Hey Walt,
If you don't mind, I have a question.
In an earlier post ( see below ), you talked about using electricity, in an
organic solution, to generate H2 and CO.
In the post you mention that you used sugar solution, have you tried it with
Ethanol? What I was wondering, would it be easier to convert biomass to
Ethanol, then with electricity, convert the Ethanol to syngas?
If you want, contact me directly at: [EMAIL PROTECTED] , I have a couple more
thoughts about the project.
Greg H.
----- Original Message -----
From: Walt Patrick
To: biofuel@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Monday, December 01, 2003 10:03
Subject: [biofuel] working on the methanol part
Another nifty patent to come down the pike involves using a 36 volt arc
to
decompose a solution of some organic in water producing syngas. Because of
the presence of a carbon material, the plasma from the arc generates not a
mix of H2 and O2, but rather H2 and CO.
<snip>
We're looking at trying to make this work with a slurry of saw dust
instead of the sugar solution mentioned in the patent.
----- Original Message -----
From: Walt Patrick
To: biofuel@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2004 15:15
Subject: Re: [biofuel] Methanol
At 09:22 AM 1/19/04 -0800, Jeff wrote:
>I have been looking on how to make methanol out of wood. I have seen a
>couple of articles on how to make ethanol out of wood, but not methanol.
>
>If anybody could share some information on what would be involved and what
>it would take, please let me know.
This is the part of the biofuel world that we're most interested in.
Traditionally, methanol has been condensed from CO and H2 using a zinc
oxide catalyst. The challenge was that the reaction was quite exothermic
and it was very easy for the reaction to accelerate and burn up the
catalyst. Common conversion rates per pass were between four and five percent.
In the early 90's, they were able to get around that by grinding the
catalyst into a powder and then suspending the catalyst as a slurry in
mineral oil. The oil adsorbed the extra heat and allowed the reactor to
increase the per pass yield to the range of twenty percent.
Even better, from our point of view, was that the developers built the
test reactor out of a six foot long piece of one inch diameter stainless
steel pipe.
Since then there have been even more exciting developments arising out
of
the work of Dr. Mahajan. He's developed a process which uses two catalysts
dissolved in a solvent to get conversions in the ninety percent per pass
range.
That's significant because it makes the process much more forgiving as
to
the inclusion of inert gases in the feedstock since you can just burn off
the unconverted feedgas.
As a bonus, this catalyst is also much more forgiving regarding the CO2
content of the feedstock.
The process is also a significant break through in that it can initiate
at
room temperature, and operates at between 100 and 150 psi.
As you can imagine, we're pretty excited about these developments which
we
believe allow us to start down the road of building a micro-reactor for
producing quantities of methanol sufficient to meet our automotive needs.
Our current efforts are focused on feedstock issues. Here at the
Windward
site, we have a hundred acres of forest that we steward; grooming the
forest generates substantial quantities of limbs and branches that we want
to convert to methanol, but first we needed a way to process forest waste.
We tracked down a heavy duty PTO mounted chipper that mounts on our
main
tractor and makes short work of branches and limbs, producing lovely little
quarter-inch size bits of wood, but that's about as far as we got before
winter shut us down.
This coming year, we're looking forward to getting a woodgas generator
on
line using the chips. Once we're producing reliable quantities of CO and
H2, we'll embark on building the reactor.
Anyone who's interested in getting involved with this project is
invited
to check us out and make contact.
http://www.windward.org/
with best wishes,
Walt
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