ETHANOL FUEL CELLS A VIABLE ALTERNATIVE?

[JohnWxy]

http://www.glrc.org/transcript.php3?story_id=2195

These excerpts are from a report broadcast by The Great Lakes Radio Consortium's Stephanie Hemphill.

Hydrogen fuel cells may be the energy of the future, but so far the hydrogen to power them has only been made from fossil fuels. Now, researchers at the University of Minnesota have come up with a way to make hydrogen from a renewable fuel - ethanol, made from corn.

"We're now just using that ethanol as a gasoline additive. What we're proposing here is to use this ethanol as a transportable liquid fuel to use in fuel cells, which have two or three times the efficiency of simple combustion."

[Coastie for Truth]

1. Rings a bell

Phys Chem Lab II, double credit exercise, about 6-8 weeks into the term.

Yes (1962)

[mike_c]

2. what's the catalyst? n/t

[JohnWxy]

4. my guess is that's part of his patent and he wants to keep it to himself

until he gets patent protection.

[JohnWxy]

3. Excellent articles on your blog!

One of the things I have been trying to remind people of is that because of the very likely oil supply disruption coming soon, we need not only to be developing energy sources/technologies for the Future but also developing what we have, for the near term, as insurance against the oil supply disruption. We are just gambling right now (so what else is new, right?).

But this idea of using ethanol as a supplier of the hydrogen needed for fuel cells is really interesting as it might enable fuel cell technology much sooner than has been expected!