Ethanol could be star player in hydrogen fuel cell technology

FARGO, N.D. - We're all aware of how easy it is to pull into a service station and fill the gas tank with an ethanol blend gasoline. But in the not too distant future that ethanol could be a means of adding hydrogen to a storage tank on our car to power the fuel cell that will propel the car, according to Dr. Sandy Thomas, president of H2Gen Innovations, Inc. and a speaker at the North Dakota Corn Growers annual convention in Fargo on Feb. 8.

Thomas, along with many others, predicts it's just a matter of time until the internal combustion engine becomes a thing of the past and fuel cell technology will take its place in powering automobiles and other vehicles.



“Someday our grandchildren will have to go to a museum to see an internal combustion engine,” he said, “and they will say, ‘What were they thinking back then?'”

In powering a car with hydrogen, the hydrogen fuel cell combines oxygen from the air and hydrogen using a chemical process that will generate electricity and water as a byproduct. The electricity is then used to run an electric motor, which powers the car's wheels and provides motion.

Thomas has the vision that in maybe 10 to 15 years the average motorist will pull into a local filling station and fill with hydrogen and drive off for another 300 to 400 miles before needing to refill the hydrogen tank. The hydrogen would come from a hydrogen generator module, which his firm now makes, that would take the hydrogen portion out of such things as natural gas or ethanol and compress the hydrogen and store it at the local filling station, where it would be dispensed to the motorist.

At the present time, Thomas is using natural gas for the hydrogen conversion process, but he claims ethanol is by far the most economical and efficient way of transporting hydrogen from the corn field to the consumers' car.



Thomas estimates it would cost around $13 billion annually to convert the present gas station infrastructure to a “hydrogen from ethanol process,” which sounds like a lot of money. But he claims that pales in comparison to the $80 billion a year cost currently being spent to keep our traditional fossil fuel system intact.

Society will also realize a huge savings by converting to a hydrogen fuel system. In the year 2040 Thomas predicts the savings to society will amount to $200 billion dollars when the pollution and oil import savings are added together and that figure will shoot up to a savings of $500 billion by the end of the century.

Efficiency factors also favor the hydrogen fuel cell. According to Thomas, the internal combustion engine is 12 to 14 percent efficient at best. A fuel cell, on the other hand, has an efficiency rating of around 40 percent and the electric motor driven by electricity from the fuel cell is around 90 percent efficient. When all of the fuel cell components are combined they end up being 2.4 times more efficient than an internal combustion engine.

There have been only a few fuel cell vehicles manufactured at this time so the costs are extremely high, however most of the major auto makers are devoting large amounts of research dollars into fuel cell vehicles and Thomas predicts their costs will start to come down.

When asked if these fuel cell vehicles would have enough power, Thomas noted that an electric motor has a very high torque rating, and when Ford started to test market a fuel cell vehicle, they had to install a governor to limit the electrical flow when starting up, otherwise the rapid torque caused the tires to rip apart. Thomas also expects longer vehicle life once the fuel cell vehicle becomes commonplace.

“Many of the delivery trucks in Europe now are powered by electrical motors, with the power coming from batteries on the vehicles, not fuel cells,” he said. “But these electric motor vehicles are seeing a fairly maintenance-free life of 300 to 400 thousand miles since there are so few moving parts.”

Even though attendees at the corn convention were thinking in terms of ethanol from corn, Thomas pointed out that ethanol from any product would work equally well, whether it be from grain products, biomass products like switchgrass, animal waste, forestry products or even municipal solid waste.

He also noted that for this process to be completed, a transition strategy must be completed on two fronts: First, the auto industry needs to move from the internal combustion engine to hybrid electric vehicles, some of which may be partially fueled by a fuel cell, and then to a total hydrogen fuel cell vehicle.

And second, the hydrogen fueling business must transition itself from using natural gas to produce hydrogen, which only lessens our dependence on fossil fuels partially, to using ethanol for hydrogen, which will switch the hydrogen supply to a totally renewable source and dry up our need for imported oil.

Finally, in the area of cost, once the process is up and running, Thomas predicts that drivers will see hydrogen costs less than $1.50/gallon gasoline equivalent, based on a range basis.

“I really believe this needs to be our future,” he said.

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