More interesting to me is the recent work on converting biomass to hydrogen using bacteria being conducted at Penn State Univ.:
New Method Uses Bacteria to Generate Hydrogen Gas | WIRED
For an article in Wired about the latest work, or read the published report in the Nov 20, 2007 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/104/47/18871
It’s not quite Mr. Fusion but it’s getting closer…
Welcome to the boards, ehbush. When commenting on one of **Cecil’s ** columns, a link to the column is appreciated:
Is ethanol derived from cellulose a truly viable energy source?
Thanks for the additional information.
In recent lectures, I’ve heard Dr. Jim Duke, retired USDA scientist, and well-respected ethnobotanist, talk about his idea of a sustainable ethanol production model. He advocates growing medicinal plant crops, most specifically Artemesia annua (currently under intense investigation as an anti-malarial agent), and using the biomass after harvest of the usable medicinal components, to produce biofuels.
The best cite I could find is from the CRC Handbook of Edible Weeds, where Dr. Duke advances his model. This is worth reading, as Dr. Duke is expert, as well as having a sense of humor and life that SDer would appreciate. I’d also suggest that Cecil and hardworking Research Minions contact him for further elaboration on the subject.
Edit: couldn’t make that link work due to not copying the entire long link.( Any help with that process appreciated.) Until then, it’s pages 3-6 on that book link.
One critical, and conspicuously omitted fact, is what is happening to the carbon in this process. Without such explicit information, I can only assume, that like in other fermentation/biological degradation of organic matter, that it is becoming CO[sub]2[/sub]. In that case, it is only as good as any other carbon neutral fuel source. Worse yet, hydrogen itself is useless as a fuel for general transportation due to it’s low energy/volume density.
Seeing that there are hydrogen-powered automobiles and busses right now, that seems questionable.
I think what John W. Kennedy meant is that ultimately it’s a design concern. Ie, how to fit the bigger fueltank?
All of the applications that I am aware of, consist of vehicles that get back to a station to refuel frequently. In other words, not applicable to general transportation.
Hydrogen in its most concentrated form (liquid), requires four times the space that gasoline does for the equivalent energy.
How big do you think these liquid hydrogen fuel tanks can get? If you have a twelve gallon tank now, you will need a 48 gallon tank to go the same distance. Never-mind the problem that you will need a refrigeration unit to keep the hydrogen liquid.
12 gallons is actually tiny. Consider that the overall volume of a car is a number of cubic meters, and that 12 gallons is 0.05 m3. Basically, when you said “hydrogen is useless…due to its energy/volume” you were talking through your ass. At worst, we’ll have to make cars a bit bigger. Hardly ‘impossible’, even if unwelcome.
All I can figure is you completely missunderstood. What I said was, that if you have a mid-sized car with a 12 gallon tank of regular fuel, you will need that same car with a 48 gallon tank of liquid hydrogen to go the same distance. Is a 48 gallon tank of refrigerated liquid hydrogen too big for a mid-sized car?
Here is my cite for the energy density of hydrogen. I appologize for the wikipedia site, when you come up with something more reliable concerning the energy/volume density of hydrogen I will gladly read it.
The fuel range of the Honda Clarity is 270 miles. My 2003 VW Passat is about 400.
Cool. It looks like they have a solution the hydrogen storage problem. 5 kg of Hydrogen is huge considering liquid hydrogen weighs .07 kg/liter. I wonder wich of the storage mechanisms they use.
John W. Kennedy, do any of your cites tell you how much this thing costs? It’s all well and good to have a new way to store hydrogen, but if the material used to store it is worth more than gold it’s hardly commercially viable.
I don’t mean to suggest that none of this research is usefull. Absolutely it needs to be funded, but in my experience, people tend to over emphasize the success and hide the problems. This is especially a problem where research funding is at stake. On the otherhand, if we continue to make claims of “the solution” that don’t pan out, we will be increasingly less credible to our detractors.
Gotten away from the gist of this post. Yes, cellulose is the better way to go for fuel, but most bio-mass that is being considered fall short of viability, and usability.
Hemp is the one and only bio-mass on this planet that has multiple uses.
We in sunny SoCal have begun the 2008 Hemp Initiative. I wont go on here, but you can get all you need to know here: jackherer.com author of The Emperor Wears No Clothes.
Why does that make it more suitable as a fuel source? We should be looking at biomass feedstocks that are very efficient at producing energy, not feedstocks that are mediocre at a lot of uses.
The Honda Clarity will be leasable for about $600/mo for three years in southern California, starting in mid-2008. There are already test models in the hands of the usual magazines, etc..
I should add that I don’t have any connection with Honda, or the car industry generally, or the energy industry. Everything I’ve said here is readily available via Google.
I wasn’t at all implying that you were in some way connected to Honda. I was a little suprised to see that this technology was available, and apparently it has been available for a while. It was maybe a little more than a year ago that I met someone that was working on the amine-borane storage technology and it sounded like they were still a ways off.
If this works, that’s great!
We still need to figure out what is happening to the carbon in the papers presented by the OP. I realize that the second paper says that they detected minimal CO[sub]2[/sub], but that sounds a little like they are obfuscating the true carbon product since they don’t come out and tell you what it is. Then again, that’s a chemist thinking, not a biologist.
Of course lease is not the same thing as buy, since Honda is guaranteed to get that precious material back. Actually, from what I have been able to deduce from various patents I found, it looks like they are using a carbon allotrop for hydrogen storage, which inherently means that while the material itself is pricey, a global market for it would likely reduce the cost to managable.
That can’t possibly be true.
It patently is not. Corn, to use an obvious example, can be used as a direct food source for humans and herbivores, processed into an indirect food source, fermented to form drinkable and burnable alcohols, burned for heat energy, processed into ethanol via the cellulosic methods Cecil describes, processed into textiles and plastics, and dried for use in amusing Autumn holiday displays.
But I suppose a biomass isn’t “multi-use” if it can’t get you high. :rolleyes:
.