Subscribe
researchers have evolved an efficient way to convert sewage and rejects from paper mills into hydrogen -- one of the cleanest energy forms. The feat was achieved by Ashok Bhattacharya and his team from Warwick University, the uk. The researchers claim that the process can generate pure hydrogen that can be used in fuel cells to power factories and vehicles. This technique can capture 60 per cent of the energy from the organic waste in the form of hydrogen -- three times as much as previous methods.
Previous attempts to extract pure hydrogen from biomatter to power fuel cells have only met with limited success. Unlike most of the earlier methods, Bhattacharya's process uses biomatter in a wet form and extracts hydrogen not only from biomatter but also from the water content of the material. As a first step, the waste biomass is gasified breaking it down to methane, water, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and some hydrogen. All these gases are subsequently fed into a reactor that helps extract hydrogen from methane and water through a chemical reaction. During the previous attempts, this reaction would reach an equilibrium and simply stop once a certain amount of hydrogen had been generated. However, to prevent this from happening, the research team used a palladium coated ceramic semi permeable membrane as part of the reactor that allows the hydrogen to pass through, thereby never letting the reaction reach an equilibrium. This also allows the hydrogen to be collected in very pure form and keeps the reaction going as long as it is fed with the waste biomass.
This process is also much cleaner than traditional production of hydrogen as it does not use fossil fuels. It produces the same amount of carbon dioxide as would be emitted naturally when the waste biodegrades. Moreover, it produces no other emissions such as nitrous oxides, the researchers claim. The team, which is a part of a pan-Europe consortium that works on cleaner forms of energy production, early this year received about us $3.9 million to scale up its lab-based solution into larger prototypes. Once proven, the technology could be used to set up small hydrogen producing factories, no bigger than a large room in some cases, in a retrofit manner at the sites of sewage plants or paper mills.
It could also help meet European Union's ambitious goal of making hydrogen the source for meeting 22 per cent of electricity demand of its constituent countries by 2010. European countries meet 70 per cent of their oil and gas requirements through imports from foreign soil, putting their energy independence at jeopardy. Therefore, the European Commission, the administrative body of the eu, has recently allocated us $2 billion over the next five years for research into sustainable energy sources, which is a 20-fold increase over the previous five years.