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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."
It notably does not use fossil fuels in the process.
It most certainly does use fossil fuels.
Ethanol takes energy to make. Lots of energy, possibly more than it contains. That energy comes from fossil fuels. Ethanol is not an energy source; it is a different way to store energy, and not a particularly efficient one.
Using Ethanol as a fuel is mostly a way to funnel money to Corn Belt farmers.
.. than an ethanol powered engine?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The problem is the Drug War won't allow it .
Beer has taught me that yeast create ethanol as a metabolic waste product, right? I believe that yeast also create carbon dioxide as a waste product.
I doubt that large-scale industral ethanol plants are using yeast colonies for production... but what do they use? And what are the waste products from that process?
I understand that reducing our reliance on fossil fules is a good thing. However, if substantial amounts of greenhouse (or other undesirable) gas emissions result from the ethanol production process, aren't we just playing Whack-A-Mole with the source of the pollution?
This is very good news. I already use ethanol blend gasoline in my car. Although it is a bit more expensive, it burns cleaner and (obviously) uses less fossil fuels to produce. There was a saying in the mining engineering department at university: If it can't be grown, it's gotta be mined. If we can move more and more toward the growing, then we're finally truly moving toward a renewable energy economy.
Those GM Hywire commercials are pretty to look at, but don't make it clear to the general public how difficult energy-wise it is to actually produce hydrogen. I hope more research funds get pumped into this kind of technology so we can move toward a hydrogen future at a meanginful pace.
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..
Yeap, the second law of thermodynamics IS a problem. Let's see, efficiently convert ethanol into hydrogen? Fine. Have a fuel cell that efficiently converts hydrogen into power we can use? Great.
But it uses no fossil fuels? Well, maybe not directly, but... let's see, where do we get ethanol? Hmm. Well, most of it comes from corn. Corn treated with heat. That heat comes from natural gas, usually. So there's a fossil fuel. What else? Corn has to be harvested. Usually this involves tractors, harvesters, and other large pieces of farm equipment that generally run on.. d'oh! More fossil fuel!
According to the US Dept. of Energy, creating ethanol takes about 29% more energy than it provides. Since most of that energy going into the ethanol-creation process is fossil fuel-based, we'd probably be better off just burning the fossil fuels directly. Using ethanol just burns them up even faster.
A source for more ethanol numbers: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/031128.html
End of lesson. You may press the button.
I keep seeing comments talking about how much fossil fuel it takes to grow the corn.
;)
Y'all just aren't looking far enough down the road. When hydrogen power is cheap and available, all of the places that we currently use fossil fuels to produce the corn can change to hydrogen power as well. If this is pooh-poohed now, we'll never get to the point where we can make the transition.
I look forward to the day when the harvesters, trucks used to transport the grain, air conditioners cooling the fermentors, and heaters powering the industrial stills are all powered by nuclear and/or hydrogen power right along with my SUV.
Now where's my jet-pack?
Of course it will get funding. ADM makes big oil look like a bunch of neophites when it comes to political lobbying. Just take a look at the latest farm bill.
I think they're referring to the fact that some fertilizers are actually refined from petroleum products.
This is a laudable achievement.
The hydrogen is envisioned to replace petrochemicals in automotive uses and small-scale electrical generation with fuel-cells.
The only problem is the ethanol source. Right now it is pretty much corn, period. With present technology, much petrochemicals must be expended to grow the corn and refine it into Ethanol. The fact that no petrochemicals are used in the subsequent conversion to hydrogen is lost on the fact that a large amount of petrochemicals were burned to get the ethanol in the first place.
If a suitably-credentialed person does the math, I think we'd probably find that less petrochemicals would be burned in generating the electricity conventionally, or powering the car conventionally.
We'll have to wait for future tech that can generate the ethanol or hydrogen without using, or by using significantly less petrochemicals.
My idea shouldn't be surprising, because no process is ever 100% efficient.
USNG: 14TPU4605
Well I'm no professor, but corn has been grown long before gasoline was ever concieved of. Couldn't electric tractors be made? And as another poster already stated there is already bio-diesel. Seems to me that electric power from things like Nuclear Power plants and the 77,000 (FEMA Statistic) dams in the US, could provide enough power to create enough ethanol.
Here's some real numbers, a 1 bdrm apartment burns on average 1.2 KWh per day. Although it shows your iron runs at 1.2KW, you don't normally run your iron for hours on end. Energy consumption can be figured by calculating the consumption rate, by the time used.. Here's some links that would show closer to true consumption.
e le c_stat_eng.asp
http://www.sig-ge.ch/fr/vous/priv/statistiques/
Using Ethanol as a fuel is mostly a way to funnel money to Corn Belt farmers.
The New York Times ran an interesting story about agriculture and obesity in October, basically discussing how, among other things, American corn has traditionally been so overproduced that corn-growers are desperate to find ways to use it. In the 19th century, the solution was to use it to make alcohol-- the average US citizen's consumption of corn-based alcohol then was more than FIVE times what it is now.
Following the backlash against drinking alcohol around the turn of the century, now much of the corn glut is used as a cheep sweetener. Corn syrup has replaced sugar in most sodas, candy, etc since the 1980s. The article suggests that the move from corn-alcohol to corn-syrup is responsible for the 60% obesity increase plus dramatic increases in "adult-onset" Diabetes.
So is the corn-as-fuel studies a similar way to answer the question-- how do we get rid of all this corn?
Also, see this NYTimes editorial. Some interesting stats in there as well.
W
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
HFCS is 75% sweeter than sugar. Manufacturers can use less sweetener for the same amount of finished product to obtain the same flavor.
Other attributes of HFCS over sugar (from http://food.oregonstate.edu/sugar/hfcs.html):
# retain moisture and/or prevent drying out
# control crystallization
# produce an osmotic pressure that is higher than for sucrose or medium invert sugar and thereby help control microbiological growth or help in penetration of cell membranes.
# provide a ready yeast-fermentable substrate
# blend easily with sweeteners, acids, and flavorings
# provide a controllable substrate for browning and Maillard reaction.
# impart a degree of sweetness that is essentially the same as in invert liquid sugar
# high sweetness
# low viscosity
# reduced tendency toward characterization
# costs less than liquid sucrose or corn syrup blends
# retain moisture and/or prevent drying out
In short, in a mass-production environment, sugar is used where it needs to be used, and HFCS is used where it can be used. I imagine ADM donates liberally to political parties for other reasons. The biggest one that comes to mind is genetic patents.
You ever seen those monster dump trucks used at mines? Those are electric! They have a big diesel motor that powers a generator that in turn powers electric motors. You don't have to have a transmission that way. Same for diesel electric trains. So, if you have a fuel cell big enough, you can push that 5 ton tractor anywhere you want to go.
Brazil in the early 80s developed a technology to make cars run on ethanol that is distilled from sugarcane (just like cachaca). It might not be as clean as a hydrogen fuel-cell, but it's quite a bit more efficient, and very stable technology.
there are fuel cells that operate using ethanol instead of hydrogen -- why not use the ethanol directly and save the step of converting ethanol to hydrogen? anyone here know why?
The flaw in the claim that this thing doesn't use fossil fuels is in the source of the ethanol; most fuel ethanol comes from grains - in the U.S., from government-subsidized grain corn. Due to the poorness of overcultivated soil in nearly every temperate region where grains grow, it takes a lot of petroleum-derived fertilizer to grow that grain - multiple calories of hydrocarbon energy for each calorie stored in the grain, in fact. Fermentation and refinement of the ethanol, of course, reduces the net energy yield of this process.
Find a better source of ethanol, though, and I'm sold.
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
So, basically, I call bullshit on not having enough biomass to run the farm equipment. Actually converting farms over is another story.
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Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
Not really. It's a highly useful plant. You can produce multiple crops per year with managable soil exhaustion. It's an excellent source of fibrous material usable for a lot of things, most notably paper (which is in fact why it was banned in the US, but that's another story).
I don't have sources handy, but I did research this topic at some length in the past and convince myself that Hemp would have real value if it weren't for our political climate.
Though the strains most effective in terms of biomass, fiber production, etc, are NOT the best strains for recreational use.
One should be aware that hemp has been through extensive selective breeding, and the THC levels have boosted considerably in the last 50 years. However the changes to boost THC have made the plant less effective for other purposes.
PS:
I should not that I'm not a user, but I am strongly in favor of legalization, both for production and recreational uses.
plus-good, double-plus-good
Corn isn't exactly the best plant to use? maybe something with higher sugar content and easier extraction? maybe a grass? Ethanol only needs sugar, there are some pretty high sugar content grasses (umm.. sugar cane but there are others) or even somethign like left over canola biomass?
Or how about a genetically modifie solutions. Take a very simple and robust grass and add a snippit of DNA for fructose/glucose with a super promoter in front, copy it a few dozen tiems and you'll have soem pretty sweet weed. ahh weed.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
My SO is doing leading edge research on photosynthesis. She occasionally comes home with green splotches in her hair. It's really fascinating how the actual specific chemistry of photosynthesis works, harvesting energy from light.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Actually legal widespread hemp growing is not a ridiculous idea.
It's an entirely political debate, not based on science whatsoever.
"Industrial" hemp as a crop has many useful benifits. And such hemp also has very little THC, in fact so little that it is difficult to get "high" off from it.
If this really was the issue behind it, the government could find a way to regulate it, as they do alcohol.
People who want to get "high" will find a way to do so one way or another. The fact is industrial hemp plants make a very poor drug.
Sure someone might find a way to get a bunch of hemp and distill out more THC, but it would be easier sneaking it over the border.
The fact is people are already making meth from cough syrup, but does that mean we stop the sale of cough syrup?
I'm all for a crop that would put our farmers to work, decrease government subsidies, is enviromental friendly, and decrease our foreign imports.
Industrial Hemp could do this. The number of pot smokers would not increase either.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
And so I continue the great legacy of answering my own questions shortly after I've asked them...
"One bushel of corn yields 2.5-2.7 gallons of ethanol from the starch component of corn"
Also interesting that the processes of ethanol and corn oil (biodiesel) production from corn don't seem to interfere with eachother, and are somewhat complimentary: http://www.ethanolrfa.org/prod_process.html
=Smidge=
FYI - The whole "hemp is illegal" issue came about because cotton growers (a surprisingly large political power even today) felt threatened by this new plant that grew faster, required less maintenance and produced more (and softer) fibers.
But instead of saying "Hey, wow, this is a great product, let's switch!" they instead said "Hmm, this might require us changing the way we do things, must be bad!" and lobbied for bills making it illegal to grow ALL forms of Cannabis, not just the ones that make you high.
Smoking industrial hemp in sufficient quantity might make you sick but you won't get high off it...
I suppose one of the reasons commercial helm remains illegal because it would be too difficult to know which is hemp and which is marijuana when the DEA is flying over the countryside.
I read an article sometime around the middle to late part of last year which described a system a dairy farmer came up with for generating electricity from shit. It goes into a buried tank which contains some type of bacteria which breaks it down. This generates heat and releases gas. The heat is used for heating (amazing!) and the gas is used for generation of electricity. The waste which is removed from the tank (via pipe and pump) is further "digested" than it is when it comes out of the cow, and thus it takes up less space, and is significantly less stinky. I seem to recall them stating that they were able to reduce the grid power consumption of the average dairy farm by over 75% using this method. This is an ideal example of working smarter rather than harder.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Just think about it folks. Why is oil so cheap (compared to its energy cost) to harvest right now? Because there's a century of infrastructure built around its harvest. There are researchers making things more efficient, oil wells galore, efficient refineries, and why? Because we put a whole bunch of money and time into the research of it.
/NEED/ a ton of upkeep to grow, we just do a ton of upkeep to keep it edible. No one gives a sweet damn if the corn they use to power their vehicle was infested with ergot or weevils or blight, or little green bugs. It's all hydrogen in the end.
The total cost of delivery of a single gallon of gasoline is still quite high. It has to be mined, shipped to refineries (which uses oil!) refined in several stages (also uses oil), then shipped in individual semi-trucks (also uses oil) to get to it's final destination, which is for the most part a huge network of individual mom-and-pop owned gas stations. In addition to this, tankers fall over, refineries produce the occasional bad batch, pipelines break and need repair (oh boy, how about those SUVs needed to get to the point the pipeline broke in alaska), there are oil spills in Alaska, oil tanker ships. All these indirectly use oil to harvest oil.
As opposed to the infrastructure surrounding ethanol -- a fledgeling (no, I don't mean ADM) industry with some government and corporate funding and only 30 years of poorly funded research backing it. In 100 years, where will we be with this? One really darned great thing about grain alcohol, is that nearly every place in the non-desert world is suitable for growing some kind of grain that can be changed. Sugar cane, barley, hops, corn, rice. All can be turned into alcohol organically, with yeast, and the varieties of each can be grown in nearly every clime in the world, as opposed to having to be mined and distributed on the hub-and-spoke system. Locally managed stills can make enough ethanol to power entire towns for the most part, with a surplus. Believe me, we know the volume homemade, illegal, inefficient, made-by-the-village-drunk 'stills can produce in Arkansas and Tennessee. How about efficient stills made by corporations with the money to put into the research of draining every last drop out of the infrastructure they create? No long, hazardous shipping across outdated hub-and-spoke shipping lines. Fine-grained (no pun intended) distributed, low cost production facilities are a much better way of creating electricity and vehicle fuel.
The really great thing is that all these grains don't
This can be the key, folks. This can avert the disaster heading our way once oil becomes expensive to mine. We just have to put the money in now while we can.
I've read that we hit a Hubbert's peak for plutonium in about 30-40 years, so depressingly enough, even nuclear (fission) power isn't a long term solution.
Energy balance for ethanol is either something under or just over unity, depending on who you ask. This means that for every joule you get from ethanol, you consume just about that much fossil fuel in growing the corn. This is why ethanol is a stupid idea, unless Klaatu and Gort are dumping huge mounds of free extraterrestrial waste corn somewhere. Ethanol power generation is pure pork for farmers; we'd be better off just using the gasoline directly and not growing the corn.
On the other hand, soybean biodiesel returns 220% to 230% of the input energy from fossil fuel. Soybean cultivation is the solar power technology that is most suitable for powering vehicles.
The fact is people are already making meth from cough syrup, but does that mean we stop the sale of cough syrup?
We're getting close, I went to pick up a bunch of NyQuil (cold was just begininng to spread through the family), and they limited me to a single two bottle pack. They told me I have to come back a different time if I wanted more.
The next step is to begin working to genetically engineer plants that produce more of the kinds of materials that benefit the distillation and catalysis of ethanol. Corn is a poor energy source when you consider what it takes to grow it, and how devastating modern agriculture is to the soil.
Not to mention the fact that agriculture is essentially owned and regulated by Big Oil, who also own the companies that make seeds and the companies which make nitrogen fertilizers. No serious progress is likely to be made in agriculture or energy technology as long as the interests of Big Oil remain paramount.
The smart direction, I think, is to look at aquatic plants, algae, bacteria, and the like. If a bacterium or yeast could be developed to produce ethanol in sufficient quantity, and a closed system could be developed that takes in sunlight and produces all the kinds of things bacteria and yeasts produce - ethyl, nitrogen, methane, etc., it would go an amazingly long way towards improving the efficiency of these processes.
The trouble with our current crude methods is that they are simply unsustainable and produce far too much pollution and waste.
Recently a technique was developed to convert any kind of solid waste into constituent materials, including a rich form of oil. This project was undertaken with support from ButterBall because the costs of waste disposal for their turkey abattoirs are hilariously high.
Now imagine a similar kind of energy plant, except instead of slow-heating wastes and so forth, it has a chain of vats containing various forms of bacteria, single-celled organisms, simple plants, etc., in a closed ecosystem. Wastes and other materials from one vat are leeched out and channeled to the next vat in line. Nitrogen and CO2 are funneled to the plants, and their oxygen is fed to some single-celled creatures. Round it goes, probably feeding back into itself in a closed loop. Except, of course it isn't a closed loop. Free materials like oxygen, CO2, nitrogen, hydrogen, etc., are constantly being added to the system along with plenty of sunlight. The result is that you end up with a huge abundance of excess which can be siphoned off.
The grail of energy will be to engineer or discover bacteria capable of freeing hydrogen itself. Maybe some of those deep-sea hot vent varieties have some creative genetic ideas!
We are so used to thinking of energy in terms of limitations, and so there seems to be a rush to knock energy out quickly and with great force. The fact is, slower, gentler, more methodical methods are available using the power of living cells. We only have to learn how to utilize and program these molecular machines to do our bidding.
I have a friend who is utterly convinced that Free Energy Devices (also known as Zero-Point Energy Taps) are possible, they exist, and they are suppressed by Big Energy interests. I am naturally skeptical of the idea, but at the same time I'm open to the possibility, if only because at the atomic level everything is going a million miles an hour all the time. If you could tap that energy at the molecular scale I believe you could produce - essentially - a perpetual-energy device.
For example, if you were able to build a device on the nano-scale which captures electrons - like a cashmere sweater - and then instead of just forming a diffuse cloud of electrons were able to channel those electrons into a medium and hold them... well you get the idea. We know static is real, and we know a little bit of it can produce a pretty impressive shock. If a trillion of these devices could fit into a square foot then I imagine you could extract a pretty impressive amount of electrical energy.
There have to be thousands of ways to efficiently borrow excess energy. Another method that occurs to me is to layer materials in a manner such that electrons are caused to flow in a specific direction. I'd be interested to know if layering materials - let's say nickel and copper - can produce energy flow passively, or if a catalyst such as acid or NaCl is always required to "pull" electrons out.
-- thinkyhead software and media
Not true. There are alternatives (*cough*wind power*cough*) that are outstripping nuclear, if you look at it on a level playing field. New offshore wind farms in the uk are contracted to produce electricity at 0.03/kilowatt/hour, and that price is set to drop.. (British wind energy association) The real energy problem is a blinkered outlook in some parts of the US establishment..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
Speaking of nuclear, I assume you are talking about fusion not generating tons of radioactive material?
No, I am not talking about those self-destructing reactors. I'm talking about a plain old fission reactor. They do *not* generate tons of waste per year. In fact, most of it can be reprocessed and reused. The stuff that's really "hot" won't last long. (10 seconds to 20 years.) And the stuff that *will* last millions of years is no more dangerous than the uranium in your back yard. Remember, mass gets converted to radiation. If it stays radioactive for a long time, it's not converting much mass. Unless you pile tons of it in one spot, you'll have a hard time distinguishing it from background radiation.
Otherwise you've got the idea. Mobile reactor can be useful in ships and heavy industrial equipment. Beyond that, the power from the nuclear grid can be stored in some chemical fashion (e.g. hydrogen cracked from water) and reused by vehicles.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
This is a legitimate possibility. One advantage of converting corn to ethanol is that it provides relatively-safe, relatively-dense portable energy storage. Not as dense as gasoline or nuclear, better density than hydrogen or batteries. At the present time, energy demand in the US can be divided into two broad categories: applications that are essentially fixed in position (houses and other buildings) and applications that are mobile (cars, trucks, trains, planes, ships, etc). Energy production that works well for one doesn't generally work well for the other. That is, nuclear is fine for generating electricity to put on a grid to distribute to fixed locations; gasoline is fine for mobile applications; nuclear-powered cars and gasoline-fired power plants are both kind of silly.
What would be terrific is an efficient way to convert electrical power into a stored form that is safe, dense, small, and efficient in conversion in both directions. Heinlein worked such a device into one of his novels. Not only was it used in mobile applications like cars, but it was also used in stationary apps. It became economical for some locations (say the Sahara) where they could harvest large amounts of solar power (to your point, where there are hundreds of thousands of acres of otherwise worthless land people would cheerfully give up for solar power production) to charge up the devices and then ship them around the world. Sixty years after its invention, the corporation that controlled the technology essentially owned the world.
The real key to biofuels would be the ability to use cellulose as the feedstock instead of just simply sugars.
Currently there is work going on to reduce the cost of using cellulase enzymes in the bioethanol process. Currently, cellulase-based bioethanol requires 30-50 cents of cellulase per gallon. To be economically competitive with sugar processes, the price has to be brought down to 5 cents per gallon.
At that point, bioethanol production could use the entire plant, including a large amount of plant waste that is simply thrown away today.