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Ethanol to Hydrogen Reactor Developed
guacamolefoo writes "CNN reports that researchers at the University of Minnesota have developed a small (2 ft. high) hydrogen reactor that turns ethanol into hydrogen and then uses a fuel cell to turn the hydrogen into electricity. It notably does not use fossil fuels in the process. I knew that liquor would save us all some day."
The Minnesota researchers envision people buying ethanol to power the small fuel cell in their basements. The cell could produce 1 kilowatt of power, nearly enough for an average home.
But not anywhere close enough for your average Slashdot user.
"Some fight for law. Some fight for justice. What will you fight for? One day, you will see."
Ethanol takes energy to make. Lots of energy, possibly more than it contains. That energy comes from fossil fuels.
No.
Our current industrial-ag model of crop production consumes quite a lot of fossil fuels. That does not mean the same thing as "growing corn and converting it to ethanol requires fossil fuels".
Producing ethanol requires nothing more than the sun, some corn, and bacteria. Yes, you'll notice that list includes an energy source, but not "oil".
Using Ethanol as a fuel is mostly a way to funnel money to Corn Belt farmers.
To that extent, I will agree with you, because we do use an industrial-ag model of crop production. We don't need to, though.
How many gallons of oil does it take to put a gallon of gasoline in your tank. And remember one gallon of oil does not equal one gallon of gasoline.
Also, if you are going to be paying money to fuel your car would you rather pay it to American farmers and corporations or foreign oil barons and corporations.
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Please tell me how you will plow your farm, plant your corn, harvest it, process it and transport it to the ethanol plant, what you'll make your fertilizer from and how you'll get your ethanol to your hydrogen plant all without using any fossil fuels...
Or even with fossil fuels, in such a way that it makes sense to do at all...
Inquiring minds want to know.
Please tell me how you will plow your farm, plant your corn, harvest it, process it and transport it to the ethanol plant, what you'll make your fertilizer from and how you'll get your ethanol to your hydrogen plant all without using any fossil fuels...
Using the hydrogen of course. Duh.
Maybe someone with more expertise can clarify this or tell me I'm missing the point...
Since ethanol is usually made from plants which have to be cultivated by equipment that burns oil -- combines, tankers, pumps, etc -- my understanding is that the production of ethanol is actually wasteful of fossil fuels. I've read (but haven't been able to corroborate) that the energy required to produce a gallon of ethanol is actually more than the energy produced by a gallon of ethanol.
So, is it really cleaner when you look at the big picture? Is it more efficient?
There's also the cost. Corn-based ethanol is inexpensive because of the huge subsidies the US government gives corn growers. There have been some primetime specials lately connecting the dots between lobbyists, corn production, and the ever growing waistlines of Americans. The small blurb in the article regarding economic potential for farmers is a huge understatement considering these subsidies.
Is this just cool a Good Thing?
A lot of people are saying this- but it seems to imply that farming equipment, etc. must always run on fossil fuels.
It sounds a lot to me like saying - "yeah that new C language seems o.k. but you still need language X to write a compiler for it- so what's the point" But once you move beyond that- you can drop language X or in this case fossil fuels. What if your farm equipment starts running on fuel cells? The move from fossil fuels has to take place in steps.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Actually, all fuels take more energy to produce than they contain -- thanks to the same Second Law of Thermodynamics that Uncle Cecil seems to misunderstand at the end of the linked article. (Don't get me wrong, I like Cecil, but I think he made a little mistake.) Anything that produced more energy than was put into it would violate the Second Law.
You might respond to this by saying, "But it takes less energy to get oil out of the ground than that oil eventually produces when burned!" Well, not exactly. The energy that went into making that oil was expended millions of years ago, and it all started as solar energy that was converted into plant and animal matter by the appropriate biological processes. Not really any different than the ethanol produced by plants that are grown with solar energy.
It's just that those hundreds of millions of years produced a large reserve of oil, so that the energy expended in finding it, drilling it, refining it, and transporting it is less than the amount of energy we get out of it -- but the total amount of energy that's gone into getting the oil into a usable form *is* still greater than the amount that's produced when it burns.
The amount of oil available on our planet is finite. There's still plenty of debate about how much is left, but there's never been any indication that more oil is being produced inside the planet, at least not at a rate that's anywhere near what we use it at. Which means we are going to eventually need alternative fuels. (Assuming our rate of consumption doesn't decrease drastically.) That might be 10, 20, 50, 500 years in the future, but it *will* happen.
All that said, there's also no reason why we have to use fossil fuels to produce ethanol. It's just that fossil fuels are currently the cheapest energy source. That won't remain true forever: the cost of all renewable sources will only ever decrease, as technology improves.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
So after liberating some (all) of the hydrogen we are left with C2 and O I would assume it would pick up O2 from the air and make C02 as a by product, with potentially some water also.
Last time I checked C02 was a greenhouse gas. It doesn't add to CO2 levels if (big if) the sources for ethanol production extract the CO2 from the atmosphere at the same rate. Keep in mind it isn't just the raw materials, but energy needed to process and create the ethanol, which may cause pollution in the process.
I would have expected CNN to give the actual chemical by-products, and not just summarize as "no greenhouse gasses" which is extremely misleading. I would also be interested to know how many of the H6 get truly extracted, and what remainder go into water (which would say something about efficiency and power density). Or whether some more exotic compounds are left behind that just C02 and H20 (even if only in trace amounts). A molecule here, a molecule there, and sometimes things aren't as benign as one might first assume.
Good news in any event, just wish there where more details.
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while I haven't read the article in Harpers, I would guess that much of the fossil fuel involved is used in the distillation process (i.e., removing the water from the ethanol/water mixture). This reactor tolerates eth/h20 mixtures as low as 50%. So, I would further guess that this reduces the cost and demand for fossil fuels...
I don't no if one can extract the Ethanol from the mixture using only solar power.
A Solar still takes very little knowledge, and no oil to build.
It does use fossil fuels but most people are just too "small picture" to realize it. Where do you think that Ethanol came from? It wasnt magically dropped on earth by some incredibly kind tree hugging aliens. It was most likley produced from corn. And that corn was grown in a large field and maintained by a farmer who uses thousands of gallons of deisel fuel to run the tractor to maintain that corn. Plow, Plant, Water, spray for insects, harvest, husk, remove from cobb, lll those are done by big diesel machines.
So when it all boils down. The nice clean ethanol that was used to make the hydrogen that made the electricity was grown and processed with power from good ole' black dino juice.
My sig can beat up your sig.
We have an Ethanol plant in our town. It smells awful. When the wind changes a bit - usually when it's getting colder, around football season - it blows right across campus. Freshman used to think it smelled like baking bread. OT, I know. But I wouldn't wish Ethanol on anyone. It'll make you sick, and you don't even have to ingest any..
I take it you've never sniffed the air downwind of a petrolium refinery or an oil well....
This is true only with respect to burning ethanol as a fuel in an internal combustion engine. This statement does not appear take into account the difference between an internal combustion engine and the conversion of ethanol to hydrogen to electricty to motive power.
You also are ignoring the fact that the ethanol can be produced using ethanol based energy. The tractor power, the distillation, the factory incidentals, the distribution, all of that energy could be provided by ethanol. That it isn't produced that way yet is due in large part to the lack of a widely available efficient ethanol conversion process.
The "hydrogen-based energy economy" has been hampered by the fact that hydrogen is not as easy to deliver as gasoline. However, ethanol is exactly as easy to deliver as gasoline, and the infrastruture already exists to do so. The problems with converting methanol or ethanol to hydrogen for fuel cells (the expense of the platinum catalysts) has been one of the final roadblocks to widespread adoption of fuel cell powered vehicles.
Crying "corn belt subsidy" before the technology even sees the light of day is counter-productive. Yes, some people are going to get filthy rich off of whatever fuel supplants oil. Unethical people will make financially-motivated decisions to use a "dirty" process and release lots of pollution. There will be more crooked deals with more crooked politicians, there will be kickbacks and porkbarrels the likes of which will relegate Haliburton and Cheney to the junior varsity level. Some oil industry barons will be ruined, many oil industry workers will lose their jobs, and the world will be changed. But it needs to change. The new direction may or may not be ethanol, but it can't remain fossil fuel based forever. And we need to explore those alternatives now.
John
I don't claim to know whether this is a net gain when all energy costs and byproducts (chiefly carbon dioxide) are taken into account, but don't dismiss the idea out of hand by spuriously equating it to the burning of purified ethanol.
Here's an article with a bit more information.. I found this link elsewhere in this discussion.
That can't work (at least not as a closed system)...you can't run the corn production and ethanol distillation process on the ethanol produced and expect to have an energy surplus (or even break even) unless the operation is so large, and so efficient, that the energy input from sunlight is larger than the loss through various inefficiencies. This converter was a breakthrough, and it still only reaches 60% conversion efficiency, so it doesn't sound like things are going to be that efficient anytime soon.
As if no-one had ever used a C compiler to compile their original New-Language compiler, and then threw the C away entirely.
/nothing/ else - the energy independence is a huge step forward.
the shift here is from using fossil fuels that take many years of pressure and heat to create, and mostly lie across oceans - to a fuel source that only takes bacteria, the sun, and a few weeks to create, and can be produced in abundance locally.
if
and the numbers for ethanol creation are referring to -engine-grade-ethanol- which must be (expensively) purified. the ethanol source for the reactor in question -doesn't-.
not to mention that the IOP article says that this ethanol->hydrogen reactor is 3x as efficient as an ethanol engine directly.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
First of all, it's Yeast and not bacteria.
(I'm a homebrewer going commercial)
Yeast will at best get a corn mash up to about 20% ABV (Alcohol by Volume) To get this any higher, you need to distill it which requires lots and lots of heat (look up the specific heat of water and remember that 80% of your mother liquor is water).
In addition to the alcohol, there are lots of other chemicals - I don't know but I would be pretty sure that some of them would need to be removed or they would corrupt the chemical reactions. I would not be surprised if this reactor didn't require a pretty pure ethanol.
Finally, given the poor efficiency of fuel-cells, you might be better off just burning the ethanol in a micro-turbine. These will run on anything and have nice numbers.
Ummm... hydrogen powered tractors???
Actually they mention that burning hydrogen (or using it to power a fuel cell) may not release greenhouse gasses, but when you convert ethanol to hydrogen, the carbon in the ethanol has to go somewhere. Is it released as CO2? The article was too sketchy on details to know...
Sorry for the flame, but why the #$% do you guys keep putting stories like this on slashdot's front page? This ethanol-->hydrogen thesis is for crack smokers. As pointed out in posts above, the second law of thermodynamics implies that the production of ethanol will kill any energy plus in the equation. For god's sake, all these discussions make me think I'm watching the matrix again with the human battery concept.
Here's from FTW:
One conclusion generally accepted by almost every attendee was that hydrogen, contrary to popularly accepted comfort promotions by writers like Jeremy Rifkin, was not a solution either in the near or long term because of intensive costs of production, inherent energy inefficiencies, lack of infrastructure and impracticalities. Speaking for Daimler Chrysler, which paid lip service to Peak Oil yet acknowledged that it had done extensive research on hydrogen vehicles, Dr. Jorg Wind told the conference that his company did not see hydrogen as a viable alternative to petroleum-based internal combustion engines.
"We use fossil fuels to make hydrogen. That does not result in a significant CO2 reduction. We predict that by 2020 only 5% of fuel use will be hydrogen and that infrastructure and the political framework is the most important factor. In order of relevance and likelihood from the standpoint of the auto industry Wind stated that we would see improved conventional vehicles, starter hybrid vehicles, electric hybrid vehicles and, finally, fuel cell vehicles as solutions, but he had little optimism that fuel cells would ever amount to a significant market share. In a telling left-handed acknowledgement of Peak Oil, Wind noted that one third of all diesel fuels currently used in Germany were biodiesel relying on recycled waste and or plant feedstock. He was particularly critical of ethanol stating that it was not energy efficient.
French presenters confirmed that ethanol was only viable in France due to a three hundred per cent government subsidy to farmers. Otherwise it was a net energy waster.
Decomposing plants and animals are carbon neutral. They took in as much carbon as they release.
Burning oil, however, is putting us back to prehistoric CO2 levels.
Using power from our very own stellar fusion reactor located at a convenient approximate 18 light minutes, is much cleaner.
Why did GEAR crush RDP?
Yes, now the ethanol is ultimately dependent on fossil fuel machines. This development, though, makes it possible to change that, so that eventually, the diesel machines can be changed over to hydrogen-fuel-cell machines. Currently, one of the major obstacles to switching over to a hydrogen economy has been the high cost of getting hydrogen, with the cheapest source being natural gas. This has the potential to change that.
cotodoso
I don't think so - I would have sworn that although nobody's succeeded at turning lead into gold yet, they HAVE turned BISMUTH into gold. It only cost them a few billion dollars to build the particle accelerator to do it with, too. And they got, as I recall, 8 whole atoms of Gold in the process...
I'm in the wrong line of work - I should get in on that 'particle physics' scam. "Yes, senator, this $50,000,000,000 grant is absolutely necessary if I am to discover the Pineapple Upside-Down Quark before the Soviets, uh, I mean, Red Chinese, uh, I mean, Terrorists do!"
(Note for any humor impaired particle physicists and/or sympathisers reading this - YES, it's a joke! Jeez...)
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So what does your message say? "You can't possibly understand the pain of being a farmer!" or some other content-free statement.
As to your suggestion I try farming some time, let me just say that there are ALREADY TOO MANY people TRYING to make a living farming - why would I be stupid enough to create a business that has no hope of succeding without government subsidy?
Why dont farmers who are being paid not to grow crops just get in to some other business? There are two primary reasons. 1) why work when i can get paid to do nothing? (great reason to get rid of the subsidies in the first place) and 2) My 'quality of life/lifestyle' will change - my family have always been farmers! (tough - the world changes and you need to too)
I hear complaints like "The farm has been in our family for generations and now because we can't compete with the 'big' industrial farms, we are in danger of loosing our way of life and our livelyhood!" To which I reply "Great - get out of farming, go get an education and do something ELSE. Tell your kids to get an education and do something else." I don't do what my fater did for a livng and it doesn't hurt me or him a bit. If big 'mechanized' farms are driving the little guy out of business then the little guy should go into business doing something else.
The reason we have all these subsidies is because there are too damn many farmers - if we stop paying them to do NOTHING with their land then perhaps they'd go do somehting else and actually contribute to society.
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The ratio of profits to subsidy is completely meaningless number. For example, if they were to turn around next year and give their employees a small raise which cut into their profits in half, it would mean that we pay $60 for every dollar of profit they make, but that doesn't mean they are wasting twice as much money.
A more usefull number would be the ratio of revenue to subsidy. I couldn't find that in the report you linked, but assuming their profit margin is about 10%, then for every dollar I pay for ethanol another three dollars comes from the taxpayers.
What is this miracle crop, you might ask?
This miracle crop scares our government, and numerous other larg-scale entities (such as various corporations), because of its multitude of uses, and the fact that it is so easy to grow. At one time, it was grown in plentiful amounts right here in the United States. Then a ban was induced in the early part of the twentieth century (but was lifted briefly for World War 2), and farmers couldn't grow it. Recently, products made from it came under our government's eye again - but the courts beat them back once more (of course, these products are made mostly in Canada, or from the crop grown in Canada). We, the people, are being denied access to growing this crop, and reaping its benefits, by our own government. A government started with a document entitled the "Declaration of Independence" - written on paper made from the very fibers of the crop denied to us today!
So, what is this wonderous crop, you plea?
Say it loud - say it proud - let the world and our corrupt politicians know it: HEMP! HEMP! HEMP!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I never proposed using solar panels on a vehicle. Solar panels are still very inefficient (of course, if the billions of dollars pouring into research on how to extract more oil and how to burn it more efficiently were spent on improving solar panels, I have no doubt they would perform much better).
I don't know how much corn would be needed to power everything. But I would bet that there is plenty enough energy falling on just a few hundred square miles to power all of our needs. It powers the weather and winds globally after all. It's just a matter of finding a way to collect the energy and then store it. I think storing the energy as hydrogen to be used in a fuel cell is a good way to go, whether you generate the hydrogen via corn or nuclear power.
Speaking of nuclear, I assume you are talking about fusion not generating tons of radioactive material? I'm all for fusion power and hope it becomes viable some day. But I don't think you'll see a fusion power plant in the trunk of everyone's car. I think the fusion power will have to be used to create an intermediate form. Power for electric cars? Hydrogen for fuel cell powered electric cars? Who knows?
I saw a good writeup the other day (probably on slashdot) about how we could change from an oil based economy to a hydrogen based economy. If the current oil companies were "encouraged" to be the producers and distributors of hydrogen as they are now for oil products, they wouldn't see it as a threat to their existence. Then they wouldn't be exerting their considerable political influence to try to stop alternate plans.
Just my $0.02 worth ($0.01 after tax)...
Oh, and a few more things that turn into ethanol quite readily.
1. Potatoes (really good. soil-healthy crop)
2. Grapes
3. Wheat
4. Sugar Beets
5. Honey
6. Rye
7. Apples
8. Peaches
9. Oats
10. Several types of hardy grasses, including milkweed, dandelions, cattails.
The list goes on. What's more, there's a surplus of all these every year. Regularly, crops simply get dumped into the ocean to mitigate price drops caused by low supply/demand ratio. We already farm too well. What if farmers could sell their entire surplus, every year? The revival of agriculture as a way of life. Even the >gasp small-farm -- remember what I said about local farming being a better way to produce energy because you don't have to ship it?!
For a bunch of people who call themselves nerds, the /. crowd has certainly been short-sighted lately. Nerd!=whiner.
A compact ethanol to hydrogen reformer means that at least two of the the LARGEST problems stopping the adoption of hydrogen have been solved
1) Transportation:
The existing gasoline transport/storage/dissemination architecture can be used for ethanol
2) Net production of CO2
Until now, the cheapest ways to produce hydrogen have relized on fossil fuel consumption. Now hydrogen can be derived from biomass.
To everyone who complains about ethanol subsidies: corn is NOT the only way to make ethanol. You could probably find a way to ferment whatever is fastest growing--after all, this is not for human consumption.
In summary, I hope this thing is for real...