Slashdot Mirror
Big Advance In Hydrogen Production Could Change Alternative Energy Landscape
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at Virginia Tech say they've had a genuine breakthrough in alternative energy production that could shake up the world's energy structure. Specifically, they've hit on a way to derive large amounts of hydrogen from any plant source. The method uses renewable natural resources, releases almost no greenhouse gasses, and needs no costly or heavy metals. The key is using xylose, the most abundant simple plant sugar, to produce a large quantity of hydrogen that previously was attainable only in theory."
It's called a Sabatier reaction. It is the reaction of hydrogen and carbon dioxide, under pressure, at 300-400 C, in the presence of a nickel catalyst to produce methane and water. The methane can be transported in the existing natural gas pipeline system or used by a reforming fuel cell. The methane can also be used in one of the variations of the Fischer-Tropsch reactions to make liquid fuels.
There is energy in the plant mass. The full equation is
plant mass + input energy = output hydrogen energy + waste plant mass
Entropy is still preserved in the overall system.