In 2004, University of Minnesota professor Lanny Schmidt and a group of chemical-engineering graduate students gained worldwide attention by creating a reactor that extracted hydrogen from ethanol—quickly, cheaply, and on a small scale. Scientific American magazine called it one of the top technological breakthroughs of the year.
Schmidt, a Regents professor of chemical engineering and materials science at the university’s Twin Cities campus, describes the reactor as a gasifier that uses a chemical reaction to extract hydrogen from a source material in milliseconds. It requires a small amount of heat to get started, then sustains the reaction at about 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit.
Having begun with ethanol as a source material, Schmidt and his graduate students now are experimenting with soy oil, wood chips, sawdust, and other forms of biomass. Like the wind-to-hydrogen-to-ammonia project on the university’s Morris campus [read more about Wind to Hydrogen to Ammonia], the reactor collects hydrogen without relying on natural gas as a source and without using energy from other fossil fuels to run the process.
But unlike the Morris project, Schmidt’s gasifier promises truly small-scale applications. A reactor the size of a coffee cup might supply a hydrogen fuel cell—essentially a rechargeable battery that combines hydrogen and oxygen to produce useable energy, with pure water as the only emission—that could provide all the power needed for an average home. Voilà! The hydrogen economy.
Schmidt is the first to dash that dream, however, at least in the near term. Despite large-scale research and development efforts on fuel cells, under way for years at national laboratories and at companies including Maplewood-based 3M, challenges remain, Schmidt says.
Foremost among them is a chicken-or-egg issue that doesn’t apply only to transportation, but is best expressed like this: There is no mass market for fuel cells because there aren’t cars on the market designed to use them; there aren’t hydrogen cars because the distribution problems that hydrogen presents have prevented anyone from setting up a network of hydrogen fueling stations where drivers would replenish the cells; therefore, even if fuel cells are perfected, they can’t be made economically. That’s why the most valuable use for most of the hydrogen produced today is anhydrous ammonia for fertilizer.
Schmidt says using hydrogen to create “synthesis gas” or syngas is another option with more immediate application. Syngas—a mix of hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and methane—can replace natural gas in many applications. It also can be used to create liquid fuels, including—in the circular product and byproduct relationships of the energy future—ethanol.
So at this stage, call Schmidt’s reactor a breakthrough technology in search of a mass market. But a small, cheap gasifier that consumes practically no external energy while making hydrogen or syngas from sawdust and vegetable oils? That almost has to be a major step toward a renewable-energy future.
