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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."
Foster Brooks takes a drive: "Honesht Offishur, I washunt drinking, I hadda shiphon shom gash *hic*"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
My dad has one of these apparatus, but it works the other way. It's about 8ft tall and converts hydrogen (and some other chemicals) TO ethanol
The cause of, and solution to, many of the world's problems.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
So, I see that part of the saying "Beer is the solution to all lifes problems" is partly true.
Evolution or ID?
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!!!!
One item of interest is that this new technique converts ethanol to hydrogen at a 60% efficiency rate, compared to the 20% efficiency rate with current technology.
This kind of reminds me of when marty got stuck in the 1800s and the doc tried to put alcohol in the delorean, and it blew out some part of it...
Um.... anyway. This technology is a much better thing than the movie.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
to create a 1-1.5 gallons of ethanol. Cover article of Harpers last month...
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Homer: "one for me" [fills mouth]
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Trolling is a art,
Unfortunately it still takes fossil fuels to grow corn. I didn't see any mention of this in the article, but it would be insteresting to find out if the total amount of fossil fuels (from things like farm equipment, fertilizers, etc) that goes into growing the corn to create the ethanol to create the hydrogen is the same, lower, or even more than that required to turn fossil fuels into hydrogen directly. If its the same as or higher than the direct route, then this "breakthrough" isn't all that great.
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.
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That article is pretty damn skimpy on the details. Check out this one which I found at ArsTechnica. Perhaps the most important detail is that a rhodium-based catalyst needs to be heated to 700 celsius for the reaction to have any efficiency.
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
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?
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.
Well, no doubt fossil fuels are used somewhere along the lines, but this makes it sound pretty simple and mostly biological.
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
Ever noticed how most foods and drinks are sweetened with "high fructose corn syrup", rather than the simpler "sugar", and thought it was a bit odd? I'd always just assumed that it was to disguise the ingredient, but that seemed pointless given the nutritional listing of sugar content. Apparently the resolution is that the US government mandates a price for sugar which is about twice the global one. It does not mandate such a price for corn syrup, so corn syrup is cheaper. The major manufacturer of corn syrup (Archer Daniels Midland) "donates" generously to both parties to ensure the continuation of this policy.
(ADM also runs a mammoth ethanol boondoggle based on government subsidies. Every dollar of profits earned by their corn sweetener operation costs consumers ~10$, every dollar earned by their ethanol operation costs taxpayers ~$30.) (ADM also runs a mammoth ethanol boondoggle based on government subsidies. Every dollar of profits earned by their corn sweetener operation costs consumers ~10$, every dollar earned by their ethanol operation costs taxpayers ~$30.)
>ethanol from fermented corn is not gonna work, >primarily since all of the farm machines need >gasoline
Uh. Diesel. Almost all farm equipment have run on diesel for the last 40 years. And bio-diesel is a reality....
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?
But there are two considerations to make here that are not part of the above statement:
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.
From the article: "The cell could produce 1 kilowatt of power, nearly enough for an average home."
) turns up numbers showing that an iron takes about 1.2KW, or just over 1KW for a toaster. So almost enough for an average home, so long as I wander round the house turning off everything else before flattening my shirt or browning some wheat. That's handy.
A bit of googling (http://www.arctic-cat.com/generators/wattage.asp
(This occured to me because I have a fusebox that can't cope with me using a medium iron and an electric heater on low in the same room. Domestic bliss.)
The reactor pushes a mixture of watery ethanol and air over a rhodium-based catalyst heated to about 700 ?C. It takes only five seconds to start up, and produces a steady stream of hydrogen and carbon dioxide with very few other waste products.
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.
Letter To Iran
Ethanol causes Pollution too
Ethanol wrong for CA
I've seen other materials cited saying that ethanol is not harmful. Regardless, I'm sure that the pollution that is generated by your corn-fed in-house ethanol-hydrogen fuel cell will be contained by the time this thing gets to market.
"The problem is having to choose between booze and electricity."
That's easy: drink enough that you can't see. That way, it doesn't matter that the lights don't work.
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.
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
While it may not use fossil fuels, I've been told a few times the largest viable source of ethanol is industrially cracked ethene (I think) from crude oil.
I guess once we got the vehicles etc. converted to this fuel we could set up fermentation plants if the oil ran out, but it still looks to me like the oil companies are safe for now.
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.
Ethanol has been used as a fuel for a long time in many countries, often substituted on a percentage basis with regular gas. It was especially useful during wars etc when petroleum were in short supply.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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?"
To the nay sayers pointing out that it takes 1-1.5 gallons of fossil fuels to make one gallon of ethanol you missed a important part of this. "Ethanol can usually only be burnt if it is completely free of water - and getting the water out is an energy-intensive process. Schmidt's reactor works with wet ethanol." So this doesnt require PURE ethanol, it can accept the water being left in, which according to that statement is a large part of the energy intensive process to make ethanol. So this isn't the 'pure' ethanol.
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...
I propose hemp as less maintenance intensive crop to produce fuel.
Why did GEAR crush RDP?
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.
Aye, you make a good point. However, the device is small enough "to power a vehicle." Not sure how long before John Deere starts selling hydrogen tractors, but someday, corn will rule the world.
I, for one, welcome our new Iowan overlords.
(Sorry, couldn't resist)
That? That was a pigeon.
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?
8.3 light minutes.
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
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.
Hehe...even if they don't make ethanol for fuel, the mere fact that real Mardi Gras celebrations kick off this weekend through Fat Tuesday here in NOLA will create a pretty good spike in all alcohol sales...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Using power from our very own stellar fusion reactor located at a convenient approximate 18 light minutes, is much cleaner.
That's 8 light minutes, and there are no solar panels yet that are efficient enough to drive a car, much less a tractor. Have you taken a look at how many watts it takes just to get one horsepower? You'd need a small nuclear reactor to produce enough watts to get the 450 horsepower of a tractor! (A 335 Kilowatt reactor to be exact.) Not to mention the number of batteries it would take to keep a tractor running at night.
Solar power is a niche market. It has its uses, but general power generation is not one of them.
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If ethanol is actually to play an increasing role in the energy needs of the first world (or the US specifically), it will not come from corn, it will be a result of the refining of sugar cane in Latin & South America & the Caribbean. Sugar cane has a much higher energy level and is much easier to convert to ethanol.
Quick quiz: which nation is the largest producer of ethanol, and what is its feedstock?
And as long as we are injecting facts into this discussion (yes, I'm new here...), while corn production does require lots of water, less than a third of US corn production is irrigated.
And finally, as for all of the "Does producing ethanol require more energy than it uses" discussion, the real question is whether ethanol is an efficient mechanism to capture solar energy and store it in chemical form. The evidence is mixed. The professor at Cornell who is frequently cited is David Pimentel, an entymologist. According to those who specialize in energy, the conclusion for corn-based ethanol is much, much more nuanced. Newer processing plants (those built in the last 3 years) fed by farmers using appropriate nitrogen application techniques are energy-positive. But there are many legacy plants (as well as legacy farmers). Again, in the long-term, the cost of conversion & transport from warmer climes is actually more relevant, though.
And yes, by the way, IAAAE (I am an agricultural economist). In fact, IAAGE (I am a grains economist for a Big Ten University)
Answer: Brazil, sugar cane.
While production of ethanol can be inefficient rarely does it result in a net energy loss. Several different studies show anywhere from a 38% net gain in energy to over 100% depending on methods use. The generally cited claim of a net energy loss from producing ethanol all seem to come from only one paper written by David Pimental. To support his claims he seems to have taken a worst pratices view for every step in the production process, a realworld combination found in less than 5% of current ethanol production. The more comphrensive studies I've been able to find show a slight, albeit not stellar, net gain in energy. The most recent (2002) by Michigan State shows a net gain of 0.56 MJ/MJ of input for corn based ethanol production. If one looks at Cellulose based ethonal production, studies show almost a 2.5 net energy gain and it is easier on the environment since it requires less maintenance and fewer fertilizers.
o ne tenergybalance.htm
For reference this site has some good links, including a rebuttal of the Pimental paper (as well as showing the Pimental article).
http://www.econet.sk.ca/pages/issues/ethanolinf
Wow. A Cato Institute article that quotes a Mother Jones reporter. Politics sure does make for strange bedfellows...
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
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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As for needing a nuclear reactor to power a tractor, bullshit! See my post below where I point out that the big mining dump trucks as well as trains are all electric. They use the diesel motor to power a generator which in turn powers the electric motors. All you need to do is replace the diesel motor and generator with something like a big hydrogen powered fuel cell...
I was kidding about the nuclear power plant. Mostly because it was assumed that you aren't running it off of a chemical fuel like diesel. You said yourself that the electric mine cars are hooked to a diesel generator. But you're not going to get the necessary energy out of solar panels.
Corn is solar powered. Just because it is not efficent (yet) to convert light directly to electricity, don't forget how much energy falls on every acre of land from the sun. It's just the storage method you use that may be inefficient or polluting.
How much corn does it take to generate 335 kilo-joules of energy? How long does it take for that corn to grow? I'm willing to bet that miles of traditional solar panels will still produce more power over the same amount of time. But who wants to give up hundreds of thousands of acres of land for solar power generation?
If you look at oil, you'll find an even worse energy production rate. How many thousands of years does it take nature to produce a tank of gas?
Face it. Nuclear power is the only source of power that can produce enough power to maintain our civilization long term. Nuclear fuel is plentiful here on earth and in the rest of the solar system, it can be made cheaply, and it doesn't output tons of radioactive material per day. (*cough*coal plants*cough*) Instead of developing low power density fuel cells, we should be developing micro-power plants for use in industrial equipment, and small, safe, and efficient nuclear plants to replace our aging, dirty, and expensive power grid.
Sorry if I'm getting off topic here, but fuel cells are quickly becoming a pet peeve of mine.
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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.
Ethanol is a lot easier to transport, refill,... than hydrogen. I bet a lot of energy is wasted in the ethanol->hydrogen reaction. So why not just use the ethanol directly?
More energy is used to purify the ethanol to standards that make it compliant with current internal combustion engines than is ever won back from burning the ethanol. I.e. the ethanol must be modified to emulate gasoline in order to be burned directly, and that takes a lot of energy.
Ethanol having its hydrogen extracted doesn't require any such purification process, making the conversion of ethanol->hydrogen, then burning the hydrogen, vastly more effecient than burning the ethanol directly. three times more effecient, according to the article. This leads to a situation where we can remove traditional energy sources from the equation, using the sun+soil+water to grow the crop, using sun+some small amount of energy to ferment, using some small amount of energy to extract the hydrogen, then burning the hydrogen. As long as the energy won from the sun is greater than the energy used to ferment the ethanol and to extract the hydrogen we have a self-sustaining energy economy (assuming we aren't draining acquafers and the like).
Best of all, we can produce the energy here at home, and stop pouring dollars into countries with regressive religions and toxic idealogies...which in turn might do something to slow the spread of toxic idealogies in our own countries.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
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
Yes, but you don't use that iron or toaster 24 hours per day, do you?
... but not 24 hours/day, I'll grant you that.
I could, if I put my mind to it.
Really what I want to do is make a first slice of toast, then iron that slice while toasting a second slice
-kgj
-kgj
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."
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)...
Now, Lanny Schmidt of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Xenophon Verykios of the University of Patras, Greece, and colleagues have developed a potentially portable ethanol converter. In it, a solution of ethanol and water passes through a fuel injector--a nozzle that ordinarily pumps gasoline into a car's motor--and into a gently heated chamber, where it vaporizes and mixes with air. The mixture then passes through a porous plug of aluminum oxide covered with rhodium and cerium oxide, which catalyzes reactions that yield hydrogen and carbon dioxide. The reactions heat the catalyst to over 700C, which keeps the process going. The gadget converts essentially all of the hydrogen in ethanol into hydrogen gas, the researchers report.
"Their process has the advantage that it is very, very fast," says James Dumesic, a chemical engineer at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who is working on producing hydrogen from sugars. But he points out that the ethanol process also generates a lot of carbon monoxide, which the high-power fuel cells that might someday propel cars cannot tolerate. Gabor Somorjai, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, points out that rhodium happens to be "the most expensive catalyst you can ever make."
Earth is closest to the sun (perihelion) when the northern hemisphere is experiencing winter, and furthest (aphelion) when the northern hemisphere is experiencing summer. (In 2004, perihelion was on Jan 4, and aphelion will be July 5. [source])
Earth's perihelion: 147,000,000 km = 8.17 light-minutes
Earth's aphelion: 152,000,000 km = 8.44 light-minutes [source]
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.
it takes more energy to produce the ethanol than you get back in stored chemical energy. I am sure that no one disputes that.
I dispute this. Having grown up on a grain farm I have a very good handle on the fuel and fertilizer inputs. Being a hobbiest beer and winemaker I have a very good handle on the mashing and fermentation processes. Being very good friends with a fellow who runs a commercial water distillation plant I have a very good handle on the state of high efficieny distillation systems.
This idea stems from work by David Plimentel at Cornel. (see my other post) David analysed horribly ineffecient coal fired distillation systems. His assumptions are incorrect.
One example is as follows. corn can easily produce over 100 bushles per acre. Barley can easily produce over 40 bushels per acre in the dry land farming areas I grew up in. Since barley weighs in at 48 lbs/bushel - that is nominally a tonne of grain per acre.
A 40 acre feild can be plowed in about 6 hours using a tractor and plow that runs about 3 1/2 MPH and burns about 3-4 gallons of fuel per hour. This means that plowing the feild can be done with under about 20 gallons of fuel - or about 1/2 barrel. A tractor of this size is about 70 horsepower and that compares favorably to your SUV which burns 3 gallons of fuel per hour while running down the highway at 60 MPH while it gets 20 MPG fuel economy.
It takes about 4 trips over the feild - one for 1st spring working, another for sowing the grain, another to take it off and another for working the field in the fall. Typically it will lay fallow for one year in 4 and during this year it will need to be worked 3-4 times. Since each trip requires in the ball park of a 1/2 barrel of fuel, the farmer will use about 1/2 x 4 x 1.5 = 3 barrels per crop for the 40 acre feild. To this we need to add fertilizers and these typically are applied when I was doing it at about 40 lbs/acre and each sack of fertilizer weighted 80 lbs so that 40 acre field needed 20 sacks of fertilizer or about 3/4 tonne. Present day fertilization levels are much higher mind you.
Nevertheless, chemically the fertilizer was something like 11-48-0 or 11-55-0 and this translates to 11% nitrogen by weight - typically in the form of ammonium phosphate. The chemical formula is NH4H2P2O5. If we look at jsut the nitrogen which is typically made by starting with Methane (CH4) and replacing the Carbon with a Nitrogen then we are looking at about 11% by weight Nitrogen (which is what the 1st number stands for) and that works out to adding about 11% of 3/4 of a tonne of Nitrogen to the feild. This works out to about 165 lbs of Nitrogen.
On a per pound basis the energy in Methane is not all that much different than liquid fuels... a few percent but within 15%. There is more energy in the carbon bonds than the hydrogen bonds so fuels like Diesel carry more BTU per pound than gasoline (predomenantly parafines: C(n)H(2n+2)) and similarly gasoline carries more BTU per pound than methane.
atomic weights: C=12, N=14, H=1 This implies that CH4=16 and NH4=18. They are within 12% of each other. Thus it is fair to say that 165 LBS of Nitrogen on the feild is about the same as 18/14x165=212lbs NH4.
Since the methane is lighter it is fair to say that we'll need in the ball park of 200 lbs CH4 as a chemical feedstock. At 8 lbs/gallon (Gasoline), 200 lbs represents about 25 gallons or just over 1/2 barrel of oil equivalent (BOE).
Well - we started with the farmer using 3 barrels of oil in the form of liquid fuel to plough the land. Next we calculated the energy input by way of Nitrogen in the form of NH4 and got about 1/2 barrel more - albeit at a low fertilization level so lets double it!!! Now our farmer is up to 4 barrels for his crop of 40 acres. That is 10 acres per barrel... but we do have other unaccounted for energy inputs like the coal used t
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?!
The max theoretical energy conversion by plants using chlorophyll is only about 12%. [src: http://w3.aces.uiuc.edu/NRES/LPPBP/PathW.html]
This does NOT include the losses incurred by converting the resulting plant matter to booze!
So, yeah, solar panels are by far more efficient. But still suck. By "335kJ" I assume you mean '335 kJ/sec' or 335kW, and that would require 335m^2*(1/0.20) = 1,675 square meters of solar panel. The numbers are so big I am questioning the simple math.
The most disgusting thing is that I am going to disagree with you on the fuel cells from Ethanol sucking (well, you didn't say as much, but...): why? Because you don't use prime plant stock to create it. Ethanol can be made from much of the crap stock that is not worth the bother of bailing and / or packaging. Or the crap that goes bad. As long as there is some sugar left to distill (I mean, hell):...
And most importantly, nuke won't happen fast enough to clean our air before I die. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of a bunch of smaller nuke plants. Not portable... I have my limits. But hell, the biggest sin in the transportation world is that nobody is building even CRUISE ships with nuclear engines. wtf?
Cheers
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
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...