Fuel in a flash

[C1ay]

He's done it again. Chemical engineering wizard Lanny Schmidt made waves in 2004 with an invention to extract hydrogen from ethanol.

 

lefthttp://hypography.com/gallery/files/9/9/8/Lannybiodiesel_thumb.jpg[/img]Now, he and his research team have found a way to do the same with vegetable oil and sugar, a first step toward creating usable fuels from plant wastes like sawdust or cornstalks.

 

Schmidt, a Regents Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, and graduate students James Salge, Brady Dreyer and Paul Dauenhauer describe their work in the Nov. 3, 2006, issue of Science.

 

The process yields a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide gases called synthesis gas, which is now used to make synthetic diesel fuel (dimethyl ether, also a substitute for propane gas) and ammonia, a constituent of fertilizer. Hydrogen is also the energy source for fuel cells and may someday be burned in car engines instead of fossil-based gasoline.

 

If scaled up, their process could slash the cost of producing renewable fuels and chemicals from plant-derived materials, or "biomass," while eliminating the fossil fuel input now needed for turning vegetable oil into usable "biofuel." The new process works 10 to 100 times faster than current technologies and could be done in facilities about 10 times smaller than today. Facilities could be placed on farms to produce fertilizer or energy for local consumption, or in centralized locations to produce fuels for transportation.

 

While the Schmidt team used fresh soybean oil and a sugar-glucose-in their experiments, those were just practice materials. In particular, glucose was a stand-in for related starchy compounds like cellulose, a major building block of plant cell walls. The real targets of the research are underutilized plant oils and fibers.

 

"It's a way to take cheap, worthless biomass and turn it into useful fuels and chemicals," says Schmidt. "Potentially, the biomass could be used cooking oil or even products from cow manure, yard clippings, cornstalks or trees. It's better than bringing oil from Saudi Arabia to fuel your gas station."

 

Currently, soy oil can be modified to make a fuel called biodiesel, but the process requires the addition of methanol, a fossil fuel derived from natural gas. And while cellulose can be digested into simple sugars-which can be fermented into ethanol or turned into other fuels-these processes require special enzymes and lots of time.

 

What makes vegetable oil, sugars and starches so hard to turn into fuels is the fact that they don't evaporate when heated. As a drop of oil sits on a hot surface, its bottom layer is exposed to heat but not oxygen. In the absence of oxygen, the heat will break down the molecules of oil into water vapor and carbon "gunk" rather than into synthesis gas. A similar situation applies to crystals of sugar.

 

The new process quickly vaporizes the oil and sugar and exposes them to extreme heat. There's no time for carbon gunk to form because oxygen in the air snatches the carbon atoms and transforms them into carbon monoxide. It's over in one-hundredth of a second, potentially 100 times faster than current means of making synthesis gas and hydrogen.

 

"What Lanny does is sorcery," says Frank Bates, head of the chemical engineering and materials science department. "This is classic Minnesota chemical engineering in the tradition of understanding how to steer chemical reactions to get more of the products you want and less of those you don't."

 

"We need radically new technologies on the road to renewable fuels. This is a possibility," says Schmidt. "We need a lot of research like this to make renewable technologies work."

 

Read about Lanny Schmidt's previous work on ethanol in Harvesting Hydrogen.

 

Source: University of Minnesota

[cwes99_03]

I will have to read this again, and search various news archives to gain a complete understanding of the process. Thanks for bringing it to my attention though, C1ay. Another fine article for bringing the newest news to hypographers.

[Little Bang]

Wonder if this process will eliminate the CO2 that we are putting in the atmosphere?

[cwes99_03]

Doesn't seem to. The first couple of paragraphs suggest that the process has CO as a bi-product, how that bi-product is dealt with C1ay doesn't mention, thus deeper study of the news archives.

[arkain101]

wow.

 

Thats great for the thousands of farmers aswell!!! They make our countries what they are but alot of them are having a hard time and many have shut down. This could have a large posistive effect.

 

I wonder what else we can chemically break down then boil into gas.

[cwes99_03]

Anything carbon based for sure (okay not diamonds), but what gasses and how easily are the points in consideration here.

 

Oh, and the target here was bi-products of manufacturing, however the note did extend to soy oil which creates a demand for soybeans.

 

The farmers won't profit much from this. The demand won't go up because there are cheaper ways of doing it and the price of the biofuel won't go down because the companies that will use this process will just make bigger profits. Perhaps you could take this info and invest in ADM.

[arkain101]

Considering how much waste product there is in farming, I thought that they would make considerable more product when making use of the waste.

[cwes99_03]

There actually isn't really any waste product in traditional midwestern farming. What are you thinking of when you say waste product?

[arkain101]

It's a way to take cheap, worthless biomass and turn it into useful fuels and chemicals," says Schmidt. "Potentially, the biomass could be used cooking oil or even products from cow manure, yard clippings, cornstalks or trees

 

stalks, shells. It depends on the farms purpose.

[cwes99_03]

I wouldn't call it waste. Just because it is grown and doesn't get processed doesn't make it waste.

 

Farmers learned the hard way about a century ago. The dust bowls and droughts taught them the lesson of recylcing the bio-mass of stalks and shucks into the soil. It saves a ton on fertilizer and it keeps the soil loose. The only reason a farmer would collect the biomass and haul it off of a refinery would be economic. Then he'd have to weigh the cost of collection and shipping. Probably not worth it.

 

This application will be most likely useful in the other areas of manufacturing where the waste product can't be recycled directly back into the system as of now. This includes sawdust, used cooking oil, etc. etc. etc.

 

Farmers don't waste.

[arkain101]

True Call.

 

I orginally said. "waste product there is in farming"

 

I meant that there is alot they can not sell in the same manner as the oringal product.

 

If they could sell such things that make no profit but rather create savings one would think they could make better profit.

[Michaelangelica]

Bush Promotes Hydrogen As Alternative Fuel Source

 

President Bush gave an Earth Day address in California reaffirming his commitment to hydrogen as the alternative fuel of the future. What do you think?

:D Bush Promotes Hydrogen As Alternative Fuel Source | The Onion - America's Finest News Source