Farm waste can be converted into hydrogen fuel
Imagearybet/Shuttersk
Hydrogen can be made using agricultural waste under a new production process that uses low energy than existing methods and no one emit greenhouse gases.
The novel process converts bioethaneol into clean hydrogen and acetic acid, a substance found in vinegar which are also used in chemicals, food and pharmaceutical industries.
Most hydrogen arises from natural gas; The process is energy-intensive and expensive. Hydrogen can also be produced from water using renewable electricity, but this approach is more expensive than using natural gas.
Graham Hutchings Cardiff University, in the UK, and their colleagues have developed an alternative method that depends on the catalysts made of platinum and iridium to extract hydrogen from bioathanol and water without releasing any carbon dioxide. Hutchings say that bioethane used in this process can be made from waste plant content.
“We don’t make co2, and so we are not making anything that is an environmental burden,” Hutchings. “We are taking biologically durable sources of carbon and hydrogen, and we are turning it into renewable hydrogen and renewable acetic acid. This is quite clear. ,
The team says that the process is likely to be scalable and commercially viable, requiring much less energy than making hydrogen from natural gas. Hutchings says that the next step is to attract commercial investment to set up a performance plant.
Clean hydrogen production will require fundamentally scales to enable global decarbonisation, such as steel, chemicals, and prolonged transport industries require hydrogen fuel.
But the world uses only 15 million tonnes of acetic acid in a year, limiting the potential role, this new process can play in meeting the demand for zero-carbon hydrogen.
“Depending on a molecule we make hydrogen twice as acetic acid,” says Hutchings. “But acetic acid is much heavier than hydrogen.” This means that the production of 15 million tonnes of acetic acid-the entire annual demand for the world-in this way only 1 million tonnes will be more than hydrogen, which is less than the demand for the pure-zero world. “In the context of the scale, a mismatch is a bit,” says Claus Helgard At Imperial College London.
Hutchings say that the new process may offer a possible passage to decurboning the part of the chemical industry, an attractive sub -product with clean hydrogen production, says Hutchings. “Acetic acid is currently made from fossil carbon effectively. And here we are, we can make it from permanent sources of carbon, ”they say.
Subject:
(Tagstotransite) Chemistry (T) Energy (T) Hydrogen
