Farm waste can be converted into hydrogen fuel
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Hydrogen can be made using agricultural waste as part of a new production process that uses less energy than current methods and does not emit any greenhouse gases.
The process of vital ethanol is transformed into clean hydrogen and acetic acid, a substance found in vinegar that is also used in chemical, food and pharmaceutical industries.
Most hydrogen is produced from natural gas. The process is thick and expensive. Hydrogen can also be produced from water using renewable electricity, but this approach is more expensive than the use of natural gas.
Graham Hatings At Cardiff University in the United Kingdom and its colleagues, they developed an alternative method based on a catalyst made of platinum and reidium to extract hydrogen from ethanol and water, without launching any carbon dioxide. Hachings says that the Boithanol used in the process can be made of waste station materials.
“We do not make carbon dioxide, so we do nothing to make an environmental burden,” says Hachings. “We are taking a sustainable biological source of carbon and hydrogen, and we turn it into renewable hydrogen and renewable acid acid. This is very elegant.”
The team says that the process is likely to be developed and commercially applicable, which requires a much lower energy -making energy of natural gas. The next step is to attract commercial investment to create a manifestation factory, says Hijingz.
Clean hydrogen production will need to radically expand to enable global carbon removal, with industries such as steel, chemicals and long transportation expected to need hydrogen fuel.
But the world uses only about 15 million tons of acetic acid annually, which limits the potential role of this new process in meeting the demand for the zero hydrogen for carbon.
“On the basis of the molecule, we make twice the amount of hydrogen like acetic acid,” says Hachings. “But acetic acid is much heavier than hydrogen.” This means producing 15 million tons of acetic acid-which is the entire annual demand in the world-and in this way it will lead to more than one million tons of hydrogen, which is much lower than the demand for net zero. “In size, there is little incompatibility,” he says. Klaus Hilgred At the London Empire.
Instead, the new process can provide a possible way to remove carbon from the chemical industry, with clean hydrogen production an attractive secondary product, says Hutchings. “The Gulf acid is currently made of fossil carbon. We here, we can make it from sustainable sources of carbon.”
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