Aug
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Solar Plus Biomass To Replace Oil
August 1, 2007 | 1 Comment
Replace all oil used for US transportation by using biomass to gather the carbon and solar to produce hydrogen? Pretty exciting stuff.
That’s what the theory promises as published by Purdue’s Rakesh Agrawal, Navneet Singh, Fabrio Ribeiro and Nicolas Delgass They’re saying it’s a ‘can do’ with current and near current technologies.
Agrawal is quoted as saying ““Enough technology exists to build the main concept of this process today. H2CAR could also endure sustainably for thousands of years. [We hope that] this process will lead to the birth of a new economy, a ‘hybrid hydrogen-carbon economy.’”
With a new acronym “H2CAR” for hybrid hydrogen-carbon the team envisions using the high energy density that hydrocarbons processed from sustainable and environmentally friendly methods. The products they propose making would be similar enough that they can be used in the existing infrastructure and skip the problems of using ethanol for example.
Robert Rapier who blogs at http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/ often reviews and critiques things of this type and has offered several looks at how the economics, capital costs, and hard realities would come into play for various alternatives energy sources. I will be letting him know this is something to look at and hope to get his take on this.
I do suggest a look at the article in PNAS here:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/104/12/4828 or download the pdf:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/104/12/4828?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=
10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=Agrawal+Rakesh&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX
I don’t generally offer direct links to scientific studies as a rule, but this one is available without a subscription and is frankly, quite lucid and well written. The main point the study offers is the combining the production of carbon in biomass and the production of hydrogen from solar, nuclear, wind, and etc. can fully offset the oil products we use for cars, trucks, planes, trains and other liquid fuel uses. That is a very large amount and US consumption approximates about a fifth of total world oil production.
The opening of the article explores and explains an easily understood and well thought out analysis of the current liquid fuel situation and the available ideas for going into the future. The authors make the important point that photosynthesis is not particularly efficient whereas photovoltaic is more so and by combining the products offer a much longer term solution than either one alone. They discuss scenarios for both biomass and coal as feed stocks and compare the method with suggested biological routes using microbes and enzymes. The conclusion offers some thought on how and where additional research could be directed for getting a full working method.
It seems the authors may have a strong point to make for public and private research investors to be conscious of technologies that blend value from seemingly unrelated fields.
The authors make a persuasive point that combining renewable sourced hydrogen and biomass carbon offer a great deal more than each would alone making the prospects of research and development in each field even more worthwhile.
It really interesting to see what some well thought out consideration can do by combining assessments of unrelated technologies. You have to wonder if the “oil companies” are noticing this as well.
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Great information! I’ve been looking for something like this for a while now. Thanks!