A higher Neatest thing To Oil [Hydrocarbon]

With a view to create a renewable carbon economy, you need to use solar power to split carbon dioxide. Combine the resulting carbon monoxide with hydrogen and you’ve got the beginnings of a solar fuel that would someday replace oil.

Since 2008, a ecu consortium led by Athanasios Konstandopoulos at the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, Thessaloníki, Greece, has been operating a 100-kilowatt pilot plant that generates hydrogen from a mix of sunlight and steam. The plant is sited at a concentrating solar power tower – the Plataforma Solar de Almería, in Almería, Spain – which houses a chain of mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays onto solar panels beneath.

The same technology is usually used to split CO2 – the resulting CO would be combined with the hydrogen to form hydrocarbon fuel, they say.

The pilot plant incorporates a ceramic reactor riddled with a honeycomb network of channels coated in a mixed iron and cerium oxide. Concentrated solar energy heats the reactor to around 1200 °C, releasing oxygen gas, that’s pumped away. The reactor is then cooled to around 800 °C before steam is fed during the honeycomb – the depleted material steals back oxygen and within the process converts the steam into hydrogen gas.

Pilot plant

The team has run the pilot plant in different week-long bursts since its launch as element of the ecu Commission-funded Hydrosol II project. They claim that it’s possible to convert up to 30 per cent of the steam into hydrogen.

Now, Konstandopoulos and associates have successfully used a similar reactor technology and process to split carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide within the lab. Two reactors running simultaneously could generate hydrogen and carbon monoxide, that may be combined into synthetic fuel using one of two established chemical processes, says Konstandopoulos.

In the Sabatier process the two gases are heated at high pressure inside the presence of a nickel catalyst to supply methane or methanol, while within the Fischer-Tropsch process an iron-based catalyst is used to generate liquid hydrocarbon fuels.

The process would help to make better use of the CO2 captured from power plants, which otherwise might simply be buried underground. Konstandopoulos says it could actually also solve the difficulty of storing and transporting hydrogen once it really is produced – a difficulty that can prevent the improvement of a hydrogen economy.

Nature’s choice

” Hydrocarbons are the most convenient energy carriers that we have got available – nature has already proven that,” he says. ” We just should have the opportunity not to take advantage of them as our primary energy source.”

Generating hydrocarbons this fashion would also mean few changes are needed to cars and existing fuel infrastructure, he says.

Other teams are investigating different reactor designs for producing solar fuel, including rotating rings of cerium oxide. A team led by Aldo Steinfeld at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, has built a 10-kilowatt plant during which steam and carbon dioxide are reacted with zinc oxide to provide synthetic gas in one step. They plan to discover a 100-kilowatt version next year.

Konstandopoulos and associates are now working to scale up their technology and build a 1 megawatt hydrogen-producing plant, in a project generally known as Hydrosol 3D.

New Scientist reports, explores and interprets the implications of human endeavour set within the context of society and culture, providing comprehensive coverage of science and technology news.

Source

This post is tagged: HIGHER, Hydrocarbon, Neatest, oil, thing