy needs, as could Brazil. Growing plant stocks for ethanol conversion would be a great boost to the agricultural sectors of Cuba, Jamaica, and other places where world sugar prices have shut down a lot of sugar mills and plantations.

[depakid]

5. Patents only last seven years

so even if some nefarious company did purchase the patents, they couldn't bury them for long. Moreover, once filed they become "prior art," which is a matter of public record and searchable by anyone with a little money and knowhow.

[Bozola]

4. Odd...

Researchers say they have produced hydrogen from ethanol in a prototype reactor small enough and efficient enough to heat small homes and power cars.

Hydrogen does not emit any pollution or greenhouse gases. But unlike oil or coal, hydrogen must be produced -- there are no natural stores of it waiting to be pumped or dug out of the ground.


CNN is a bit sloppy placing this boilerplate in this article. Though hydrogen is non-chemically polluting {you still have thermal pollution); hydrogen from ethanol is polluting, to a certain extent.

C2H5OH -> H2? Where does the Carbon and Oxygen go?

I always liked the solar hydrogen from water cell developed back in 1983. It's too bad they never got the efficiency up to anything commercially usable.

[jmowreader]

6. An alternate equation...

C2H5OH->C, H2 and O2.

The carbon (as carbon black) goes into some sort of a catch bin. Carbon black is a salable product, so by turning your carbon black in you'll receive a small discount on your next fill-up. Or you could accumulate it in a garbage can and sell it to a tire company or an ink maker.

The hydrogen is why you're performing the reaction in the first place, so you accumulate that in some sort of vessel then pump it into the car. For this you'll need a compressor.

Offgassing the oxygen makes the most sense--it's like having your own mechanical tree.

[Occulus]

13. So you're saying...

this design could actually reverse the damage done by greenhouse gases if used over time?

[jmowreader]

14. If they were able to capture CO2, then yeah

But to do it they'd have to react methanol, not ethanol.

Methanol is made from wood, and you can make good methanol from poplar--the fastest growing tree. Plant a lot of poplar, let it grow for a couple of years then make methanol from it.

If you get the CO2 out of the air, and poplars will do that, you solve a lot of the problems of greenhouse gas emissions.


The only thing I'm wondering: Alcohols are made by distillation, which requires lots of heat. How do you keep this from being another distant-pollution problem? Here I'm referring to electric cars--not hybrids but ones with no fueled engine--whose electricity comes from polluting power plants. A fermentation process wouldn't do it alone, because the organisms that do the fermentation die at high alcohol concentrations. Some sort of catalytic process for converting methane into hydrogen would be more friendly as far as air pollution goes, and you can capture the heat for other uses--people in Berlin buy steam for heating, so raw heat is salable--but you're still stuck with needing a source of methane. Cow shit, maybe? Tap landfills? Both would work. (Then again, if you use methane as your base material you don't get the opportunity to offgas oxygen.)

[Paulie]

17. Cow and Pig waste maybe?

You tank it instead of lagoon it, and then heat pump the atmosphere to generate the power needed by processing pre/post products. Fertilizer as a result, and if it's tanked, it can't enter the water supply. Psyteria won't be happy. :D

Unless the processing is onsite of the animal farming, you're going to expend lots of energy in transport of the bulk mass, let alone the products of generation.

This would work best with factory animal farms, so the small organic producer will be at a a marked disadvantage, unless used only for their own power/fuel needs....

Tricky all the way around.

[Lizz612]

8. There is also a problem with ethanol production.

Ethanol is a very stinky process that uses copious amounts of water. In rural areas with state of the art facilities they still end up messing up the water table something fierce. There are also some nasty VOCs produced.

This is good news for hydrogen cells, but the whole process needs to be looked at.

[DemSigns]

7. Some more info-links

Gives off CO2 but the fuel cell portion is 60% eff. compared to 20% when burned in gasoline.

http://www.nature.com/nsu/040209/040209-13.html
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/nation/7949741.htm

Another look at figuring out photosynthesis to crack water:
http://www.solaraccess.com/news/story?storyid=6100

[DemonFighterLives]

16. Thanks for the links!

Anything to get away from oil wars is a good thing.
:kick:

[gimme a break]

9. There's also a company working on the wind tree

It's basically like a windmill, but only a turn of 1/2 an inch powers a house for a whole day. I've got the water purifier and air purifier they produced. I've had the air purifier for nearly ten years and don't want to ever go without it. It literally kills the stuff in the air. (kind like the smarter image thing they advertise all over TV, but better) I went without it for a week and couldn't believe the difference in the smell of my house and the amount of dust. The water purifier made the same type of difference in the taste of our water. They've convinced me of the quality of their products. I think their having trouble in the court system over it. It has the potential to solve all our electric problems, but it will also put thousands of people in the electricity producing and maintenance industries out of work.

[Jose Diablo]

15. The article below examines the WindTree® claims

"This gives a probable WindTree® output figure of about 55 watts in a 13mph wind with a 6ft x 6ft rotor. EcuQuest is claiming their unit can produce 54 times more electricity than any modern wind turbine can produce."

http://www.otherpower.com/windtree.html

I am suspicious of the claim of 3000watts of power from a 13 mph wind.

It seems to me that WindTree® is really more interested in selling dealerships. Shall we say selling 'marketing plans' rather than viable product to convert wind energy to electrical power.

[daleo]

10. Many think that the fossil fuel energy expended in producing ethanol

makes this a rather pointless exercise. The recent issue of Harper's has an article about how much fossil fuel goes into producing agricultural products. So, burning a lot of 'dirty' oil to get 'clean burning' hydrogen this way is not really helpful in the long run.

[proud patriot]

11. that's what's so cool about this article

It's a new way to refine it that uses less oil .

:D

[daleo]

12. I suppose it makes an inefficient process somewhat less inefficient

My understanding is that it is in the actual growing of the ethanol feedstock (e.g. corn) that most of the fossil fuel is consumed. The idea is that there is well over 1 calorie, maybe up to 5 or more, of fossil fuels consumed for every calorie of biomass energy produced.

I don't know how accurate these specific numbers are, but I have read numbers like this in a variety of sources.