Fuel Tanks Made of Corncob Waste

Roland Piquepaille writes "The National Science Foundation is running a story on how corncob waste can be used to created carbon briquettes with complex nanopores capable of storing natural gas. These methane storage systems may encourage mass-market natural gas cars. In fact, these 'briquettes are the first technology to meet the 180 to 1 storage to volume target set by the U.S. Department of Energy in 2000.' They can lead to flat and compact tanks and have already been installed in a pickup truck used regularly by the Kansas City Office of Environmental Quality. And as the whole natural gas infrastructure exists already, this new technology could be soon adopted by car manufacturers."

Comments

Further adaptions

[Shadow Wrought]

Perhaps they could use this technology for the tailpipe, too...

Supply?

[rsmith-mac]

These methane storage systems may encourage mass-market natural gas cars.

Do we even have enough natural gas for this to work? I thought it was expected to run low about the time petroleum was.

Re:Supply?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Fossil fuel natural gas is also a finite source. But dont forget America alone has 100 million cows and about 120 million pigs. Cant guess how many million chicken. All their waste produced methane. Currently their wastes are a mixture of methane, nutrient rich fertilizer and small amounts of extremely stinky gases mainly H2S.

If these can be seperated you get so many benefits. Pollution/odour abatement, organic fertilizer, auto fuel, green house gas emission reduction, etc etc. Last time I actually did the calculation I came up with six cows can keep one car running. With a million cow, we are talking about 15% reduction in oil consumption. Since we import 50% of the oil, this would represent 30% reduction in oil imports. Add the pigs and chicken, we can run our cars on their shit instead of importing oil from the middle east. On national security standpoint alone, we should be investing very heavily on recovering fuel from farm waste.

Re:Supply?

[Radon360]

Biomass would be a good way to make methane renewable. However, the trick is removing all the impurities, such as carbon dioxide from the raw gas. Right now, that isn't very cost-effective, compared to some natural gas wells. Heck, the United States would have quite a bit more petroleum-derived natural gas for its use if an inexpensive way to remove carbon dioxide were developed (many sources of natural gas are contaminated with varing levels of carbon dioxide, some to the point that they are unusable).

Re:Between this and corn-derived ethanol...

[Perseid]

"Hooey, it's hot in here. Hey, bob, what's that popping sound outside?"

"Oh, my God! My car!"

Natural gas is great fuel

[asadodetira]

Compressed natural gas (mostly methane and low C alkanes) has been in use in Argentina for years, it's cheaper and cleaner than gasoline, the autonomy of compressed gas is lower but for city driving it doesn't matter, and cars can still use gasoline because the engine has only minor modifications. This method seems to admit lower pressure in the tank, and might enable to store more gas without need of thick heavy steel was for containing it. Sounds like a good idea to me.

Re:Natural gas is great fuel

[virtual_mps]

Sounds like a good idea to me. Sounds like an idiotic idea to me. Natural gas was billed as a cheap, clean fuel years ago. So people started using it, for houses, electricity generation, industry, etc. Now natural gas is an overused resource, with oversubscribed pipelines, severe seasonal price shocks, etc. Why on earth would we start converting cars to use an energy source that's already overutilized? It's going to be a lot easier to deploy a more sensible alternative vehicle fuel (e.g., biodiesel) than to convert tens of millions of furnaces, power plants, and other durable consumers to use something else because the natural gas distribution network can't cope with the demand of a bunch of new cars trying to use it also.

Re:Natural gas is great fuel

[juancn]

You are forgetting that natural gas can be replaced by gas made from decomposing organic matter (i.e. trash), which is renewable (although the CO2 emmisions are still there, but it's the same with biodiesel).

Adapting a regular gasoline car to natural gas, costs around U$S 700 in Argentina. The equipment pays itself after a year or so.

The economics may be different in the US, though. For example, some year ago, before natural gas was widespread, we used a mixture of regular-gas and ethanol on some parts of the country (no modifications to the engine required, but as with natural gas, a thicker engine oil is needed). The biggest problem was that the fuel hoses and some plastics in the car worn out faster due to the ethanol.

Brazil still has widespread use of ethanol mixed with the gas.

Re:Infrastrucutre in place?

[LWATCDR]

While I am not a big fan of ethanol I have to say the problems you are having are because E85 cars are flex fuel cars.
If you knew that you where only going to run ethanol you could run a much higher compression ratio in the engine and or much more spark advance. That would give you mileage and performance much closer to gasoline.
You can actually make more power running alcohol than gasoline that is why they use in at Indy and for dragsters. Top alcohol dragsters are faster than gas powered cars. Now Top fuel uses alcohol because it mixes better with nitro.

How it's made

[Mr.Sharpy]

Here's a neat poster (pdf link) about how these briquettes are made.

It looks ultra simple to do. This poster references only 120:1 storage ratio, so maybe there have been process changes that have improved storage capacity. Maybe this will also help with fuel cells that run on methane to provide portable electrical power too. I think this could be an exciting development.

For those hand-wringing about eco issues

[drinkypoo]

...you're a bunch of alarmist buffoons.

Anything you can do with natural gas from a well can be done with methane. It's very easy to produce. Here's how it works. You've got a pond with a tent over it. The pond is full of beneficial bacteria. "Fresh" water (can be contaminated) and sewage are introduced into the bottom center of the pond. Over time the system is colonized with algae. The algae and other organisms digest the sewage, resulting in lots of algae (a resource itself), fairly clean water, and methane (mostly.) The methane can be captured and the algae can be harvested; the algae can be used to make either alcohol or biodiesel depending on what kind it is - some have more carbohydrates, some have more oil.

Right now, a lot of our sewage treatment systems, even the ones that look like oil refineries, are producing and flaring off methane. This is stupid. It should be captured and used. In fact a lot of agricultural producers of shit, like pig farms, are starting to use this technology to power their farms - and in many cases they actually produce enough power not only to run their operation, but to actually make a profit by selling excess to the grid. The resulting effluent has been "cooked" to the point where it can be applied directly to the crops as fertilizer. Normally this is achieved by storing it in an uncovered holding pond for months, where the methane simply escapes.

If we simply applied this technology to waste treatment plants and forced it on those who have a lot of animal shit currently posing a health hazard, we could get a lot of power and it would actually save money for everyone involved.