Pharmacy could be converted into hydrogen fuel
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Hydrogen could be manufactured by agricultural waste during a new production process that uses less energy thhan’s existing methods and emits no greenhouse gases.
The new process transforms bioethanol into pure hydrogen and acetic acid, a substance found in vinegar used in chemicals, foods and pharmaceutical industries.
Most hydrogen is produced by natural gas; The process is energy and expensive. Hydrogen can also be produced from water using renewable electricity, but this is approaching is even more existing than across natural gas.
Graham Hutchings at the University of Cardiff, UK, and his colleagues have developed an alternative method that relieves the catalyst made of platinum and iridium to extract hydrogen from bioethanol and water without a rejuvenation area. The bioethanol used in the process can be made from waste plant material, says Hutchings.
“We don’t make CO2, and that’s why we’re not doing anything that is an environmental barden,” says Hutchings. “We are thought of a biologically sustainable source of carbon and hydrogen, and we make it sustained hydrogen and persistent acetic acid. It’s pretty neat.
The team says the process is likely to be scalable and commercially viable, which requires much less energy to run than produce hydrogen from natural gas. The next step is to attract commercial investments to create a demonstration system, Hutchings says.
Pure hydrogen production will need to scale up radically to enable global decarbonization with industries such as steel, chemicals and long -distance transport experimented to need hydrogen fuel.
But the world spends only about 15 million tonnes of acetic acid a year, limiting the potential role this new process could play in meeting the demand for zero-carbonary hydrogen.
“We have a molecular basis, we make twice as much hydrogen as acetic acid,” says Hutchings. “But acetic acid is much heavier than hydrogen.” This means that producing 15 million tons of acetic acid world’s entire annual demand in this way would only give just over 1 million tonnes of hydrogen, far less than the demand for a net-drag world. “With regard to scale, there is a bit of a mismatch,” says Klaus Hellgardt at Imperial College London.
On the contrary, the new process could offer a potential path to decarbonizing part of the chemical industry, with pure hydrogen production an attractive by -product, says Hutchings. “Acetic acid is currently effectively made of fossil carbon. And here we are, we can do it from sustainable sources of carbon, ”he says.
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