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Hydrogen Fuel Cells Running On Sunflower Oil
tigersaw writes "You've heard about Biodiesel , Greasecars, and Fuel Cells for a while now. At yesterday's meeting of the American Chemical Society, researchers from the University of Leeds in England described a novel approach that combines these ideas in a fuel cell device that employs steam and two separate catalyts to generate hydrogen using sunflower oil. Experimental results show a hydrogen yield of 90 percent, versus 70 percent in other hydrogen fuel cell technologies. 'The sunflower oil used is the same type found on grocery shelves. "We would happily toss our salad with it," says the researcher, who adds that the process can also work with other types of vegetable oils.'"
In America, "Tossing Salad" refers to eating out someone's asshole as well as the meaning you suggested. It generally refers to gay prison oral to anal sex.
It obviously escaped someone that such a benign comment also has a decidely "non-benign" alternative meaning. That kinda makes it funny.
ymmv
The vehicular power requirements of the United States average close to 200 GW. Then you have losses in transmission, conversion and storage. Total US electric generation capacity in 2002 was about 900 GW.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
And then since hydrogens's only a carrier (like a rechargeable battery - there is no such thing as a "hydrogen well") you still need a real energy source to "charge" it. Sunflower oil might be a potential source...until you do a back-of-the-envelope on how many arable acres you would have to grow it on and what percentage (most) of the US's arable acres are only so due to energy-intensive and oil-intensive farming providing water, fertilizer, pesticides, etc. and how much of the "naturally arable" land has been paved over for suburbs and cities (e.g. the entire Santa Clara valley aka Silicon Valley).
Even this sunflower one makes me wonder: what are the fertilizer and farm equipment inputs? where does the energy for the steam come from? So what's the net energy return? I'd put money on it being no better than ethanol!
An interesting post I saw else where: for good energy return on low density sources like biomass you want to have minimal energy inputs from petro or other sources. As an energy cash crop you want to have something that grows pretty much like a weed. Guess what produces good quality oil and grows like a weed? :-) Well, "weed" of course, or actually hemp. Wouldn't it be funny if we need to rely on hemp for the "Peak Oil" time.
> first being energy "return": 10:1 for Alaskan/Texan oil. [...] ethanol 1:1 [...]
Really? Where do you get your numbers from?
According to the Wikipedia entry. Considering the whole life-cycle oil has a yield of 1:1.843 for diesel petrol, and bioethanol one of 1:2.34
> until you do a back-of-the-envelope on how many arable acres you would have to grow it on
With high-yield rapeseed, 3% of the arable area of the US would be needed to cover its need of oil for transportation.
Some Algae have even a better yield.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
Because hydrogen only produces water vapour as it burns and not CO2 (plus H2O), like ethanol etc. Plus hydrogen storage has come on a long way, with foam and aluminium cell type storage mediums being used.
The problem with Ethanol as a fuel for fuel cells (solid oxide FCs) is that you will have coke (carbon) formation at the anode, which will kill the catalyst sites, and thereby the cell will stop producing electricity. Moreover, coke formation will probably cause the cells to rupture, as the stresses caused by the carbon deposits are fairly large. A lot of research is currently being done on finding new anodes that inhibit coke formation, like using copper instead of nickel as a catalyst.
A SEID=142064. The station generates the hydrogen by hydrolysis, which is powered by a wind turbine on the shore of Lake Ontario. The result is 65kg of 100% clean hydrogen a day, apparantly enough to power 20 cars. Note that the turbine isn't dedicated to hydrogen production... it also provides power to the Toronto grid.
The second problem with ethanol, like canola, is that it has to be manufactured: yeast will form alcohol from biomass such as corn, wheat, etc, but the initial biomass is still required to be cultivated. Plus, ethanol fermentation is relatively slow, and will only result in a maximum of about 10% ethanol by volume. 10% v/v of ethanol is low, so you'll have to expend energy to remove the water i.e. distillation, or some sort of liquid-liquid extraction. So as you see, there's inherent problems with ethanol as well, although I think that they are easy to ovecome, and I also think that ethanol-fuelled fuel cells will be a viable technology.
One hydrogen-generation technique that is viable is hydrolysis via wind-power. Hydrogenics Corp. http://www.hydrogenics.com/ recently unveiled a hydogen-fuelling station in Toronto at the Canadian National Exhibition http://www.hydrogenics.com/ir_newsdetail.asp?RELE
IMHO, hydrolysis is one of the best ways to produce hydrogen, as long as it can be done by running on a clean electricity source. Hell, just set-up some giant treadmills, and pay people to power the hydrolysers... come to think of it,this would also solve Toronto's homeless problem.
I find that many people are quite pessimistic when it comes to the feasibility of alternative fuels. Encouraging research such as this is good for the general public's morale, hopefully sooner than later American farmers, rather than terrorist states will power our vehicles.
BBC also has a story on this...
All the torrents you could want.
I wonder if they have tried this one. It's designed to supress methane production and increase hydrogen production.
From the article:
...a Raneynickel catalyst, named after Murray Raney, who first patented the alloy in 1927.
Raney-nickel is a porous catalyst made of about 90 percent nickel (Ni) and 10 percent aluminum (Al). While Raney-nickel proved somewhat effective at separating hydrogen from biomass-derived molecules, the researchers improved the material's effectiveness by adding more tin (Sn), which stops the production of methane and instead generates more hydrogen. Relative to other catalysts, the Raney-NiSn can perform for long time periods (at least 48 hours) and at lower temperatures (roughly 225 degrees Celsius).
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.