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Driving on Starch
Roland Piquepaille writes "Using sugar contained in corn or potatoes to build hydrogen-powered fuel cells has already been done. But now, a team of U.S. researchers has developed a new sugar-to-hydrogen technology. Why not put the starch inside the tank of your car? With the help of 13 specific enzymes, 'a car with an approximately 12-gallon tank could hold 27 kilograms (kg) of starch, which is the equivalent of 4 kg of hydrogen. The range would be more than 300 miles, estimates one of the researchers. One kg of starch will produce the same energy output as 1.12 kg (0.38 gallons) of gasoline.' The beauty behind this idea is that no special infrastructure would be needed. Starch could be distributed by your local grocery store."
I want my car to burn hay!
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Wouldn't that be a lot of starch? I mean, wouldn't we then have a shortage of it? I know it's more renewable than gas, but could they even produce enough? They're having a hard enough time with 10% corn for gas. 12 gallons of starch is like, 110 or so bags of starch at the store...
My first thought on reading this is about if it costs to make starch than hydrogen? Sure we can grow starch but there are upper limits on that production method. We'd eventually have to manufacture the starch from non biomass derived sources if we wanted to use it as fuel.
As far as a storage mechanism goes it sounds like it might have advantages but how complicated is the process to break it down for hydrogen? How much does it cost to make the enzymes and what not needed to break it down as well?
Overall an interesting idea but still far less important than the question of where we are going to get energy to make starch or hydrogen in the first place.
The abbreviations are: PPP, pentose phosphate pathway; G1P, glucose-1-phosphate; G6P, glucose-6-phosphate; 6PG, 6-phosphogluconate; Ru5P, ribulose-5-phosphate; and Pi, inorganic phosphate. The enzymes are: #1, glucan phosphorylase; #2, phosphoglucomutase; #3, G-6-P dehydrogenase; #4, 6-phosphogluconate dehydrogenase, #5 Phosphoribose isomerase; #6, Ribulose 5-phosphate epimerase; #7, Transaldolase; #8, Transketolase, #9, Triose phosphate isomerase; #10, Aldolase, #11, Phosphoglucose isomerase: #12, Fructose-1, 6-bisphosphatase; and #13, Hydrogenase.
it looks like they built it like this: starch=>glucose [amylase]=>glycolysis=>pyruvate decarboxylation=>TCA cycle and finally liberating the hydrogen from protons and electrons from the TCA. I wonder from this is how they deal with the enzyme's need for cofactors, corrosion, stability of enzymes and side reactions. it looks promising for sure but it looks like they have a lot of work ahead of them. there is also the problem of the starch settling in the tank and thus being unavailable for the reaction unless that is where it happens in that case what about H2 build up? lastly, with the problem of corn shortages being possible for ethanol, what exactly will happen when starch is used instead as it is also taken from food plant sources?
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Hay is for horses, of courses.
Infuriate left and right
Unfortunately, this would be far from commercialization. I can forsee two problems.
First would be the effective rate of production of hydrogen. Demand for high hydrogen production rates, as in throw the starch into your tank and get your ass on down the road, would probably demand high levels of these enzymes. Which would mean cost.
Second would be the fact that enzymes are protein-based and therefore have finite lifetimes before catalytic activity is lost totally. Potentially, bacterial contamination and consequent enzyme degradation could accelerate this. Cost again, to replenish the enzymes. Freezing and thawing in the winter might be very bad for the enzymes as well.
I think that this process is only viable on a factory scale, where skilled people can manage it under controlled conditions.
Oops, sorry, I forgot the link for that blockquote above about the cost of cooking oil being affected by bio-diesel. Linky here:
c e+of+cooking+oil/2100-11389_3-6114425.html
http://news.com.com/Biodiesel+to+drive+up+the+pri
And here is the tinyurl for it:
http://tinyurl.com/esxef
That Michael Kanellos article in Cnet was dated 2006/9/12 and was entitled, "Biodiesel to drive up the price of cooking oil".
Well, what need to do is bring back external combustion engines. Then we can simply burn anything: Garden waste, wood, coal, anything that will burn. There is enough coal on this planet to fire up steam engines for thousands of years...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Now that oil is getting near to being all used the big plan is to use food crops to run you cars? Brilliant, what can go wrong?
in conjunction with my Jenny Craig diet plan ? If I do a starch exchange with my car how many points do I deduct ? And what are the points for the various starches ? These are importnat questions for millions of Americans
Its not the years, its the mileage
You're right, it is not a power source. Nothing is a power source if we were to take it to a certain degree, oil based products got their energy from the sun, so does ethanol, and this new system using starch.(the sun gets its energy from the fusion, so I guess you could say that is a power source, but that gets its power from the mass, which gets its power from... well... magic!)
But the real important thing is turning it into a form of energy that we can use. We cannot use the sun's energy directly, we instead use plants (corn/sugar for ethanol, or long dead plants for oil) that changes it into chemical energy that we change into a different chemical energy that is then used for kinetic/thermal energy to drive our cars, which then goes entirely to thermal in the form of friction.
Enough with being pedantic and onto the being practical.
Oil is a power source in the sense that it is readily available stored energy. The difference between it and hydrogen is that hydrogen manufactured through electrolysis is manufactured at a 1:1 ratio of energy put in verses energy removed (under perfect conditions). This starch process allows hydrogen to be produced at a rate much closer to a perfect 0:1 (from our point of view, yes I know energy cannot be created) which is similar to oil.
The question now is, are there enough of these enzymes to go around? Does processing the starch via enzymes leave a byproduct which ends up in our cars? will people be willing to modify their cars to run on hydrogen (a fairly simple process, but try convincing someone of that)? will there be enough starch to go around? In other words, yes it works out chemically, but does it work out practically?
It's Roland the Plogger again, wrong as usual.
It's been possible to convert cellulose to ethanol using enzymes for a while now. The problem is that making the enzymes is still too expensive for this to be useful as a fuel process. This Wikipedia article provides some background on that. It's a good idea. If the cost of making the enzymes can be brought down, there's plenty of agricultural waste (straw, bagasse, corn cobs, wood chips) available at low or even negative (it costs money to dispose of it) cost. Venture capital is going into developing cost-effective processes.
But it's not likely to be done in a car's fuel tank. Something more like a brewery scaled up to oil refinery size is more like it.
The beauty behind this idea is that no special infrastructure would be needed. Starch could be distributed by your local grocery store.
WRONG.
It might be that way for the first person who does it, or the first thousand people. But anything connected to transportation requires special infrastructure. Millions and millions of cars and trucks drive millions of miles per day, and consume millions of gallons of gasoline. Your local grocery store is not set up to handle the business your local two dozen gas stations currently handle.
I'm not impressived by the "net" ammount of carbon dioxide released by one process, if you're going to compare to the "gross" ammount released by the oil/gasoline process.
Try it with your paycheck, compare the gross income or your paycheck to the net income of a coworkers. Don't they have a word for this type of "accounting", specifically when used in the energy sector? Ah yes, they call it Enron-nomics.
...the only way an alternative fuel will gain wide acceptance, manufacturer support, and wide distribution is if you can...
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Its not a bug. Its a feature!
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super cool idea though, i'm impressed that they can even break even and produce enough energy to move the weight of the starch.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
So, does this mean that next time the neighbor's kid pours sugar into my gas tank, I should thank him?
you are correct that you put more energy into a system in this case hydrogen production than you get out but hydrogen is meant to be an energy carrier not a true energy source. it is useful when your battery technology relies on crummy Ni/Cd or lead acid technology. it's useful when you can make more usable power from gasoline once it has been converted into hydrogen and carbon dioxide. it isnt the least bit pathetic as you suggest.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
That should curb obesity in this country. But then we have all this energy already stored as fat on our bodies. Well, we'll just have to design a car that runs on human fat. Just cut that love handle, toss it in a gas/fat tank and there you go, drive to the store and buy more Twinkies to put that lost chunk of fat back and keep going...
I just simply don't see it happening. There's just not enough benefits that I can see, both from economic and environmental perspectives.
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Now, I know this probably will never get seen by anyone, but none of the posts so far were appropriate to reply to.
I am actually a bioengineer, and I'm actually working in this field, trying to convert ethanol into hydrogen.
And I can say, this process looks excellent. Finding natural enzymes that do the conversion makes everything enormously easier.
Here's the deal. Ethanol has slightly more energy than straight sugar, because the fermentation adds energy to the system. That added energy is negligible in comparison to the total energy. However, you lose a butt-load of energy because you have to heat the sugar up in order to ferment it, deal with transportation costs for the crops, and if you're using it as an additive (instead of reforming 20-25% ethanol in water directly), distill it to 100%, which uses a ridiculous amount of energy (10 times more to get it from 95-100 than from 20-95). However, the plus side is that ethanol is a pretty high energy density liquid, about 85% that of gasoline, and much higher energy density than compressed hydrogen gas. So, with an ethanol+water mixture, you end up getting 6 H2 out of every one etOH molecule. Pretty durn good. (if you think I'm an idiot because I have more hydrogen coming out than are on an ethanol molecule, look up steam reforming instead of making yourself look like a fool)
However, at the end of the day, it's extremely questionable whether or not ethanol itself is net energy positive, because of all the energy that goes into producing it (even though the liquid itself increases in energy density). Sugar, however, is less refined, and so less energy goes into making it. The idea is this -- if the net energy is negative, then you're still using more fossil fuels than you save. But if sugar is energy positive, then you can use 1kg of sugar to produce 2kg of sugar, and use that to make 4kg of sugar, and so on.
Sure, you have to pay attention to the problems of rising food costs. But starch? Don't worry about it, it'll be more efficient than gasoline, and it'll be more efficient than ethanol. You're talking a 3x fold improvement on efficiency right off the bat because it's a fuel cell instead of an I.C.E. Now, your sugar production has to be net energy positive, so multiply that factor (guess would be around 2-3) times the 3x fold efficiency improvement in the fuel cell and you're using 6-9 times less energy to produce the same amount of work. The economy will figure out the rest -- hell, you can get starch out of all sorts of crop waste way more easily than you can get ethanol out of them.
Sounds like our Doc is pretty good for the future after all :)
No sig for now.
You have us mixed up with the "hydrogen* extracted from water by electrolysis is a power source" chorus.
{*} Sorry, I meant "Brown's gas", not "hydrogen"...
No sig today...
that will eat your rice?
VIVA1023.com | Political Fashion.
the ER/EI (energy return over energy invested) for hydrogen always is and always will be NEGATIVE.
This is true for ANY fuel. With fossil fuels we're just cashing in on the fact that the Earth had several million years' head start. And your point is?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The only infinite resource we have is "human stupidity". When we figure out how to split water molecules using stupidity we'll have the problem licked fer sure.
I'm sure a breakthrough can't be too far away, most modern SUVs are already running on 50% stupidity, we just need to improve the yield.
No sig today...
As in sugarmotor -- sugarmotor.net :-)
Stephan
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
Other than nuclear power and Mr. Fusion.
Gasoline is solar energy. Sun -> plants -> dinosaurs -> decomposition -> pressure -> time -> oil -> human intervention -> gasoline.
People who complain about hydrogen not being a power source are not seeing the whole picture. Most of the energy on this planet comes from the sun. Gasoline seems efficient, but only because it's had millions of years to collect. What we really need is a solar capture that doesn't take so much time.
Personally, I'm betting on solar splitting of water into hydrogen.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Let me see if I can summarize: 1: Start with starch 2: Put it in a car 3: (waving of hands) 4: Profit! Next: Electricity from seawater, loosely based on biochemistry of electric eels.
::groan::
I think that this "idea" is little more than a half-baked potato.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Mare Juice I misread that last option as something else that had an 'l' instead of an 'r' and thought, "Hells yeah!"
"Sex in the back seat" could take on a whole new meaning.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
As a lot of previous posters have noted, it will be a while before this technology will be in wide use to power cars, because of the need to provide a viable distribution infrastructure, and the fact that the rate at which the hydrogen is generated isn't fast enough yet to power a car.
However, the minute I have a source of hydrogen I can use it to run a fuel cell to generate electricity to power my laptop or other portable electronic device. The rate at which I need hydrogen is a lot smaller. The heat from the fuel cell could be used to help run the reaction which generates the hydrogen (only needs 30 degrees Celsius). Sounds like it could be available within only a few years.
Nu? Is someone out there listening and starting to work on this?
...of enzyme/combustion are.....pancakes! Yummm!
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
There goes the price of potato chips.
/.'er going to eat?
First corn syrup, now this. How's a
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
Theres a whole heck of a lot more Hydrogen in Amonia (NH3), which already has a MASSIVE infrastructure for shipment, why can't they figure out a way to safely use it as a base for fuel cells or some such instead of starch?
Do we put diapers on our starch-using cars, or do we just let them crap in the street like horses of old? Gotta love those scientists thinking one dimensionally again.
E Proelio Veritas.
This will cause world-wide ooblick shortages! Won't someone think of the Children?
-- My Sig is a P228.
If ammonia were used in a fuel cell, rather than a carbon compound, there is one potential advantage: rather than CO2 or Cx (graphite) being left after the hydrogen is stripped for the actual fuel, what could be left was either NOx (bad) or, if the cell can be properly configured, N2, which makes up about 70% of the atmosphere already. This would make the fueling of cars truly carbon-neutral.
I did some looking around, but where (other than the outer Solar System), is there a good source of ammonia? Can it be created from atmospheric N2 and water? If so, and all of the energy used to create it is solar, wind, or water generated, why isn't this the top of the everyone's alternative fuel list?
Every potential fuel is problematic in one way or another.
Even if you have some "pristine" source of electricity, the storage mechanisms are toxic stews, and the process of "refueling" is much too slow for real usability outside of a limited commute. Those fantasy 300 mile range cars do not give that range in LA traffic with the air conditioner, lights, music system, GPS, and power assist for the steering and brakes. There was a crash at an electric car race a Phoenix a few years back; several miles around the track were evacuated and the HazMat team called in to clean up. Picture that in any major city's highway system or (favorite trick of the hysteria-prone) "near a school".
Hydrogen gas transport, storage, and transfer from dispenser to car are nightmares, and the liquid is worse.
Gasoline and diesel only really work when combusted, and gasoline is hard to make from anything but fossil fuels (oil and coal), plus is a bit toxic. Diesel can be made from bio-sources more easily than gasoline, is less explosive in transport and storage, and has more energy density than gasoline. We already have the infrastructure to distribute and use them.
Methane and propane have some storage issues, but we have some experience using them in cars, trucks, and buses. They are still fossil fuels, unless we can recapture methane from bioreactions of animal waste.
All hydrocarbon fuels will almost certainly have CO or CO2 as products. Regardless of the efficiency by which they are created, it will almost impossible for them to be "carbon-neutral".
Ammonia may be toxic, but none of the others are strictly non-toxic and non-hazardous. It can be transported and transferred as some combination of compressed gas and not-so-cold liquid, using most of our existing fossil fuel infrastructure. Combustion of it always seems to generate the NOx products, but a fuel cell with N2 as the product has no harmful emissions. In theory (as I said, more references, please), it can be produced from air, water, and clean energy. Why is this not perfect?
FTA: the enzymes use the energy in the starch to break up water into only carbon dioxide and hydrogen
Doesn't seem a whole lot better than gasoline if it releases as much CO2...
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
The animal-loving end of the Green movement are not going to like this one bit. The process involves killing little fluffy bunnies! No, really, it does!
The paper says that four of the enzymes, glycogen phosphorylase, phosphoglucomutase, triose-phosphate isomerase and aldolase, are all sourced from "rabbit muscle" (see Table 1 on page 4 of the PDF). So, the process may be good for reducing fossil carbon emissions but starch-powered cars are not suitable for vegans!
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
Just build a beowulf cluster of potatoe batteries and be done with it. If you run out, just dump another bag in from the grocery store
tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
Another big problem iwth the hydrogen economy, is it's really hard to get it going because it's a chicken and the egg scenario - people don't want to buy hydrogen cars if there are no stations to fuel them, and people don't want to invest huge amounts of money in stations because there aren't enough cars to make them profitable.
The cool thing about this idea is that *starch is already sold*, and you can even buy it in large quantities at bakery supplys. SO if I wanted to I could go get one of these cars *right now, and be able to purchase the fuel at any number of places.
As more people buy the cars, the market will develop for businesses that only sell starch for cars (starch stations) - but unlike hydrogen, but this is not REQUIRED to sell the cars.
IMO this is a huge benefit.
What do you think of the work being down using algae now? There's two directions,. algae to hydrogen and biodiesel from algae.
IANAC, but from a high-school chemistry video about the Haber Process, which is the most efficient method of ammonia production to date (or most economically viable) I seem to recall that production of ammonia requires a substantial amount of natural gas for use in the reaction. Infact I can remember a pipeline running into the plant that was about the width of my bedroom. That's a lot of natural gas. So, unless ammonia were surprisingly more energy-dense than other substances mentioned/proposed (and more energy can be taken out from it than was put in during production and the use of all that natural gas), I think unless we were to find a large comet which we could capture and mine, we would have to find a substantially more efficient method of producing ammonia first. I could be wrong of course, it's been a while since I was in a chemistry lecture, but I seem to remember the process requiring substantial energy input to obtain the ~500C temperature and 250atm pressure required to run the reactors most efficiently, plus the natural gas input for use in the reaction.
// cinn
I think you're totally missing the point here. The source of the starch will be plant material, which will be the result of photosynthesis. This means that the production process will take out of the atmosphere exactly as much CO2 as will be released when the starch is split up again.
Ultimately this is a "solar powered" system. The energy what goes into the production of the starch comes from sunlight. It also happens to output the energy in a convenient chemical form which has better energy density that current battery technology.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
So vehicles might be able to run on soda. Brings a whole new slant to the cola wars. "Coke Classic for your classic ride" "Cherry Pepsi keeps your car cherry" "Mr. Pibb xtra for xtra speed"
it gets me but
burning hydrogen or any other fuel needs O2 also
so given the deforestation needed to grow the starch based fuel , why they looking at other means to produce H2 ,
its a simple equation
use a fusion reactor based power station to split water into 2(H2) and O2 , burn the pre mixed result and get H2O back , no mess , no 25kg of source material needed for 1kg of fuel , and the waste H2O can be collected and reused , and no nasty chemicals in the process
instead they have to look at a way of producing H2 that has some form of environmental impact
this like the method of using aluminium with another chemical to allow for perpetual oxidization in water to produce hydrogen
so you end up with aluminium oxide and hydrogen , but are then faced with the problem that you trap the O2 in the aluminium then lose more O2 burning the hydrogen
as to power , well its the engine design that needs the work to try to compencate for the losses in relation to what a petrol design would give
a petrol engine needs to be metal because of the presure , a H2O based hydrogen design could be built from ABS , and the rest of the car also , so you don't have to shift around 2 tons of metal , lighter car , and less fuel used , so its not going to give you 500 BHP and do 0 to 120 in 8 seconds , but what use is that when your stuck in a traffic jam doing 2 mph or less because of gridlock
and as to the infastructure to distribute it , well i guess they had gas stations in the USA before the car , and in such a money centric place , it still fails to see a potentitaly money making gap in the market that needs filling , rather can not be bothered investing in new technology that would create new jobs and a whole new industry , rather they expect the only investment is to change the liquid the pumps drip out of the end
and BTW they have been using LPG (gas) filling systems for some time here in the UK so the technology has been around to deliver fuel in gas form for some time
this story only realy shows another way to produce hydrogen in a way that turns a simple no waste proccess into one that produes masses of striped and potentitaly useless biowaste for rather a small percentage of fuel gained
better just sticking a pipe up a cows ass and collecting the methane , and using that to fuel the cars , so you reduce the methane polution produced by the cows and burn it in a usefull process so no real environmental impact , but i guess not vegan safe
TFA says the production costs would be about $1 per pound of hydrogen. BTUs in one pound of hydrogen: 61,000. BTUs in one pound of gasoline: 20,500.
the ER/EI (energy return over energy invested) for hydrogen always is and always will be NEGATIVE.
You mean the ER/EI ratio will be less than one. Perhaps you should go back to grade school and learn about fractions again. Or did you mean the net energy produced will be negative?
Anyone know the 13 enzymes?
Here we go again, sweeping statements due to ignorant political bias.
Here's an idea: Solar-powered electrolysis for hydrogen.
There. Do the math for ER/EI. We're already doing it. It already works. Now remove the "always is and always will be" from your statement. The energy problem you mentioned doesn't apply to the fuel side. There is only economic concern for the infrastructure of semi-backwards-compatible solutions, where instead people need to get over the pipe dream that the reliance of oil for internal combustion engines is somehow sustainable.
I would think sunlight would be pretty cheap to "produce", and considering the potential energy from oil comes from ancient plants that stored energy from the sun... We also have hordes of technology for filtering and purifying water cheaply, that again could be almost cost-free if solar energy is utilized. I don't think people really grasp how much spacial real estate is wasted that could be used for solar technology (e.g. roofs of large commercial buildings, etc.). Sooner or later we'll have little choice but to switch to new engine technology, it's just that people gripe about it being sooner rather than later. Once the initial costs are out of the way, the savings are permanently several orders of magnitude better. The problem is that (as usual) people only care about the short term costs, not the long term costs. (Save $1 today so that you can pay $3 tomorrow and $5 the next. But at least you saved a buck today, right?!)
FACT: Oil is inevitably *guaranteed* to be cost prohibitive in the future. It's only a matter of when. I think I'll try to stop posting on this subject anymore, because if I wait long enough, all this bickering will be a moot point.
I think he knew that ...
Seems impractical for transportation, from the paper linked from TFA, peak production rate is .44mmol/(L*h), so you're looking at milligrams of H2 per liter of reactant per HOUR (if i'm not blowing anything from highschool chem), so the only way to make this work for cars is to have the reaction going 24/7 and storing it on the car, and then it's right back to the old storage problems.
Its still just another process of cracking water to hydrogen. At what point do humans and cars compete for clean water? You'll never have enough fresh water to extract hydrogen from. As it is we're already competing for fresh water. Sure water is effectively cheap now but what does the price of water do when you start pouring it into tanks along with your starch/enzyme cracking process?
So what would you have us do instead? Continue to use more oil and have gas prices skyrocket until we're all paying more money to keep our vehicles fueled than we make at the job we need the vehicle for? Or perhaps your ideal vehicle would run on fluffy clouds, rainbows, and moonbeams?
If you don't think that Hydrogen is a viable alternative to oil, then by all means come up with something that is. People sick of paying high gas prices would love to hear it. However, if you DON'T have anything, then shut your mouth. No, Hydrogen isn't perfect. However, once we get the technology to extract it in large quantities figured out, it will still be a hell of a lot better than gasoline.
BTW, I believe the phrase you were looking for is "It's pathetic." </Grammar Nazi>
"So after all this, you make my case for me. To end this stalemate, you must die..."
Diesel engines are available now, get *way* better mileage then gasoline engines, are absolutely prefect for SUV-sized vehicles whose owners are convinced they might need to tow something or go off-road, and we know how to make it with almost zero-sum CO2 emissions from human waste.
Most people wouldn't even notice the difference between gas/diesel SUVs unless you told them.
So:
a) Which part of that isn't "win"?
b) Which part doesn't make "starch" or "ethanol" look like a silly idea?
No sig today...
I think I would love to run my car on starch and hydrogen.
I thought so too and wanted to start with some home production experiments. I made some ethanol a long time ago (I am an alternate energy geek) and ran two motorcycles and a chainsaw on the stuff, just test runs, but I actually have a need for a lot of diesel, living and working on a farm now. We go through a *lot* of diesel. We also have a big greenhouse, I was thinking of doing the test vats in one end of that thing. Need to do some more research though on the subject, then find a few of those 25-30 hour days....
It's not just hydrogen that carries that story, ethanol blended fuel is just as bad. With the current farming techniques we use in the western world it requires about 4 units of fuel for every 1 unit we get out of the whole process. It requires alot of diesel to run a tractor.
Who is this Jimmy character, and why was he cracking corn in the first place?
the output is hydrogen gas, which means that one is back into the problems with transportation and storage which have caused most informed people to look elsewhere for a source of transportation energy.
Which would make the new process interesting chemistry but otherwise fairly useless.
Tech Public Policy stuff
external combustion than internal combustion.
Tech Public Policy stuff
thanks for the replies, and yes, we'll see what we can do. We have a lot of ponds here, most (well, half are clean, half are scummed out) are already saturated with algae and duckweed. I wonder what wild harvested pond scum would yield. I am interested in simple and works as opposed to extremely complex for higher yields. Ethanol is fairly simple, as is methane (built a digester before, it worked great, just test samples though, small scale from a 55 gallon drum). A continuous batch system would be ideal though. My resources are: one (1) large farm full of odd used equipment, stacks of it. A lot of used pvc feeder tubes and watering tubes for poultry. Odd tanks and containers of various sizes from small to whopper. About a normal small hardware store of tools. 15 minutes here and there "spare time". That's probably the worst part of the whole deal right now, this spare time stuff. But it sure is interesting. I already run a little solar PV, that was one of my projects, build some sort of electric farm buggy I can recharge with the panels, just for fun. Haven't found a good enough(cheap/used) DC motor yet though and don't want to go AC because can't afford a big inverter right now. although AC motors we got a plenty.
anyway,, ya, we'll work something out here.
Would that be based on $64.73/barrel oil (NYMEX - today)? $75/barrel oil? $100/barrel oil? $200/barrel oil? $unavailable-at-any-price oil?
Unless you're a member of the abiotic oil cult (related to the "global warming is junk science" cult), you know that the long-term trend for oil prices and therefore gasoline prices is upwards.
Each form of alternative transporation energy has a per-barrel price that makes it competitive with fossil fuel, with the possible exception of hydrogen.
Tech Public Policy stuff
It is zero emission the same way that ethanol or bio diesel is zero emission. Yes the reaction produces CO2, but it is the CO2 that the plant just pulled in during the last year (or 10) while it was being grown. It is not putting CO2 that has been trapped for millions of years into the atmosphere the way fossil fuels are.
Cellulostic ethanol will be produced efficiently by bioengineering the corn to already contain those enzymes which are activated after harvesting by means such as heat.
If you mean waste as in feces/urine, then you might need to rethink what you're saying a bit. How many kilocalories a day do most people consume? Maybe 2000-2500? Even if we inefficiently passed 75% of those out, I don't think a car is going to drive too far on 1500 kilocalories of energy - a gallon of gasoline contains about 31,000 kilocalories of energy. You might be able to drive 100 feet. What you suggest is a great idea...for a very limited amount of vehicles. There is no way it could ever be expanded for everyone.
http://www.electroauto.com/
sells and electric-car conversion kit. An inventor in korea has developed an electric generator from sea water
http://www.1000inventions.com/detail2.php?id=942
There are at least a dozen of these types of inventions out there. This is the only one I know of being looked at for commercial scale production. During the Y2K scare there was a small-scale commerically available version of this called the EnviroGen generator.
There is a company in India Reva producing a in-city car (tops out at 35 MPH). Most in-city trips top out at about 35 MPH. Plug this types of cars into a well designed mass-transit system such as DCs Metropolitan Transit bus/train system or Denver's Regional Transit bus/train system and you have a descent solution.
http://www.revaindia.com/
http://www.wmata.com/
http://www.rtd-denver.com/
If the process of breaking down this starch for hydrogen produces a large amount of solid waste, what will we do with it? Am I going to have to muck out my car's stall? Also, everything I know about starches and sugars can be summed up in two words: They're sticky. Wouldn't any system that employs really sticky substances need periodic swabbing out to prevent residual muck from jamming up the pipes?