Re: READ IT AND WEEP YOU POOR BASTARDS


"Marc" <mdandml@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1124215076.459174.237410@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/esthag-w/2005/aug/t Sunlight
turns landfill gas into renewable hydrogen
Amid record-high gasoline prices and capricious summer weather that
hints at global warming, renewable production of hydrogen (H2), a clean
fuel whose only combustion product is water, seems like the solution to
the world's energy and greenhouse-gas woes. More than 95% of the
world's H2 is currently made with polluting fossil fuels, and a cadre
of researchers is working on new technologies that use renewable
sources, such as solar and wind power, to generate H2. Now, Canadian
entrepreneurs have demonstrated for the first time a solar-powered
system that can produce H2 from landfill methane (CH4).


So why not just burn the CH4 directly to produce electricity or compress it
for use in a car? Sure, the products of combustion are carbon dioxide and
water but if you reform the methane to get pure hydrogen, what hapens to all
the carbon that was in the CH4? Doesn't it just wind up in the atmosphere?

snip


By preventing 81,000 tons (t) of CO2 equivalent from entering the
atmosphere every year,

"But Madam Rudolph, where did the Carbon go?"

with profus apologies to Richard Pryor

ron herfurth


the reactor will satisfy half of Regina's goal
to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 1 t per household as part of
Canada's Kyoto Treaty commitments.

There are lots of ways to produce H2 from renewables, and SHEC is not
the first to use solar power to convert CH4 to H2, says Brant Peppley,
a chemical engineer with the Queen's-Royal Military College Fuel
Cell Research Centre (Canada). However, what is unique about SHEC's
project is that the company is using solar power to convert renewable
landfill CH4 to H2, he says. "For every molecule of waste biogas
methane that we convert to hydrogen, the atmosphere benefits because
methane is 21 times more powerful than CO2 as a greenhouse gas," he
says. Using H2 from landfills as a renewable energy source in place of
fossil fuels creates even more advantages for health and the climate,
Peppley adds.

The solar concentrator technology at the heart of the SHEC system has
been around for decades. However, it has been drawing renewed attention
in the wake of the development of the very high efficiency solar
cells-above 37%-that are now widely used for powering satellites.
"This development demands that we take a fresh look at the potential
of solar concentrators for generating low-cost electricity or
hydrogen," according to the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory
(NREL).

SHEC's system does not use photovoltaic cells, but it has helped push
solar concentrators back into the limelight. Most importantly, the
company has cut the cost of solar collection by using inexpensive
materials to create mirror assemblies that are not labor-intensive to
construct, says Ray Fehr, vice president of marketing at SHEC. The
company dropped its costs by one-third by developing new methods to
form the reflectors before mirror finishing, he explains. Each
square-foot facet in the array concentrates the sunlight falling on it
to the size of a thumbnail. "When you put 25 of those together, you
get the power of 5000-8000 suns," Fehr says.

A water-cooled aperture, also a new invention, operates under computer
control like the iris of a camera to adjust the amount of sun in the
reactor, thereby maintaining the temperature of the reaction at 850
°C, the optimum level for the catalyst, he says.

The system is also innovative in "the way we have integrated the
solar mirror array and shutter system, reactor core, catalyst and
control system," Fehr says. CH4 extraction wells capture the landfill
gas, which is composed of a mixture of CH4, CO2, and other impurities
that are then separated from the CH4. In the first dry fuel reformation
reaction, CO2 and CH4 are quickly heated to 850 °C in the presence of
a catalyst to form H2 and carbon monoxide (CO). The CO and water then
flow into a water-gas shift reactor at 200 °C to yield H2 and CO2.
The H2 is separated from the CO2, which is recycled into the first
reaction, Bakos says.

SHEC's approach of using a proprietary catalyst to split CO2 and CH4
into H2 and CO has a number of advantages, Bakos says. Most
importantly, it requires less energy than the industry norm of using
steam to "reform" CH4, he adds. "It normally takes a lot of
energy to heat water," he says. Using the catalyst, and thereby
eliminating the water, means that it takes less energy to bring the
gases to 850 °C, and the temperature is easier to control, Bakos
explains.

More than 98% of the CH4 that feeds the reaction is converted to H2,
Bakos says. In energy terms, for every 40 megajoules (MJ) of CH4, the
process yields 45.7 MJ of H2, a net energy gain of more than 14%.
However, when the energy from the sun is factored in, SHEC's system
turns out to be quite inefficient because a great deal of the solar
energy is lost in the form of heat, Bakos admits. "SHEC will, in this
commercial project, implement heat exchangers to recover the majority
of the heat energy and apply this heat to the process," Fehr adds. By
using the abundant and free energy of the sun, energy losses are not as
critical when comparing SHEC's process to other processes that
require fossil fuels, he says.

SHEC nonetheless expects to be able to produce H2 much less expensively
than conventional processes can. Bakos estimates, on the basis of the
pilot plant's operation, that H2 production costs will be
Can$0.75/kg, compared with Can$1.25/kg for traditional H2 methods that
use natural gas. A kilogram of H2 has about the same energy content as
a kilogram of gasoline.

"Even if that estimate is just for production cost alone,
[Can]$0.75/kg is way too low because the solar technologies are
expensive," counters Margaret Mann, a chemical engineer at NREL. The
price rises even further when you factor in the cost of compressing and
transporting the H2, she notes. The U.S. Department of Energy has set a
target for H2 production cost at US$2/kg for this year.

However, the production cost of H2 varies widely, depending on the
feedstocks used and the source of energy, notes Ry Smith, manager of
the Hydrogen Village program for Fuel Cells Canada, an industry
association. "In the next 5-10 years, increasing consumption as
well as a number of new technologies will bring the price of hydrogen
down to where it is competitive with gasoline in terms of distance
traveled," he says.

SHEC will be selling food-grade H2 to food producers, mainly for
hydrogenating vegetable oils, Fehr says.

"The landfill methane cost is independent of the price of fossil
fuel-we are purchasing methane for pennies on the dollar-and the
operating costs will be much lower because we are using sun, not
fossil-fuel, energy," Bakos responds. Traditional methods of solar
energy collection and usage have been expensive, but SHEC's
technology is commercially viable because of its inexpensive
concentrator design and manufacturing techniques, Fehr adds.

The components that SHEC has created for its dry reformation of
landfill CH4 will also be used for the company's efforts to use solar
power to directly split water-a holy grail for researchers, Fehr
says. However, that development will be at least 10 years in the
making, he says. JANET PELLEY
ech/jp_sunlight.html


Ahhahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Looks like another few Million for
yours truly. Ahahahahahahahahahaha. You idiots!!!
Ahahahahahahahahaha.


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