Hydrogen Fuel Advance
by Jack Penland |
January 5th, 2008 |
Published in
All, Technology
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Power from Apple Pie
Hydrogen may be the fuel that someday both frees us from our need for fossil fuels and still keeps us in the cars we love. When today’s hydrogen-powered cars hit the road, instead of polluting the air, the only by-product is water. So, why aren’t manufacturers churning out thousands of hydrogen cars?
There are several reasons, but one of the most difficult to solve is how to make large amounts of hydrogen. In order to produce hydrogen today, manufacturers still use large amounts of fossil fuel, which defeats the purpose.
One promising method being explored by researchers at Penn State University is coaxing bacteria into producing hydrogen from just about any organic matter. “We could have given them bananas and oranges and apple pie and they could turn that into hydrogen,” says Penn State Environmental Engineer Bruce Logan. He adds that practically speaking the bacteria can also use things we don’t eat, like garbage, sewage, or plant material. As Logan notes, “anything that in nature, biodegrades.”
Researchers have been exploring microbial fuel cells as a possible alternative source of energy. A small fan in Logan’s lab runs from electricity produced by one such fuel cell.
But Logan’s goal with this project is not electricity, but hydrogen. He says the bacteria eat the biodegradable material, “and they break it down into protons and electrons and we boost the voltage in a specially designed fuel cell, which works kind of like a battery.” With the new step of adding a small amount of voltage and changing the structure of the fuel cell, Logan was able to produce hydrogen.
It takes energy to make energy and no process can create more energy than you put in. In this case energy comes both from the electricity and from the biodegradable material. Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Logan says this process is very efficient. He says if you count both the biodegradable material and the electricity, the efficiency is about 82 percent. However, he notes, “if we just look at the amount of electrical energy that we put in, we actually get out almost three times as much energy in the hydrogen as we put in the electrical energy.”
This compares favorably with other alternative fuel sources such as ethanol or biodiesel. For example, University of Minnesota ecology professor David Tillman found that when you count the amount of energy used to grow, fertilize, harvest, transport and process corn for ethanol, the amount of energy created is quite small, only 25 percent.
Logan’s research is in its early stages. He sees the next steps as taking two directions. “We want to prove this technology at a larger scale,” says Logan. He adds that in the laboratory he wants, to “improve the efficiency of the process (and to) reduce the size of the reactor.”
If the technology proves itself, Logan doesn’t expect that cars will have little generators turning sewage into hydrogen. He adds, “It’s not going to be ‘Mister Fusion’ from ‘Back to the Future.’”
Instead, he foresees the possibility that communities would have centralized hydrogen-processing facilities. He says the processes is sufficiently complex that it will need a manufacturing facility capable of handing higher levels of technology.
This research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online Early Edition the week of November 12-16, 2007 and was funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and Air Products and Chemicals, Inc.
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May 1st, 2010 at 1:53 pm (#)
i always use Biodiesel on my car to help the environment. Biodiesel is cleaner and is reneweable..`”
May 19th, 2010 at 7:06 pm (#)
Hydrogen Fuel is very promising, i only hope that we can mass produce soon enough..`~
August 11th, 2010 at 10:23 pm (#)
i hope that we would be able to mass produce Biodiesel in the near future and i also hope that it would get cheaper’:-
October 24th, 2010 at 7:37 am (#)
hydrogen fuel is definitely the best way to go, it is 100% non-polluting and reneweable”~”
November 7th, 2010 at 12:56 pm (#)
biodiesel should be the stuff that we should put on our engines because it is a renewable fuel “
December 16th, 2010 at 12:46 am (#)
i would love to use hydrogen fuel on my car, this fuel is really nonpolluting but is not yet very available ‘,`
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