Ethanol to Hydrogen Reactor Developed 839
guacamolefoo writes "CNN reports that researchers at the University of Minnesota have developed a small (2 ft. high) hydrogen reactor that turns ethanol into hydrogen and then uses a fuel cell to turn the hydrogen into electricity. It notably does not use fossil fuels in the process. I knew that liquor would save us all some day."
Making ethanol uses fossil fuels (Score:4, Interesting)
It notably does not use fossil fuels in the process.
It most certainly does use fossil fuels.
Ethanol takes energy to make. Lots of energy, possibly more than it contains [straightdope.com]. That energy comes from fossil fuels. Ethanol is not an energy source; it is a different way to store energy, and not a particularly efficient one.
Using Ethanol as a fuel is mostly a way to funnel money to Corn Belt farmers.
Is this better/more efficient.. (Score:4, Interesting)
We already have a renewable fuel source (Score:2, Interesting)
Ethanol production? (Score:3, Interesting)
Beer has taught me that yeast create ethanol as a metabolic waste product, right? I believe that yeast also create carbon dioxide as a waste product.
I doubt that large-scale industral ethanol plants are using yeast colonies for production... but what do they use? And what are the waste products from that process?
I understand that reducing our reliance on fossil fules is a good thing. However, if substantial amounts of greenhouse (or other undesirable) gas emissions result from the ethanol production process, aren't we just playing Whack-A-Mole with the source of the pollution?
Truly renewable (Score:3, Interesting)
Those GM Hywire commercials are pretty to look at, but don't make it clear to the general public how difficult energy-wise it is to actually produce hydrogen. I hope more research funds get pumped into this kind of technology so we can move toward a hydrogen future at a meanginful pace.
Ugh... (Score:4, Interesting)
Just burn the fossil fuels (Score:3, Interesting)
But it uses no fossil fuels? Well, maybe not directly, but... let's see, where do we get ethanol? Hmm. Well, most of it comes from corn. Corn treated with heat. That heat comes from natural gas, usually. So there's a fossil fuel. What else? Corn has to be harvested. Usually this involves tractors, harvesters, and other large pieces of farm equipment that generally run on.. d'oh! More fossil fuel!
According to the US Dept. of Energy, creating ethanol takes about 29% more energy than it provides. Since most of that energy going into the ethanol-creation process is fossil fuel-based, we'd probably be better off just burning the fossil fuels directly. Using ethanol just burns them up even faster.
A source for more ethanol numbers: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/031128.html [straightdope.com]
Re:Making ethanol uses fossil fuels (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not a scientist, but I do play one on Slashdot
Fossil fuels to grow corn? Not! (Score:2, Interesting)
Y'all just aren't looking far enough down the road. When hydrogen power is cheap and available, all of the places that we currently use fossil fuels to produce the corn can change to hydrogen power as well. If this is pooh-poohed now, we'll never get to the point where we can make the transition.
I look forward to the day when the harvesters, trucks used to transport the grain, air conditioners cooling the fermentors, and heaters powering the industrial stills are all powered by nuclear and/or hydrogen power right along with my SUV.
a little bioengineering? (Score:2, Interesting)
Now where's my jet-pack?
Re:Not now..... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Making ethanol uses fossil fuels (Score:1, Interesting)
Perhaps something with higher sugar or starch content. Or maybe just something that requires less tending. Since all you need is the energy content, you can forget about the taste or visual appearance. I sure some argiculturalist could find something with a high energy yield which is resistant to insects and disease.
Re:Corn ain't free! (Score:3, Interesting)
I think they're referring to the fact that some fertilizers are actually refined from petroleum products.
Not worth it? (Score:3, Interesting)
The hydrogen is envisioned to replace petrochemicals in automotive uses and small-scale electrical generation with fuel-cells.
The only problem is the ethanol source. Right now it is pretty much corn, period. With present technology, much petrochemicals must be expended to grow the corn and refine it into Ethanol. The fact that no petrochemicals are used in the subsequent conversion to hydrogen is lost on the fact that a large amount of petrochemicals were burned to get the ethanol in the first place.
If a suitably-credentialed person does the math, I think we'd probably find that less petrochemicals would be burned in generating the electricity conventionally, or powering the car conventionally.
We'll have to wait for future tech that can generate the ethanol or hydrogen without using, or by using significantly less petrochemicals.
My idea shouldn't be surprising, because no process is ever 100% efficient.
Re:Another article (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Energy Consumption still an issue (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.sig-ge.ch/fr/vous/priv/statistiques/
Re:Making ethanol uses fossil fuels (Score:1, Interesting)
Wouldn't it make more sense to use the solar energy for electrolysis to break hydrogen molecules apart from plain old water? Much faster too.
Re:Making ethanol uses fossil fuels (Score:3, Interesting)
No mention on what the catalyst is, how long it lasts and how much energy is needed to produce it...
Anyway, if it improves the energy budget of ordinary ethanol, that's good. But ordinary ethanol takes so much more energy to create than it ever produces when you burn it, that I'm not easily convinced that this will actually make using ethanol a thermodynamically sound proposal. Politically it'll probably work just fine though
Good NYTimes article... (Score:5, Interesting)
The New York Times ran an interesting story [xent.com] about agriculture and obesity in October, basically discussing how, among other things, American corn has traditionally been so overproduced that corn-growers are desperate to find ways to use it. In the 19th century, the solution was to use it to make alcohol-- the average US citizen's consumption of corn-based alcohol then was more than FIVE times what it is now.
Following the backlash against drinking alcohol around the turn of the century, now much of the corn glut is used as a cheep sweetener. Corn syrup has replaced sugar in most sodas, candy, etc since the 1980s. The article suggests that the move from corn-alcohol to corn-syrup is responsible for the 60% obesity increase plus dramatic increases in "adult-onset" Diabetes.
So is the corn-as-fuel studies a similar way to answer the question-- how do we get rid of all this corn?
Also, see this NYTimes editorial [foodfunders.org]. Some interesting stats in there as well.
W
Re:Making ethanol uses fossil fuels (Score:5, Interesting)
In short, our current agricultural methods would have to be drastically overhauled in order for corn to be truly viable as a source of anything other than food.
Re:$1 of profit of Ethanol maker costs Taxpayer $3 (Score:4, Interesting)
Other attributes of HFCS over sugar (from http://food.oregonstate.edu/sugar/hfcs.html):
# retain moisture and/or prevent drying out
# control crystallization
# produce an osmotic pressure that is higher than for sucrose or medium invert sugar and thereby help control microbiological growth or help in penetration of cell membranes.
# provide a ready yeast-fermentable substrate
# blend easily with sweeteners, acids, and flavorings
# provide a controllable substrate for browning and Maillard reaction.
# impart a degree of sweetness that is essentially the same as in invert liquid sugar
# high sweetness
# low viscosity
# reduced tendency toward characterization
# costs less than liquid sucrose or corn syrup blends
# retain moisture and/or prevent drying out
In short, in a mass-production environment, sugar is used where it needs to be used, and HFCS is used where it can be used. I imagine ADM donates liberally to political parties for other reasons. The biggest one that comes to mind is genetic patents.
Re:Making ethanol uses fossil fuels (Score:3, Interesting)
Given today's manufacturing technology theirs no reason NOT to be using ethanol...except that a lot of powerful people make a lot of money gaming the system [and the conflicts, wars, terrorists] for profit.
as far as costing energy to make, that's what alternate power could be for! But the main benifit is that ethanol is renewable...the sun profides the power to the system. Adding Solar, Wind, or Nucler power only sweetens the deal. And we're already growing the crops as food anyway...so it's win-win. The point to the whole debate is that we should be actively presuing long term, ecologically friendly, means of power...and building alt energy infrastructure to support building more alt energy infrastructure...so that when we do run out of oil/uranium/gas...we won't need it anymore!!!!
Re:Not now..... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Hmm (Score:2, Interesting)
skip one step (Score:3, Interesting)
No fossil fuels, my ass... (Score:3, Interesting)
The flaw in the claim that this thing doesn't use fossil fuels is in the source of the ethanol; most fuel ethanol comes from grains - in the U.S., from government-subsidized grain corn. Due to the poorness of overcultivated soil in nearly every temperate region where grains grow, it takes a lot of petroleum-derived fertilizer to grow that grain - multiple calories of hydrocarbon energy for each calorie stored in the grain, in fact. Fermentation and refinement of the ethanol, of course, reduces the net energy yield of this process.
Find a better source of ethanol, though, and I'm sold.
Re:Bio-diesel and Refuse biomass (Score:2, Interesting)
So, basically, I call bullshit on not having enough biomass to run the farm equipment. Actually converting farms over is another story.
Re:Not now..... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't have sources handy, but I did research this topic at some length in the past and convince myself that Hemp would have real value if it weren't for our political climate.
Though the strains most effective in terms of biomass, fiber production, etc, are NOT the best strains for recreational use.
One should be aware that hemp has been through extensive selective breeding, and the THC levels have boosted considerably in the last 50 years. However the changes to boost THC have made the plant less effective for other purposes.
PS:
I should not that I'm not a user, but I am strongly in favor of legalization, both for production and recreational uses.
Corn? isn't there somethign better? (Score:3, Interesting)
Or how about a genetically modifie solutions. Take a very simple and robust grass and add a snippit of DNA for fructose/glucose with a super promoter in front, copy it a few dozen tiems and you'll have soem pretty sweet weed. ahh weed.
Re:Making ethanol uses fossil fuels (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:nice try but .... (Score:3, Interesting)
My SO is doing leading edge research on photosynthesis. She occasionally comes home with green splotches in her hair. It's really fascinating how the actual specific chemistry of photosynthesis works, harvesting energy from light.
--
Evan
Re:Not now..... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's an entirely political debate, not based on science whatsoever.
"Industrial" hemp as a crop has many useful benifits. And such hemp also has very little THC, in fact so little that it is difficult to get "high" off from it.
If this really was the issue behind it, the government could find a way to regulate it, as they do alcohol.
People who want to get "high" will find a way to do so one way or another. The fact is industrial hemp plants make a very poor drug.
Sure someone might find a way to get a bunch of hemp and distill out more THC, but it would be easier sneaking it over the border.
The fact is people are already making meth from cough syrup, but does that mean we stop the sale of cough syrup?
I'm all for a crop that would put our farmers to work, decrease government subsidies, is enviromental friendly, and decrease our foreign imports.
Industrial Hemp could do this. The number of pot smokers would not increase either.
Re:Read the fine print (Score:3, Interesting)
"One bushel of corn yields 2.5-2.7 gallons of ethanol from the starch component of corn" [ethanolrfa.org]
Also interesting that the processes of ethanol and corn oil (biodiesel) production from corn don't seem to interfere with eachother, and are somewhat complimentary: http://www.ethanolrfa.org/prod_process.html [ethanolrfa.org]
=Smidge=
Re:Making ethanol uses fossil fuels (Score:2, Interesting)
Think about it: if all of the readily fermentable waste that we don't use could be collected and mashed up, it would be huge.
Waste fruit from groceries, that bananna you didn't eat last week, etc. All ripe for being turned into alcohol. Bonus is, you can turn around and sell what's left as livestock feed. It still has all of the protien, fat and stuff, and maybe a little bit of the starch. Bonus.
If we could build a big enough solar distillery (I'm invisioning something like solar one [si.edu], with a big condensor to keep up with the output) It would be practically maintainance free (compared to some things), as well.
Ethanol from our rubbish alone could make a huge difference.
Re:Not now..... (Score:3, Interesting)
But instead of saying "Hey, wow, this is a great product, let's switch!" they instead said "Hmm, this might require us changing the way we do things, must be bad!" and lobbied for bills making it illegal to grow ALL forms of Cannabis, not just the ones that make you high.
Smoking industrial hemp in sufficient quantity might make you sick but you won't get high off it...
Re:Not now..... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:not just corn (Score:3, Interesting)
Making Ethanol can be cheap! Read how here! PLEASE (Score:5, Interesting)
The total cost of delivery of a single gallon of gasoline is still quite high. It has to be mined, shipped to refineries (which uses oil!) refined in several stages (also uses oil), then shipped in individual semi-trucks (also uses oil) to get to it's final destination, which is for the most part a huge network of individual mom-and-pop owned gas stations. In addition to this, tankers fall over, refineries produce the occasional bad batch, pipelines break and need repair (oh boy, how about those SUVs needed to get to the point the pipeline broke in alaska), there are oil spills in Alaska, oil tanker ships. All these indirectly use oil to harvest oil.
As opposed to the infrastructure surrounding ethanol -- a fledgeling (no, I don't mean ADM) industry with some government and corporate funding and only 30 years of poorly funded research backing it. In 100 years, where will we be with this? One really darned great thing about grain alcohol, is that nearly every place in the non-desert world is suitable for growing some kind of grain that can be changed. Sugar cane, barley, hops, corn, rice. All can be turned into alcohol organically, with yeast, and the varieties of each can be grown in nearly every clime in the world, as opposed to having to be mined and distributed on the hub-and-spoke system. Locally managed stills can make enough ethanol to power entire towns for the most part, with a surplus. Believe me, we know the volume homemade, illegal, inefficient, made-by-the-village-drunk 'stills can produce in Arkansas and Tennessee. How about efficient stills made by corporations with the money to put into the research of draining every last drop out of the infrastructure they create? No long, hazardous shipping across outdated hub-and-spoke shipping lines. Fine-grained (no pun intended) distributed, low cost production facilities are a much better way of creating electricity and vehicle fuel.
The really great thing is that all these grains don't
This can be the key, folks. This can avert the disaster heading our way once oil becomes expensive to mine. We just have to put the money in now while we can.
Re:Making ethanol uses fossil fuels (Score:3, Interesting)
It's something along those lines. The key is that it's not something we've been doing since humans evolved. In fact it's mostly a development of the last thirty years or so. A long time ago, the last time i took any kind of course in biology, at one point the text book went into efficiency of food production. My memory is a bit fuzzy on the details, but taking into account all of the non-solar energy that goes into food production (mainly work from humans and domesticated animals, or fossil fuels) modern industrial agriculture is something like a fifth to a tenth as efficient as farming methods in this country 50 to 80 years ago, and around a fiftieth to a hundredth as efficient as susbsistence farming in most undeveloped countries. Quite simply, as you consolidate your food production more and more, you need bigger and bigger machinery to make the work manageable, and your food supply gets further and further away from the consumers. All of this adds up to greatly increased fossil fuel consumption for the sake of reducing the human time and effort involved.
To be honest, i'm not entirely sure whether the amount of energy (in the form of fossil fuels) used to grow corn is greater or less then the amount of energy in the corn we end up with. There are some out there who say it is less. But it is certain that our efficiency in converting calories of dino-fuel to calories of corn has gone way down, and if it's not negative already, the extra loss that comes from distilling the corn into ethanol almost guarantees it is.
Re:Not now..... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not now..... (Score:2, Interesting)
On the other hand, soybean biodiesel returns 220% to 230% of the input energy from fossil fuel. Soybean cultivation is the solar power technology that is most suitable for powering vehicles.
Re:Not now..... (Score:2, Interesting)
We're getting close, I went to pick up a bunch of NyQuil (cold was just begininng to spread through the family), and they limited me to a single two bottle pack. They told me I have to come back a different time if I wanted more.
The Next Generation of Energy Tech (Score:4, Interesting)
The next step is to begin working to genetically engineer plants that produce more of the kinds of materials that benefit the distillation and catalysis of ethanol. Corn is a poor energy source when you consider what it takes to grow it, and how devastating modern agriculture is to the soil.
Not to mention the fact that agriculture is essentially owned and regulated by Big Oil, who also own the companies that make seeds and the companies which make nitrogen fertilizers. No serious progress is likely to be made in agriculture or energy technology as long as the interests of Big Oil remain paramount.
The smart direction, I think, is to look at aquatic plants, algae, bacteria, and the like. If a bacterium or yeast could be developed to produce ethanol in sufficient quantity, and a closed system could be developed that takes in sunlight and produces all the kinds of things bacteria and yeasts produce - ethyl, nitrogen, methane, etc., it would go an amazingly long way towards improving the efficiency of these processes.
The trouble with our current crude methods is that they are simply unsustainable and produce far too much pollution and waste.
Recently a technique was developed [changingworldtech.com] to convert any kind of solid waste into constituent materials, including a rich form of oil. This project was undertaken with support from ButterBall because the costs of waste disposal for their turkey abattoirs are hilariously high.
Now imagine a similar kind of energy plant, except instead of slow-heating wastes and so forth, it has a chain of vats containing various forms of bacteria, single-celled organisms, simple plants, etc., in a closed ecosystem. Wastes and other materials from one vat are leeched out and channeled to the next vat in line. Nitrogen and CO2 are funneled to the plants, and their oxygen is fed to some single-celled creatures. Round it goes, probably feeding back into itself in a closed loop. Except, of course it isn't a closed loop. Free materials like oxygen, CO2, nitrogen, hydrogen, etc., are constantly being added to the system along with plenty of sunlight. The result is that you end up with a huge abundance of excess which can be siphoned off.
The grail of energy will be to engineer or discover bacteria capable of freeing hydrogen itself. Maybe some of those deep-sea hot vent varieties have some creative genetic ideas!
We are so used to thinking of energy in terms of limitations, and so there seems to be a rush to knock energy out quickly and with great force. The fact is, slower, gentler, more methodical methods are available using the power of living cells. We only have to learn how to utilize and program these molecular machines to do our bidding.
I have a friend who is utterly convinced that Free Energy Devices (also known as Zero-Point Energy Taps) are possible, they exist, and they are suppressed by Big Energy interests. I am naturally skeptical of the idea, but at the same time I'm open to the possibility, if only because at the atomic level everything is going a million miles an hour all the time. If you could tap that energy at the molecular scale I believe you could produce - essentially - a perpetual-energy device.
For example, if you were able to build a device on the nano-scale which captures electrons - like a cashmere sweater - and then instead of just forming a diffuse cloud of electrons were able to channel those electrons into a medium and hold them... well you get the idea. We know static is real, and we know a little bit of it can produce a pretty impressive shock. If a trillion of these devices could fit into a square foot then I imagine you could extract a pretty impressive amount of electrical energy.
There have to be thousands of ways to efficiently borrow excess energy. Another method that occurs to me is to layer materials in a manner such that electrons are caused to flow in a specific direction. I'd be interested to know if layering materials - let's say nickel and copper - can produce energy flow passively, or if a catalyst such as acid or NaCl is always required to "pull" electrons out.
Re:Not now..... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not now..... (Score:3, Interesting)
No, I am not talking about those self-destructing reactors. I'm talking about a plain old fission reactor. They do *not* generate tons of waste per year. In fact, most of it can be reprocessed and reused. The stuff that's really "hot" won't last long. (10 seconds to 20 years.) And the stuff that *will* last millions of years is no more dangerous than the uranium in your back yard. Remember, mass gets converted to radiation. If it stays radioactive for a long time, it's not converting much mass. Unless you pile tons of it in one spot, you'll have a hard time distinguishing it from background radiation.
Otherwise you've got the idea. Mobile reactor can be useful in ships and heavy industrial equipment. Beyond that, the power from the nuclear grid can be stored in some chemical fashion (e.g. hydrogen cracked from water) and reused by vehicles.
Re:Not now..... (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a legitimate possibility. One advantage of converting corn to ethanol is that it provides relatively-safe, relatively-dense portable energy storage. Not as dense as gasoline or nuclear, better density than hydrogen or batteries. At the present time, energy demand in the US can be divided into two broad categories: applications that are essentially fixed in position (houses and other buildings) and applications that are mobile (cars, trucks, trains, planes, ships, etc). Energy production that works well for one doesn't generally work well for the other. That is, nuclear is fine for generating electricity to put on a grid to distribute to fixed locations; gasoline is fine for mobile applications; nuclear-powered cars and gasoline-fired power plants are both kind of silly.
What would be terrific is an efficient way to convert electrical power into a stored form that is safe, dense, small, and efficient in conversion in both directions. Heinlein worked such a device into one of his novels. Not only was it used in mobile applications like cars, but it was also used in stationary apps. It became economical for some locations (say the Sahara) where they could harvest large amounts of solar power (to your point, where there are hundreds of thousands of acres of otherwise worthless land people would cheerfully give up for solar power production) to charge up the devices and then ship them around the world. Sixty years after its invention, the corporation that controlled the technology essentially owned the world.
Cellulase (Score:3, Interesting)
Currently there is work [doe.gov] going on to reduce the cost of using cellulase enzymes in the bioethanol process. Currently, cellulase-based bioethanol requires 30-50 cents of cellulase per gallon. To be economically competitive with sugar processes, the price has to be brought down to 5 cents per gallon.
At that point, bioethanol production could use the entire plant, including a large amount of plant waste that is simply thrown away today.