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.'"

Comments

“We would happily toss our salad with it,

[spacecowboy420]

They toss their own salads?

Yikes...

[keiferb]

"We would happily toss our salad with it,"

They need a much, much better PR person.

i should reconsider my plans

[thhamm]

best paid jobs of 2050:

4. microsoft historian
3. slashdot moderator
2. crop flyer
1. sunflower farmer

Ultimate hippy car

[jebiester]

A car that runs on flower power?. Wouldn't that make the ultimate hippy car?

Especially as a VW combi van.

Tossing Salads

[cdgod]

I told myself, once tossing salads became a common part of slashdot, I would have to switch fields.

That's it I now officially hand in my slashdot account.

This could actually be really cool...

[Drunken_Jackass]

The modern Hydrogen economy has to get over a huge hurdle in the wide-scale distribution network of H2.

Distribution for H2 is pathetically inefficient. In order to ship it at an efficient level, they have to compress it into liquid form. That takes up a lot of energy, along with the associated costs of now transporting a very cold liquid (yeah - not very energy efficient either).

If H2 can be made using a novel approach, you can minimize the huge potential transport and distribution costs by setting up a lot of small production facilities (local refineries?).

This could be a pretty big deal.

Re:This could actually be really cool...

[mOoZik]

I disagree. On Alan Alda's "Scientific American Frontiers," they showed a novel approach in which hydrogen is produced "on site." That is, it uses a reverse fuel cell in every "hydrogen station" to develop hydrogen, then it is liquified, and delivered via hydrogen pumps, much like the way you pump gas, but with a slightly different hookup. That, in my opinion, is a better means of distribution as it completely eliminates the need for transport, pipes, large factories, and so forth.

Re:This could actually be really cool...

[R2.0]

But where does the energy to make the H2 come from? Currently, it takes a cubic assload of electricity to generate hydrogen, so the distributed production model would need huge increases in the electrical power generating infrastructure, which is already near maximum utilization.

The alternate is producing the H2 at a location with cheap power (hydro, desert solar collectors), and then shipping the H2 where it needs to be. But that has its own issues, as you pointed out.

I'll be honest - I'm not holding out for the "hydrogen economy" in my lifetime. Sounds to much like shale oil - grand idea, sounds good politically, and goes precisely nowhere. (Kind of like Carter's other big idea - Middle East Peace)

Imagine...

[baywulf]

Imagine if the $50 billion or whatever the US spent invading Iraq was spent of H2 research, production and infrastructure?

Re:Imagine...

[nelsonal]

Do you have any concept of the amount of infastructure currently devoted to gasoline delivery that would largely be wasted in hydrogen distribution, or the amount of new infastructure required? And that is beside the point that they only way we can currently produce hydrogen on any sort of efficient scale is to strip it from crude or natural gas. I'd put a guess that the new h2 infastructure would cost two orders of magnitude byond your Iraq cost figure, and we would still be getting the h2 from oil (stripping h2 in a factory and burning it in your car produces less polution than burning fossil fuels in your car).

So....

[Smidge204]

So how much energy is required to generate the steam that produces the hydrogen? Do you get enough H2 to make it worth the cost and effort?

It's like an all-electric car... sure it uses no gas but that power has to come from somewhere to begin with. You've only moved the problem to someone else's back yard.

At least with Biodiesel you get out more energy than you put in to make the conversion (the balance of the energy comes from the sun, which the plants have collected and turned into the raw oil).
=Smidge=

Centralised Power

[sbszine]

It's like an all-electric car... sure it uses no gas but that power has to come from somewhere to begin with. You've only moved the problem to someone else's back yard.

That's the whole point: one problem to solve (at the power plant) instead of many to solve (at the cars). If you run many electric cars from a single power station, then you have:

• one point to filter for emissions (in the case of fossil fuels)
• no car pollution in cities(!)
• an easy upgrade path when you replace your coal plant with biodiesel or solar or fusion or whatever
• possible economies of scale (subject to electrical transmission losses)

...and so on.

Re:Centralised Power

[Smidge204]

one point to filter for emissions
That's not necessarily a good thing. Basically you would be concentrting all of the resulting pollution in one area instead of spreading it out more or less evenly. Assuming nature cleans up the pollution at a certain rate (say, as by density of plant life and large bodies of water to absorb and recycle CO2) then you actually made the problem much worse in some areas.

no car pollution in cities
Ah, well, as long as it's not in your back yard I guess it's okay then!

an easy upgrade path when you replace your coal plant with biodiesel or solar or fusion or whatever
Except that the existing power distribution system is already strained and aging such that it can barely keep up with peek demands today. It would cost billions upon billions to construct new powerplants and additional infastructure to handle the additional demand of the now millions of electrical vehicles feeding off of it.

possible economies of scale
See above. In general you try not to build powerplants too far from where the power is used (obvious?). And you will definately need more of them right from the start.

Now take a straight biodiesel economy model:

Virtually no infastructure costs. Everything you need to produce, transport and distribute liquid fuel is already in place.

Less pollution on the grand scale. BD burns cleaner than the oil and coal (especially coal) used in powerplants, and the resulting pollution is spread out evenly such that nature can process it more effectively. If you're worried about soot (which BD produces less of anyway) there are already very effective filtering systems for small vehicles in widespread use.

Excellent scaling economics. Unlike electricity you CAN produce/refine all of the BD in one spot for the entire country (even though you probably wouldn't want to). There is basically no restriction on the location of the refineries, and the distribution infastructure of trucks, boats and pipes is more flexible than high voltage transmission lines.
The only problem is "where does te energy come from in the first place?", which the centalized electric system doesn't address either. Fusion power has to actually exist before you can even consider it, and all of the other possibilities such as oil, coal and nuclear all rely on the very same sources we're trying to get away from.

I have read articles about the possible use of algae for BD production. According to the article (which I found a version of on google) you can farm a high-oil content algae species for the purpose, which eliminates basically all of the problems of cultivating and fertilizing land for growing plants (algae doesn't need tilling...) Simply excavate a shallow lake somewhere relatively low and let gravity fill it with seawater, then start growing. If you're clever you can use a system of dykes to let the tide purge the lake for you and filter off the algae as the lake drains. Then you run it through a giant juicer and add a little methanol and lye to remove the glycerin from the product, and you got Biodiesel ready to burn in just about any existing vehicle.
=Smidge=

Re:Centralised Power

[llefler]

While I agree with your assessment of biodiesel being a good alternative to fossil fuels, I think you've missed some points on centralized production.

Yes, all of your pollutants would be centralized as well. But a modern oil burning power plant will release dramatically less pollutants than the equivalent (ICE) internal combustion engines. With a power plant, weight doesn't matter. That allows them to focus on production efficiencies and reducing pollutants. As new technologies are invented they only have to be installed in one place rather than 50-100,000 privately owned vehicles. And there are also benefits in regulating. For most people, if they didn't insist on driving huge SUVs, current electric technology would be more than sufficient. And for most, charging could be scheduled during off peak hours, reducing stress on the grid.

Economies of scale. In the 80's an ICE was only about 20% efficient. I'm sure that has increased with on-board computers and fuel injection, but since most of the inefficiencies were from heat loss, I doubt that it has increased dramatically. Steam generation and electric motors, OTOH, are extremely efficient. There will be losses in power transmission, but those are known variables.

I'm going to have to agree with others here, there is no one alternative to fossil fuels. Electric, whether with fuel cell or battery technology is one of them. Biodiesel and Ethanol is another. They address different market segments.

Re:Centralised Power

[Pentagram]

one point to filter for emissions

That's not necessarily a good thing. Basically you would be concentrting all of the resulting pollution in one area instead of spreading it out more or less evenly. Assuming nature cleans up the pollution at a certain rate (say, as by density of plant life and large bodies of water to absorb and recycle CO2) then you actually made the problem much worse in some areas.

I think that the poster's point was the potential to use technology to reduce pollution, such as stack scrubbers. This is not feasible to replicated for each product that uses fuel.

no car pollution in cities

Ah, well, as long as it's not in your back yard I guess it's okay then!

So tall chimney stacks are no good then, because they're simply moving the pollution about! And car exhausts? Waste of time! Just let out the exhaust gases through the heating system :)


Fusion power has to actually exist before you can even consider it, and all of the other possibilities such as oil, coal and nuclear all rely on the very same sources we're trying to get away from.


Wind, solar, wave, tidal power. And fission is still better than oil or coal.

Re:Centralised Power

[Smidge204]

For most people, if they didn't insist on driving huge SUVs, current electric technology would be more than sufficient.

There are frequent brownouts in many urban areas during the summer because people are running their air conditioners. It's less frequent where I am, but it still happens. If the existing system can't fully satisfy peak demands, then switching everyone to electric cars is only going to make the problem worse - even "off-peak" charging, since off-peak will then become peak as millions of people plug their cars in to juice up. Lots of infastructure upgrades will be required to make it work...

Economies of scale. In the 80's an ICE was only about 20% efficient. I'm sure that has increased with on-board computers and fuel injection, but since most of the inefficiencies were from heat loss, I doubt that it has increased dramatically.

It hasn't :) And while it generally pays to "build bigger" (large powerplants having much better efficiencies) and electric motors nowadays are approaching 90%+ efficiency, battery storage systems are still extremely inefficient. By the time you get from the fuel to the road I'm not sure if you're spending the energy any wiser.

Doing some googling on the subject:

Coal powerplant: 45%
Transmission lines: 92% overall
Battery Charging: 87%**
Battery Discharging: 33%**
Electric motor: 98%

* It says "thermal" efficiency, but I'll take it as overall fuel->electric efficiency
** For lead-acid batrery. Depends on battery construction, charge and condition.

Multiply that up and you get an overall fuel->road efficiency of just under 12%. Ouch... if you have any other sources of information please share.

I'm going to have to agree with others here, there is no one alternative to fossil fuels. Electric, whether with fuel cell or battery technology is one of them. Biodiesel and Ethanol is another. They address different market segments.

Yes, exactly. My feeling is, though, that trying to replace petrolium fuels as directly as possible will be more sucessful than trying to replace/augment the existing infastructure. The "system" works pretty well and if it can be used it wold be worth it.
=Smdige=

Byproducts

[Anonymous Coward]

In the article they mentioned that the byproducts of methane and carbon dioxide were produced. Isn't it possible to generate electricity using methane? I remeber hearing about some dairy farmers that were doing that. I don't know what the effects of that would be, but it could be one more way for the system to become even more efficent, and possibly self sustaining.

Re:Maybe it's because I'm English...

[spacecowboy420]

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.

Only if you ignore the realities

[Tau Zero]

H2 from sunflower oil. Okay, sounds great. But tell me, how much sunflower oil would it take to power the nation (or any reasonable fraction thereof, such as the transport sector) using this invention?

You don't know? Didn't even stop to ask?

I didn't think so.

Being a wet blanket bugs me sometimes, but somebody has to do the dirty work of dragging everything back down to earth and facing facts. Here are some:

1. The reactor doesn't generate hydrogen with 90% efficiency, it generates hydrogen of 90% purity. Given that the off-gas is about half methane (RTFA) it appears to me to be very inefficient. (Note: neither the author nor your Slashdot editor bothered to RTFA either.)
2. There are already engines, and even fuel cells, which can burn hydrocarbons directly. Sunflower oil makes reasonable diesel fuel as-is. Solid-oxide or molten-carbonate fuel cells can reform fuels internally, and while they might coke up on straight sunflower oil they'd probably work just fine after it had been steam-reformed a bit.
3. Hydrogen as a motor fuel suffers from huge problems with storage. People see it as sexy but for all the wrong reasons.

I could see this as another technology for making compact laptop power supplies whose fuel couldn't be used to bring down an airplane (just TRY making a fuel-air bomb with sunflower oil). The key to renewable energy? Gimme a break.

Re:Only if you ignore the realities

[JGski]

Yep. Hydrogen is a pretty poor energy carrier (not energy source!!) for several reasons, first being energy "return": oil is 100:1 for Saudi oil (100 barrels out for 1 barrel in to cover extraction, transportation and refining) to as low as 10:1 for Alaskan/Texan oil. Compare to other sources: natural gas 50:1, wind 3:1, solar 4:1 (silicon fab operations and materials), ethanol 1:1 or less (need to count inputs from fertilizer and farmer equipment fuel), hydrogen 0.5:1 (energy in for electrolysis with losses plus transportation).

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.

Re:Only if you ignore the realities

[Yokaze]

> 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.

Re:Only if you ignore the realities

[bhima]

I don't think it matters what percentage of energy consumption a given energy strategy will meet; because the hegemony of petroleum is not likely to be repeated soon, by any alternative energy sources.

The real problem is the efficiency and the practicality. (Your other points)

Biodiesel and Ethanol are good examples. Biodiesel can be made from a variety of sources, is efficient enough to be workable now, is compatible with the existing energy infrastructure, and is compatible with a large number of diesel engines (In fact I use B20 nearly exclusively). Ethanol is problematic in a number of ways, but still more or less workable. So given the right situations alternative energy sources can be useful, despite the fact that an entire economy doesn't use them. And given enough alternatives western societies can lessen their dependence on energy sources which must be purchased from unsavory regimes. This can be nothing but a good thing

Unfortunately the site is down so I haven't read the article so I can't comment about this specific implementation. However, I view anything H2 related as problematic because of both its incompatibility with existing energy delivery infrastructure and the ridiculous hype surrounding it.

Re:Only if you ignore the realities

[be951]

First, from TFA:

"Producing hydrogen from sunflower oil could provide a more environmentally-friendly alternative by reducing [pollutants such as carbon monoxide and greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane] while offering an abundant, low-cost and renewable resource that reduces dependence on foreign oil," says the study's lead researcher Valerie Dupont, Ph.D., an energy engineer with the University of Leeds in England.

Of course, carbon dioxide and methane are also produced by the process, so I'm not sure what the advantage is supposed to be. Still, the aim seems to be reducing pollution by not actually burning fuel, with a side benefit of using less petroleum. In that context, using hydrogen from vegetable oil might make some sense. Regarding your specific points:

The reactor doesn't generate hydrogen with 90% efficiency, it generates hydrogen of 90% purity. Given that the off-gas is about half methane (RTFA) it appears to me to be very inefficient.

First part (efficiency vs. purity) you quite right. I'm not sure what the "more efficient" claim is supposed to mean. The most likely thing that comes to mind is that when you use the hydrogen in a fuel cell, more pure would mean more efficient.

There are already engines, and even fuel cells, which can burn hydrocarbons directly. Sunflower oil makes reasonable diesel fuel....

Quite right. It isn't clear what advantage this new process is supposed to afford, except possibly the aforementioned greater purity which could mean better performace and/or longer life from the actual hydrogen fuel cell components.

Hydrogen as a motor fuel suffers from huge problems with storage.

Again, pretty true. Ultimately if we are going to use hydrogen fuel cells to power vehicles, the reformer and fuel cell need to be small and light enough to be on-board. They'll be fed by the real fuel (vegetable oil, ethanol, gasoline, whatever). Eventually, that will be possible/practical. Whether it will ever be preferable to biodiesel (or better yet a hybrid biodiesel/electric drivetrain) or whatever is the next big thing, is anyone's guess.

Re:Only if you ignore the realities

[syukton]

I like how you ended that. You're right. It's been said that if 6% of the US landmass were growing hemp, our foreign energy needs would be zero. 6% of the US landmass is quite a bit of territory, but the stuff will literally grow in any part of the country. Having localized energy production capability in each state (or even county?) would be nice.

Hemp played a big role during WW2 when our hemp supplies from the Phillipines were cut off by the Japanese. Even though the Marijuana Tax Act of the late 1930's had made it effectively illegal to grow any form of Cannabis (long story there) during WW2 farmers were able to get permits to farm hemp to produce rope and canvas (similarity: canvas/cannabis) for boat riggings and tents needed by the military.

I'd like to see a calculation of how many acres of hemp it takes to power a humvee for a year. I bet that's a statistic the US government could swallow.

It takes a lot of power

[Engineer-Poet]

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.

Why hydrogen?

[david.given]

The thing I don't understand is why everyone's focusing on hydrogen as an energy transport medium. It's lousy. Sure, the energy-per-unit-mass is high, but to store it you have to use high-pressure containment vessels or cryogenics. Complex and expensive. Just pumping the stuff from one tank to another is problematic.

Why not use a fuel that's liquid at STP? Ethanol, say? The energy-per-unit-mass is lower, but it's so much denser you end up with a far higher energy-per-unit-volume. Storing and pumping liquids is a solved problem; you can use the existing infrastructure built by the petrochemical industry. Ethanol can be burnt and synthesised by fuel cells, too.

So what's with the hydrogen obsession?

Re:Why hydrogen?

[david.given]

I thought the coke problem had been solved --- methanol fuel cells for small electronics are just beginning to go into production. How do these avoid it? Do they just assume that the lifetime of the fuel cell is going to be short enough that they don't need to worry about it?

And besides, there's other ways of using the stuff. Steam reformation will break methanol down producing hydrogen, which you can then feed into the fuel cell. If all else fails, just burn the ethanol in an IC engine.

And as for producing ethanol through fermentation --- that wasn't really what I meant. There are other ways of making it; I've heard that you can synthesise it directly by running a fuel cell in reverse, although embarassingly I can't find a reference. I was really thinking of using it as an energy storage medium, rather than as a primary source.

(Although organic production is good --- if you can get the efficiency up. If some budding genetic engineer can produce, say, sugar cane that produces ethanol directly, they'll make one hell of a lot of money...)

What is the current technology in storing hydrogen, anyway?

Re:Why hydrogen?

[Tiger the Lion]

Sure, you can use steam reforming to produce hydrogen. The problem with steam reforming, however, is that it requires a lot of energy (you need a lot of heat and pressure - 1000K and 4bar). So the whole point is to avoid reforming.

The methanol fuel cells being produced by Toshiba use a polymer electrolyte at low temperature. The low temperature only forms CO2 without the formation of coke.

SOFCs on the other hand, are generally high temperature (1200K), that will form coke if fed hydrocarbon fuels directly due to the high catalytic activity of the state-of-the-art nickel catalysts. Current research is focusing on using a copper catalyst, which has a lower activity, thus little to no coke formation.

As for forming ethanol by running a FC in reverse, that is not true. While theoretically feasible, it is neither thermodynamically or kinetically favoured.

Current hydrogen storage technology is looking into sodium borohydrides (NaBH4 and NaAlH4), though I don't know much about them.

No, I'm not agreeing with you

[Engineer-Poet]

If you are arguing that the power requirements of vehicles powered by electrolytic hydrogen are minimal, you are very much mistaken. The transmission grid has plenty of unused capacity during off-peak hours to move the required wattage, but the energy to fill that capacity has to come from somewhere. We're running our nuke plants flat-out most of the time, hydropower is limited, wind is a paltry few GW, natural gas supplies are tight; this means burning more coal in those few plants which aren't base-loaded and also runnng flat-out.

If I recall correctly, the efficiency of the electrolysis/fuel cell cycle is about 50%. Some types of batteries do much better, at 80% or so. You're going to need a lot more power to run cars on electrolytic hydrogen than on batteries, and the difference between the two is something like 30% of current consumption - far from trivial.

On the other hand, with the current market penetration of electric vehicles you could do things either way and it would be cheap, especially if you used off-peak electricity exclusively. It's when you begin converting substantial parts of the vehicle fleet that the impact would be felt; you'd have to make big investments in the generating part of the infrastructure, mostly to replace low duty-cycle peaking generators burning expensive fuel with high duty-cycle or base-load plants burning cheap fuel.

Cute but bunk ...

[fygment]

... because:

1) by-products are carbon dioxide and methane.

2) unseen by-products: whatever is required to grow sunflowers (fertilizers & their production, tractor fuel by-products, etc)

3) scaling: how many sunflowers does it take to make how much usable fuel?

4) scaling: how much viable farm land can afford to be lost to the production of "fuel" vice "food"?

Fuel cells are really neat. The problem of fuelling fuel cells is huge. Even without fuel cells the whole concept of biomass based fuels simply can't scale to current demand . Think about it, the U.S. produces amounts of oil measured in millions of barrels per day to sustain current consumption (let alone what it imports)! What quantity of biomass is required to come close to that and what are you willing to sacrifice to do it?

Sorry, but this story is a non-starter. If we're serious about addressing the dangers of fossil fuels, then we have to cut back on our energy consumption first and foremost. Anything else is just a "diet pill" approach. Don't change your fuel or engine, learn to live without/depend less on the vehicle(s).

Did someone mention realities?

[Engineer-Poet]

With high-yield rapeseed, 3% of the arable area of the US would be needed to cover its need of oil for transportation.

Consumption of diesel fuel in the USA in 2002 was 2.455 million barrels/day, or 39.4 billion gallons per year. At the high yield figure of 145 gallons per acre and 100% conversion to biodiesel, that would require the production of 271 million acres, or 425 thousand square miles.

Total area of the USA is 3,618,784 square miles, so you're talking 12% of the total land area (including Alaska) and a much higher fraction of the arable land.

Note that if you want to replace the gasoline as well, you have to multiply that figure by about 4.5. This is clearly not possible.

Amazing...

[zxflash]

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...

A better catalyst?

[Randym]

The catalysts, which are key to the process, orchestrate a series of chemical maneuvers that ultimately result in an increased hydrogen yield. First, one of the catalysts (the nickel-based unit) absorbs the oxygen from the air and this interaction heats up the reactor bed of the device. Simultaneously, in the presence of heat, another catalyst (a carbon-based adsorbent) releases any carbon dioxide previously trapped in the device.

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).