At 01:10 PM 10/7/03 -0400, Martin wrote:
>It's just another way of creating hydrogen from water, while burning some
>carbon in the process creating CO2
>What's the big deal?
Doesn't have to be a big deal in order to serve as a handy alternative
in
some cases.
Our focus here is on converting biomass to methanol, and one of the
things
that's hard to use up is sawdust. It appears from the patents that it would
be possible to operate that system using a fluidized bed of sawdust and
generate CO and H2 which would be both storable and compressible, something
which a mix of O2 and H2 ain't.
Given the new "room temp" co-catalyst methanol technology, having such
a
handy source for syngas adds a nice degree of flexibility. Especially in
the set-up / break down/ try it again stage.
I'm further intrigued with this because:
1) The process is not pressure dependent.
It's easy enough to compress a liquid to 3,000 psi; it's a whole lot
more
difficult to compress a gas to that degree. By being able to build to the
desired pressure within the reactor unit itself, you can get the
compression needed to fill aluminum scuba tanks.
I've got enough room under the bed of my pickup to easily mount eight
80
CF tanks, and that's a respectable amount of fuel which will get me down
the road quite a ways before I run out and have to switch back to purchased
fuel.
The key there is that by getting the first 50 miles "for free," and
being
able to switch back to propane when that runs out, I can cut down
considerably on the total amount of fuel which needs to be purchased.
2) The patent indicates that the process uses 35 VDC and is
interruptible,
which makes it a good match for intermittent wind power sites. It's also a
lot simpler design than what's needed for standard electrolysis, something
which helps the small user considerably.
While I appreciate the skepticism, and agree that there's a lot of
snake
oil out there, I'm more than ready to give the benefit of the doubt to
articles that list actual patent numbers.
with best wishes,
Walt
http://www.windward.org/
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