Furnace fuel: Small white particles of cellulose fall onto a hot catalyst bed in the presence of carbon dioxide, oxygen, and methane. The catalysts break down cellulose and methane into hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which can be used to make liquid fuels.
Paul Dauenhauer, U Mass Amherst
A new process can make more fuel from biomass.
Biomass can be converted to fuels via a process called gasification, which uses high temperatures to break feedstock down into carbon monoxide and hydrogen, which can then be made into various fuels, including hydrocarbons. But there's a major drawback--about half of the carbon in the biomass gets converted to carbon dioxide rather than into carbon monoxide, a precursor for fuels. Now researchers in University of Minnesota and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, have developed a method for gasifying biomass that converts all of the carbon into carbon monoxide.
In the new approach, the researchers gasify biomass in the presence of precisely controlled amounts of carbon dioxide and methane, the main component of natural gas, in a special catalytic reactor that the researchers developed. When they did this, all of the carbon in both the biomass and the methane was converted to carbon monoxide. "In the chemical industry, even a few percent improvement makes a big impact. The increase from 50 percent to 100 percent is profound," says Dionisios Vlachos, the director of the Catalysis Center for Energy Innovation at the University of Delaware.
To increase the yields from gasification, researchers at the University of Minnesota and UMass Amherst added carbon dioxide, which promotes a well-known reaction: the carbon dioxide combines with hydrogen to produce water and carbon monoxide. But adding carbon dioxide isn't enough to convert all of the carbon in biomass into carbon monoxide instead of carbon dioxide. It's also necessary to add hydrogen, which helps in part by providing the energy needed to drive the reactions. It's long been possible to do each of these steps in separate chemical reactors. The researchers' innovation was to find a way to combine all of these reactions in a single reactor, the key to making the process affordable.
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A solar-driven process could yield far more fuel than conventional biomass production.
Is "clean coal" the new crack?
Remove coal without destroying the planet, then we can talk about gasification......
Re: Is "clean coal" the new crack?
The Earth has eradicated 98% of all species that once existed on it's own. You've been brainwashed by the nature gnomes. What Gaia giveth the Earth can taketh away.
What's the end product of this process? I'm assuming that it's chemicals like plastics.
Gasification can be used for multiple applications (electricity, coal-to-liquids, coal-to-chemicals, etc.)
I don't understand what the biomass adds to the process. If the goal is chemicals, there are plenty of processes that turn methane into chemicals (with or without adding carbon dioxide.)
How could any biomass-to-chemicals process compete with a natural gas-to-chemicals process?
We need to stop believing that using biomass will somehow solve the problems of this planet! As a human species, we've tried biomass before in past and the outcomes have not been good: either abject poverty or mass destruction of forests.
I prefer the use of natural gas over biomass: it's more environmentally friendly and cheaper economically.
The proposed process would reduce the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere. & allow the conversion of biomass to liquid fuels [& chemicals]
Liquid fuels are hard to beat for their energy density, which is why they are the preferred choice for transportation fuels.
Diversification of energy choices is & should be one of the methods of reducing the US's dependence on imported oil
[Rant off]
Biomass provides less expensive hydrogen. it will only compete on a cost basis.
Biomass has advantages, but as I have read recently, we are at or near 'peak phosphorus' - P is vital for cell growth and widely used in fertilizers critical for large scale agriculture. Therefore, we should strongly consider whether the biomass employed has a net negative effect on any other scarce resources of great import, such as P. I would say that we should not be using biomass grown with such P based fertilizers if at all possible, or we will live in a cooler environment with more stable weather - and insufficient food.
A detailed heat balance is needed
Gasification is a self sustained process. This means that endothermic processes are compensated by exothermic ones. Aiming at avoiding CO2 formation and conversion of the input CO2 into CO, the reaction providing the necessary heat into the system should be a catalytic partial oxidation of methane:
CH4 + 1/2O2 ? CO + 2H2
The use of another exothermic reaction of H2 combustion leads to a consumption of the most valuable product. These simple considerations direct to a conclusion of a tremendous consumption of natural gas. It was pointed out a high catalyst temperature in the experiment; however, there is no reference to the heat source which permits keeping the catalyst hot.
As a result, a detailed heat balance is required to admit a rationale in this technology.
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eric25001
26 Comments
Why not coal? Hold the CO2
If the gasification process works then why not clean coal gasification? Maybe in situ?
Eric
Reply
mountainlion
14 Comments
Re: Why not coal? Hold the CO2
Coal and oil shale could be processed in place. It is more than environmentalists aginst the process as polotics have killed energhy in this country.
There was a process in the 70's to use Zinc as a catalist. I wonder what happened to Zinc?
Reply
JAQ
3 Comments
Re: Why not coal? Hold the CO2
one argument is that CO2 is still given off along with other elements and may contaminate ground water. another is formation must be below a water table, to shut off air supply to control combustion. There are mines that have been smoldering for decades. This is being done but has some concerns. Great thought,keep swinging.
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