To make better biofuels, researchers add hydrogen
Research on nuclear energy and hydrogen has yielded what backers say is a technology that could replace U.S. oil imports with biofuels made from agricultural by-products.
Scientists at Idaho National Laboratory have been working for the past year and a half on a process to convert biomass, such straw or crop residue, into liquid fuels at a far higher efficiency than existing cellulosic ethanol technologies.
A scarce resource for fuel?
(Credit: Idaho National Laboratory)Rather than one single development, the technology--named bio-syntrolysis--ties together multiple processes, but it has electrolysis, or splitting water to make hydrogen, at is starting point. When combined with a carbon-free electricity source, the approach could deliver a carbon-neutral biofuel, according to models done at INL which has done research for decades in nuclear energy.
Bio-syntrolysis is one of a dizzying number of technologies being developed with the hopes of replacing gasoline, although none have successfully been done at scale. Researchers at INL recognize there remain technical barriers, but its recent computer models show that the technique has better potential than today's biofuel processes.
The key advantage is that bio-syntrolysis would extract far more energy from available biomass than existing methods, said research engineer Grant Hawkes. Using traditional ethanol-making techniques, about 35 percent of the carbon from wood chips or agricultural residue ends up in the liquid fuel. By contrast, the bio-syntrolysis method would convert more than 90 percent of that carbon into a fuel, he said.
"That means if you gather up a kilogram of biomass from a field, you're going to get two and half times the liquid fuel from bio-syntrolysis than you would from cellulosic ethanol. If biomass is a precious commodity, this way you'll get more out of it," Hawkes said.
An often-quoted Department of Agriculture and Department of Energy study (click for PDF) estimated that the U.S. produces enough biomass to meet 30 percent of the country's liquid fuel. INL researchers say the higher productivity of its technology would cover more like 60 percent, nearly as much as the oil that the U.S. imports.
"This is the only process available that will give us all the liquid fuel we currently need that's carbon neutral with the all the biomass that's available," he said.
Although it's a compelling vision, there are a number of technical hurdles to making bio-syntrolysis commercially viable and environmentally beneficial.
To reduce carbon emissions significantly over other biomass-to-liquid processes, the INL technology requires a lot of carbon-free electricity--1,000 megawatts of electricity would yield enough 25,000 barrels of fuel a day, enough for almost one million people, according to INL models. A full-size nuclear reactor could produce 1,000 megawatts, but even large-scale wind farms or solar plants are substantially smaller.
The approach also relies on tying together different technologies, some of which are relatively immature in terms of commercial deployment. Making familiar biofuel processes cost effective is hard enough: after years of research and pilot projects, ethanol from wood chips or grasses still isn't produced at commercial scale.
Innovation in integration
Hawkes coined the term bio-syntrolysis to represent the combination of technologies researchers have been working with. To make a liquid fuel, they are using biomass to make a synthetic fuel via electrolysis of water.
Here's how it would work: a high-temperature electrolyzer would split steam into oxygen and hydrogen. Oxygen would be fed to a biomass gasifier, a machine that heats agriculture waste at high temperatures to produce synthesis gas, a combination of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. That synthesis gas, along with the hydrogen from the electrolyzer, would be fed to a refiner to make liquid fuels that could replace gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel.
A schematic of how carbon-neutral biofuel can be produced using a combination of existing technologies.
(Credit: Idaho National Laboratory)The biggest technology breakthrough in this design is the high-temperature electrolysis, which originally came from a program to study how nuclear reactors could be used to make hydrogen. But hydrogen-powered vehicles face a number of obstacles, including on-board storage and the infrastructure to cleanly produce and to distribute hydrogen.
By contrast, if the hydrogen was used to make hydrocarbon fuels, they could be distributed through the existing channels and be used with existing autos, including hybrid-electric vehicles.
The jump from hydrogen research to biofuels happened when Hawkes thought to make biomass the heat source for INL's high-temperature electrolysis, rather than the heat from a nuclear reactor. By making that switch, the electrolyzer can operate on biomass and electricity alone, rather than rely on a nuclear reactor.
"We feel each that each one of these technologies is individually proven but nobody has ever taken them and hooked them together to make one process," said Hawkes.
There are some commercially available biomass gasifiers and a few facilities turning synthesis gas into liquid fuel using coal as a feedstock. But coal-to-liquids has a high carbon footprint, even compared with gasoline, said Hawkes. If a renewable or carbon-free source, such as hydro power, can be used through bio-syntrolysis, the resulting fuel would have very low emissions, he said.
Storing hydrogen on plants
So far, INL researchers have done experiments using available commercial products and they have modeled the overall efficiency on computer. To build a high-temperature electrolyzer, they have purchased commercial fuels cells and modified them to work in reverse, so they produce hydrogen and oxygen from electricity.
"There is no need for any great discovery but there is a need for development of materials and electrolyzers and just the will the put all the different sources together," said Steve Herring, a research fellow at Idaho National Labs.
The projected cost of the fuel would be $2.50 a gallon to produce, which is not cheaper than today's gasoline. But the primary advantage is the fuel is domestically sourced, low-carbon, and available at a predictable price, Herring said. One of the rationales for the technology is that biomass to make fuel will become a scarce commodity, making techniques that can squeeze more energy from existing crops more compelling.
INL researchers imagine that a single location to collect biomass, run the gasifier and the electrolyzer. Fuel could be refined on site or shipped to existing facilities. The ash from the gasifier would contain many soil nutrients, such as potassium, that could be redistributed onto the fields that the biomass was collected from.
Why not simply use the hydrogen from the electrolyzer in fuel-cell vehicles? Hawkes and Herring said that the technical limits on hydrogen right now make this an approach that could be deployed without having to wait for technical breakthroughs in hydrogen vehicles.
"It's our observation that the best way to store hydrogen is to hook it onto a carbon atom from biomass now and make it a hydrocarbon fuel," said Hawkes.
Martin LaMonica is a senior writer for CNET's Green Tech blog. He started at CNET News in 2002, covering IT and Web development. Before that, he was executive editor at IT publication InfoWorld. E-mail Martin. 
"We feel each that each one of these technologies is individually proven..."
There are natural microorganisms in the soil and forest floors, so ordinary that selecting for them should get better results. In the presence of oxygen, water, these microbes, warm temperatures, and the cellulosic materials (except lignin), you will produce acetic acid. Then combine hydrogen and acetic acid to form different grades of alcohol. There is no fermentation involved at all. Oxygen and hydrogen from electrolysis are all laid it out in perfect ratio to have balanced reactions. These methodologies actually produces fuel from solar PV and agricultural wastes or forest litters (to reduce incidence of fire, forest litters should be utilized). There is more than enough land for solar PV that there is no need to build nuclear reactors. It now costs cheaper to build solar PV arrays of the same power capacity that can be completed at ten times faster than nuclear reactors and without the nuclear wastes.
What utter nonsense, how did you dream this up? Sunny Spain is backing out of Solar PV after committing $US26.4 billion for at most a meager 450 MWe average. Compare with the much maligned Ontario Gov't bid for two new First-of-A-Kind Advanced Candu reactors of 2 x 1200 MWe x .95 capacity factor = avg 2280 MWe over 60 yrs lifespan (vs 20 yrs for your solar) all for C$26 bilion. Includes all fuel costs for 60 yrs, decommissioning costs, new highway construction, all power transmission upgrades (normally paid by the utility) and guaranteed all cost overruns. That's 80-100 TWh for the Solar vs 1200 TWh for the Nuclear for the same cost , not counting maintenance and backup power cost for the Solar, or 13X the energy for same cost as the Solar.
See:
http://uvdiv.blogspot.com/2009/08/spanish-solar-power-market-crashes.html
http://bravenewclimate.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/peter-lang-solar-realities.pdf
Factory produced modular reactors, like the Hyperion are expected to cost $1200 per kwe & $500 per kwth or 1/8th the cost of the Darlington reactors, with installation times of 1 year or less.
Nuclear Waste is a bogus claim. Coal power plants produce 2 to 100 times the Radioactive Waste of Nuclear Power Plants for the same amount of energy. They are allowed to happily bury it in landfills or spew it into the atmosphere. To play fair, Nuclear should be allowed to dissolve their waste in acid and dump it into the ocean, not even 0.1% the environmental effect of what Coal is routinely allowed to do. 1 years Coal radioactive waste would run a Liquid Flouride Thorium reactor for 18 years, with the same power output, and generate 170 kg of radioactive waste vs the 250,000 tons of ash - 386,000 tons of sludge - 6.2 million tons of CO2 - 20,000 tons of SOx - 20,400 tons of NOx and extra arsenic, lead, mercury & cadmium which the Coal power plants are allowed to dump into the environment with complete immunity.
You intentionally did not count the cost of nuclear waste processing, which is a cost that continues for several hundred thousand to millions of years to come. Solar Power plant has insignificant operational wastes. Processing nuclear power wastes are expensive. Yes you can recycle them, and you will have geometric increase in the number of still another type of radioactive wastes and so on. Europe has mountains of radioactive wastes that gets too expensive to handle, recycling , reprocessing or storage. The subsequent products even from recycling begets different type of waste but still radioactive and deadly nontheless. Canada is quickly piling up with 88 million pounds of radioactive waste. So which is cheaper operationally when you count thy wastes?
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/5631
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/5677
http://www.yuccamountain.org/docs/winter_2008.pdf
RIP nuclear fission. Long live nuclear fussion: The Sun!
What a crock! You have an amazing flair for inventing numbers. The Japanese, Korean, Indian and Chinese reactors which are almost all that have been built or are being built recently, are coming in on time and on budget. USA Quad Cities cost $680 per kw (2007 USD) for 1800 MW, completed in 5 yrs. Millstone-1 cost $800 per kw (2007 USD) for 660 MW, completed in 2 yrs. The Darlington bids @ $10,800 per kw including all fuel for 60 yrs, decommissioning & highway construction & transmission line upgrades AND CONTRACTOR PAYS ALL COST OVERRUNS. This is for two First-Of-A-Kind ACANDU?s with ZERO SUPPLY CHAIN!
The best Solar PV going runs (at a bargain Ebay price) $73,000 for 21 kw pk, incl inverters = $3476 per kw pk. Take about the best location in the USA for Solar, Tucson Arizona, that?s 34917 kwh AC per year or 3.97 kw avg = $18,388 per kw avg. Now that is uninstalled price, unreliable intermittent power. The power output is only 1 kw at 8 am when the morning peak occurs, and 900 watts at 6 pm when the evening peak occurs. And zero for 7 pm through 5 am. So you need 18 hrs storage to be any good for even a sunny day. That?s 18 hrs X $400 per kwh = $7200 per kw for half decent batteries ? replaceable after maybe 5-10 yrs. So now you have $25,588 per kw avg uninstalled, for power only good for continuous sunny days and only for 20 yrs. What happens when it is cloudy for one week? What happens during and after a dust storm ? hail storm ? ice storm ? tornado ? earthquake ? large volcanic eruption? Absolutely nutso.
Germany has being trying for 20 yrs, full out, incredible 45 cents per kwh subsidy, and has only achieved 2220 GWh Solar by 2006 vs Nuclear, which it claims it is going to shut down, at 167,269 GWh in 2006, and of course the actual Renewables Plan energy = Coal & NG @ 379,000 GWh. So Biggest Solar PV country on Earth (1/2 the World?s PV) only managed 0.35% of its Electricity production by 2006. Compare with France, which managed to displace almost all fossil fuel electricity production with Nuclear in a 20 year build, and now exports to Germany. So much for your 10 times faster! And France generates 83 gm CO2 per kwh of electricity vs Germany?s 601 gm CO2 per kwh. And Solar PV produces 39-100 gm CO2 per kwh vs Nuclear at 5-22 gm CO2 per kwh.
??You intentionally did not count the cost of nuclear waste processing, which is a cost that continues for several hundred thousand to millions of years to come. ? Processing nuclear power wastes are expensive??
Truth has no meaning to you does it. Even standard LWR waste is at the level of natural uranium after 10,000 years. And the cost of nuclear waste using Swedish actual numbers is 0.13 cents US per kwh ? Wowee! That?s terrible. US operators are charged 0.1 cents per kwh for the Yucca mountain boondoggle, that your Oil & Gas / Coal buddies forced on the American Public, when they knew damn well that Deep Seabed disposal is cheap as borsch and safe for 100?s of millions of years, Total LWR waste amounts to a coke can full, weighing 2 lbs, for the average citizen's lifetime electricity needs. While your substitute Coal power plant will produce 69 tons of solid radioactive (2-100X more radiation) waste for the same amount of energy & 1300 tons of total noxious waste. Curious how you have no problem whatsoever with allowing your substitute Coal power plants to recklessly dump their waste in landfills and sludge ponds and into the atmosphere.
??Solar Power plant has insignificant operational wastes??
Yeah, right. Check out the horrendous, child-killing mess your Solar PV plants are making in China:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/08/AR2008030802595.html
Electrolysis is not that efficient, and high temperature electrolysis is just incrementally better-- instead of 70kWh to produce 34kWh of H2, 10kWh of heat and 50kWh of electricity is used. If the biomass gasifier has a lot of waste high temperature heat, then it could be used with electrolysis, but it's still going to take 50% more electric energy than the value in the hydrogen created, then only to be used in a 25% efficient auto engine. It would be better to use gasifier waste heat to preheat the input material or generate electricity.
Lightweighting and plug-in hybrid batteries are a much more efficient way to stretch out biofuel with added electricity. Using renewable-derived hydrogen to upgrade biofuel (attach the H2 to bio-carbon to make liquid fuel) make make more sense than trying to distribute compressed H2 gas to be used in a 50% efficient fuel cell.
Note that in theory you could heat pool water or house radiant heat by cooling PV panels (or pre-warm house hot water), but not much else-- the panels need to run at relatively low temperatures. (Low temperature electrolysis is considered to be 100 degC - boiling at atmospheric pressure. High temperature is 1000 degC.)
That is correct, but the easiest and cheapest way to do that is to convert NG to Methanol, which costs 25 cents per gallon plus the cost of the NG. And Methanol burns at double the efficiency of gasoline in a simpler & cheaper version of the TDI diesel engine, but with spark ignition & port fuel injection. It is also much cleaner burning than gasoline or diesel. Right now NG is running about two cents per kwh heat value vs gasoline upwards of 10 cents per kwh heat value.
Unfortunately we have no way to deliver large quantities of methanol, which would at least require new types of gas stations and a large distribution network. More significantly, there is no way to carry around enough of it in a car, even if you are willing to give up the trunk. That will require invention, which the scheme proposed in this article does not. You can imagine a lot of systems that would work better, except that they don't exist and aren't likely to any time soon.
Nonsense. It can be delivered with separate fuel pump selections at any gas filling station, same as E100 or E85 or diesel. It is actually the easiest fuel to distribute and deliver. Pipelines, including gasoline pipelines work just fine. Trucks, tankers no problem. Have a spill, no problem. Wash it down with water. Completely miscible in water, and environmentally friendly. Whereas have a spill with gasoline, NG, diesel or crude and you can have a major environmental disaster. Millions of tons of Methanol are added to Sewage Treatment plant effluent to reduce nitrates pollution. China is rapidly expanding Methanol production & distribution for automobile use. And Brazil has readily created an Ethanol fuel infrastructure which is similar to what Methanol requires. Except Ethanol is much more expensive to produce than Methanol and is not as clean burning (Methanol is the third cleanest burning fuel, next to NG & Hydrogen ? it is the cleanest burning liquid fuel).
"...More significantly, there is no way to carry around enough of it in a car, even if you are willing to give up the trunk...."
Wrong. Methanol has double the energy density of CNG at 3000 psi, and 5.8 times the energy density of H2 at 3000 psi ? not including the heavy, bulky high pressure fuel tank, pressure regulators and safety valves. It does have half the energy density of gasoline but burns at double the efficiency of gasoline in a simpler & cheaper conversion of a standard TDI diesel, but with spark ignition & low pressure port fuel injection. Peak efficiency at 43% with a wide island of high efficiency and excellent emissions. And Methanol is excellent as a generator for a series hybrid, like the Volt, either in a methanol fuel cell or extreme efficiency methanol engine. So you get ½ the energy density X twice the efficiency engine X double the efficiency of series hybrid = double the mileage of a comparable gasoline engine vehicle for the same amount of fuel. And since Methanol presents far less fire or spill hazard than diesel or gasoline, a more inexpensive light duty fuel tank and fuel delivery system is possible. The EPA estimates there would be 95% less fire deaths and injuries if gasoline was replaced by methanol. See:
http://epa.gov/otaq/presentations/sae-2002-01-2743-v2.pdf
Perhaps I missed something or the article was badly written, but something makes this sound extremely fishy. I usually understand the basic idea of these things but I don't understand how consuming several fuel stocks in order to make one will result in an inexpensive product. Why consume massive amounts of several fuel sources to make one when you could just use those sources directly. The explanation didn't state why this is a good idea except that it can use existing oil lines. Hydrogen is difficult and expensive to produce and solar power is not quite ready to meat the needs of a large industry. Am I making sense? I don't usually have trouble understanding this kind of thing. It really sounds like flim-flam.
Gasoline from Vinegar:
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/23406/?a=f
stated by Nanosolar: http://www.nanosolar.com/company/blog/1kg-cigs-5kg-uranium
CIGS is infinitely recyclable and are 100% recyclable after the panels degrade every 30 years. While you have millions of years of expenses to handle nuclear wastes.
so which do you like to use now and for the future generation?
Nanosolar has upped their website today with some fantastic news of achieving NREL certified 16.4% foil efficiency, the best of its kind in the world for low-cost printed solar PV.
In any case, it don't mean zip. What matters is how much per kw avg delivered power? What is life of installation? How do you supply baseload power? How much does backup / storage energy cost? How much area of pristine wilderness has to be destroyed to create your Solar PV of significant size? What is that effect on local climate? How will climate change effect the good Solar regions? How do you tranmit that energy and at what cost to customers? How fast can be production & installation be scaled up? Show me just one of their Solar Panels for sale with an actual price that I can pay.
Steve Kirsch effectively blows your arguments right out of the water, into the realm of wild & deadly fantasy.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-kirsch/add-a-gigawatt-a-day-to-k_b_261728.html
"...In fact, in 2008, the peak solar capacity was 13.4GWe, but the average powered delivered was only 2 GWe. Yikes! That's about the capacity of a single nuclear plant...Compare that 2 GWe to the 13,000 GWe we need and you get a sense for the magnitude of the task ahead of us. The point is this: after decades of installing renewable power, we are nowhere close to making a small dent in the problem. In other words, if we think we are going to make the goal from solar, wind, and other renewables alone, we must be smoking something..."
This is an emergency. We need NEW NUCLEAR - FAST NUCLEAR - CHEAP NUCLEAR. Factory produced small to medium sized nuclear reactors. Full out WWII style production. Entirely achievable - guaranteed, only problem is political.
http://www.facebook.com/IdahoNationalLaboratory
- by c12solutions September 30, 2009 12:34 PM PDT
- If you've got a bio-gasifier already, doesn't it make sense to take a slip-stream and gas-shift it to a higher hydrogen content that you can the use for fuel upgrading? I know the electrolysis provides oxygen for the process but there are much cheaper ways of obtaining oxygen.....
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(22 Comments)Anyway, interesting integration concept nonetheless.