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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
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.
to create a 1-1.5 gallons of ethanol. Cover article of Harpers last month...
Homer: "one for you" [fills tank]
Homer: "one for me" [fills mouth]
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."
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!
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.)
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.
STOP ROCK VIDEO
But there are two considerations to make here that are not part of the above statement:
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?
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.
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.
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.
But the real trick is reducing the costs of processing cellulose to ethanol to make it competitive with processing glucose from corn (which is more easily broken down) into ethanol. This is trivial when you eliminate all the subsidies, it's just a bit harder when you consider the heavy corn ethanol subsidies. However, companies like Iogen have been producing much more efficient techniques such as enzymatic hydrolysis for breaking down cellulose into an easily fermentable form - which they goes into the yeast fermentation process. The technology is already being deployed at modest scale factories.
So the answer is that yes, yeast do the fermentation. And to make fossil fuel-free, net energy positive ethanol, you just add some weak acid or strong enzymes to the mix earlier on to make sugars that are more easily fermented. As for carbon emissions (as CO2 or otherwise), which you mention, ethanol from cellulose "consumes" as much carbon in the growing plants as it releases when combusted, and in that sense it is both renewable and net-carbon-neutral to the environment. So does ethanol from corn, though the fact that the overall energy production is negative in that case means that the energy deficit has to be made up, generally by burning fossil fuels to generate energy for growing and havesting corn.
Which brings us back to many people complaining here on Slashdot that ethanol is bad for the environment. They just don't understand that ethanol != corn ethanol.
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
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"
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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
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
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.
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...