Researchers Generate Hydrogen from Biomass With a 100% Net Gain of Energy
Researchers using the Virginia Tech method may make it possible to power our homes from our gardens within the next 3 years.
The concept of producing hydrogen from biomass is certainly not a new idea, but past efforts have been too expensive or produced too little hydrogen (or both) to be viable as a source of electricity. Now, a team of researchers using biomass have successfully generated hydrogen from xylose using the "Virginia Tech method" that results in a 100 percent net gain of energy, produces small quantities of greenhouse gas emissions and doesn't require the use of specialized and expensive metals.
According to researcher Y. H. Percival Zhang, an associate professor of biological engineering (pictured on the right), this "technique could help end the human race’s dependence on fossil fuels" and has an estimated market arrival time of just three years.
Though details on the Virginia Tech method are still under wraps, it is known that the process involves pulling enzymes from micro-organisms and combining them with xylose and a polyphosphate. Once these components are combined, hydrogen can be extracted at relatively low temperatures.
When we consider the phenomenal efficiency of the process and that xylose is the second most abundant sugar found in plants, we may all have the ability to power our homes and gardens and launch the era of carbon-neutral gaming by the end of this decade.
Fuel cells are not that expensive and costs will drop. Storing and transporting hydrogen in a car is though. And fuel cells are much more efficient than an ICE. 50% at least. As long as you are getting the hydrogen for cheap/free it's a fine idea, just not in cars. Probably never in homes directly either, not enough biomass. But "central" ones running of leaf pickup and organic garbage and crop waste? Sure. anything is better than ethanol
Labs at one of the tech universities in Germany have been using fuel cells to run a few buildings for years. Why? Well. Cause tech university lol. but guess what the efficiency goes to when ALL that "waste" heat is dumped into your radiant heating system snd hot water and you dont need electric or gas boilers anymore?
SPAM
Fuel cells are not that expensive and costs will drop. Storing and transporting hydrogen in a car is though. And fuel cells are much more efficient than an ICE. 50% at least. As long as you are getting the hydrogen for cheap/free it's a fine idea, just not in cars. Probably never in homes directly either, not enough biomass. But "central" ones running of leaf pickup and organic garbage and crop waste? Sure. anything is better than ethanol
Labs at one of the tech universities in Germany have been using fuel cells to run a few buildings for years. Why? Well. Cause tech university lol. but guess what the efficiency goes to when ALL that "waste" heat is dumped into your radiant heating system snd hot water and you dont need electric or gas boilers anymore?
Exactly right! Even if this tech went only to power heat (and AC/refrigeration) sources it would take a huge load off of the overall power grid. We could go with solar to power things like home electronics, and then move to a cheap technology like this to cover things like heating and cooling. Heating and cooling is some 40+% of most people's power needs (heater, AC, water heater, oven, stove, clothes dryer, fridge) and all of it can be run efficiently on flammable gasses directly, it does not need to be converted to electricity to be a huge help to the power grid.
On top of that you are right on about the efficiency of vehicles. We are currently at ~50% efficient with the burning of gasoline for propulsion... we could go much higher than that, but the problem is that to get gasoline to burn more efficiently requires the operating temperature to raise significantly, which then becomes a bit of a dubious physics problem for something as small as a car (like the whole car would melt and burn). No matter how you slice it, once you have energy out of an ICE you have already lost 50% of the possible power from the system. The gains we are seeing in fuel efficiency are due to better drive trains, lighter weight materials, better gasoline, less wind resistance, etc, but nothing recoups that energy lost at the start of the process.
The nice thing about moving to electric power for vehicles is that the 50% limitation does not apply in the same way. My understanding (and I could well be wrong on this) is that we are still loosing some 50% of the potential power in an electric system, but most of this is an energy transfer and storage issue. Once you have the electricity inside the vehicle you have very little loss going from the battery to the motors, heater, AC and stereo (though more modern/efficient/powerful onboard computer solutions would be a plus!). Plus you get to recapture energy that would have been lost in things like braking, and you are not chained to a singular power source (anything that can be converted to electricity becomes a potential fuel). The trick is finding better ways to convert heat/light/material into electricity, and then more efficient ways to converting that electricity into a stored state for use in a battery, and there is progress being made on those fronts already. The other issue is getting material costs down and drive range up so that people can afford and use said electric/hydrogen vehicles, but that is again mostly an energy storage issue as the battery is the expense that dictates the car's higher price point.
Also, efficiency is not always required for all systems (*shock!*). If this new way of producing hydrogen is sufficiently plentiful and cheap then it does not need to be particularly efficient in order to be useful. All that it needs to do is be clean (lack harmful byproducts), cheap, and have a similar usable energy density to other energy storage solutions (such as Gasoline or lithium-ion batteries). So long as it meets those requirements then it can be 20% efficient and still be a better solution than traditional technologies, and it will get better as the technology matures. From what I understand about fuel cells (which is admittedly surface level) the hard part has always been hydrogen production, and that once you had that then you would have an energy storage system that puts things like batteries and gasoline to shame. Either way you are not dealing with the byproducts and politics (middle east) of gasoline, or the EV range and politics (china) involved with battery production. Not saying that those are the only things to consider when choosing a new energy technology, but they do go a long way at making fuel cell tech look pretty good.
@ santeana - Generating hydrogen by adding electrical current to water is a 100% viable source of energy, and is most commonly found in solar to hydrogen conversion. Your assumption that the electricity would be generated using fossil fuels is out of touch.
@someone somewhere - Generating hydrogen using that method while inefficient, can be 100% automated and based on renewable energy, so the loss from conversion is insignificant compared to the stable and lossless output of hydrogen.
The problem with many of those "vaporware technologies" is that although the inventions themselves may be great technical breakthroughs, they are often not commercially viable using the techniques and technologies that enabled the discovery and may require years or even decades of further research for cheaper and/or faster means to achieve the same results to become available.
Diamond might be the ultimate substrate for semiconductors but electronic-grade diamonds are extremely rare in nature (most of those end up in jewelry), tiny compared to silicon or gallium wafers and there is no known cost-effective and timely method of manufacturing wafer-sized diamonds. Until someone finds a cost-effective method of mass-producing 4" or larger diamond wafers, diamond chips will remain in the domain of high-premium applications that absolutely require it and can afford making chips one by one.
Same for carbon nanotubes on silicon: they proved it can be done, they proved the potential benefits but we still need the self-assembly breakthroughs to make it cost-effective for mass-manufacturing.
Much of the time, discovery is only half the battle. The other half is often finding ways to make application of that discovery cost-effective.
@ santeana - Generating hydrogen by adding electrical current to water is a 100% viable source of energy, and is most commonly found in solar to hydrogen conversion. Your assumption that the electricity would be generated using fossil fuels is out of touch.
@someone somewhere - Generating hydrogen using that method while inefficient, can be 100% automated and based on renewable energy, so the loss from conversion is insignificant compared to the stable and lossless output of hydrogen.
While generating hydrogen from water with electricity works, it is not a "source", as the electricity has to come from somewhere, and the amount of electricity will be larger than the energy in the hydrogen produced (it is not entirely efficient, plus the 1st law of thermodynamics gets in the way).
You still need to make the source of renewable electricity in the first place, otherwise you are just replacing oil with coal.
Plus storing the electricity in batteries (i.e. battery-electric vehicle) is still more efficient than electricity>hydrogen>electricity, plus the transport logistics are easier (we already have powerlines. Moving H2 is a lot more difficult and dangerous).
Moving to H2 is more about energy density than efficiency: H2 has much higher power density per kg than any battery or other chemical energy source and refilling a H2 tank takes only a minute or two. A long-range rechargeable battery would be very heavy and recharging it in a reasonable amount of time requires beefy power delivery infrastructure.
A quick comparison...
- Gas: A 40L gas tank contains ~1400MJ weighing ~35kg.
- Hydrogen: equivalent energy weighs ~12kg but needs over 120L of storage at 70MPa (LH2) which requires a heavy steel tank
- Lithium: ~700kg battery that uses around 800L of space (bigger and heavier than H2's steel tank)
Recharging a 1400MJ battery from 50% to full in 30 minutes would require infrastructure capable of delivering over 300kW or 1250A@240V... that's more power than entire neighborhoods usually use and would require some seriously stiff and heavy cables. The power grid may "already be there" but coping with so many new large momentary loads if everyone adopted such cars would likely require network-wide adjustments and upgrades.
Battery-based cars are fine for city commute where you may be able to plug in while at the office, shopping mall, restaurant, overnight at home, etc. to avoid needing to find charging stations but for longer trips, hydrogen or some form of hybrid becomes much more attractive... steel for H2 tanks is much cheaper than lithium.