yeah, but an ethanol-to-hydrogen reformer, if
efficient and miniaturized, could turn into
one really useful product: fuel cells for
laptops and cell phones, ones which don't
need to run on an explosive compressed gas.
Your proposed device would be quite useful-- liquid fuels certainly have the advantage over gaseous ones in energy density and sheer convenience. Additionally, such a system need only compete with batteries for efficiency, and that's not a high hurdle.
The Minnesota researchers make no reference to something that small, but their prototype is only two feet tall, and portable electronics require very little power. So, yes-- the gizmo you want is very credible.
Posted by Mitch at March 22, 2004 02:59 AMRunning anything on hydrogen is going to create a net loss with current technology. Hydrogen is simply too energy intensive to produce and requires too specialised a material to contain.
The ethanol discussion has a few oversights and omissions:
What is the energy cost of refractionating crude oil into petrol/diesel/etc? How many carcinogens such as benzene are produced in this process? Corn does NOT REQUIRE large amounts of nitrogen fertilizer to grow. In fact no plant requires nitrogen fertilizer of the manufactured kind to grow. There's a thing called compost that plants can use to grow really well and that requires only solar energy and some easily found micro-organisms to manufacture.
Regardless of what Diesel's original prototype engine used as fuel (I've only read that it was gunpowder) his demonstration engine ran on peanut oil. :)
Has anyone tried separating water from ethanol
using sulfur? I didn't see any layers of separation. I know this seems like a separate topic, but I'm very interested in producing alcohol for fuel. Differential miscibility seems to be a way of saving energy while producing ethanol.
Biomass to Ethanol using cellulose is much more economical than corn. Renewable trees developed by my corp is being used in Europe and Africa for the production of Ethanol. When you consider the facts that 1 acre of our trees 3 years old will outproduce corn to Ethanol by 8 to one using new technology from Advanced Concept Technologies producing 100 gal per ton of wood cellulose and the equipment is producing its own power source you are outdated on your information. Want more informatin contact me.
Ray