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.

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.

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.

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.

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.