The Next Best Thing To Oil Hydrocarbon

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5612827/the-next-best-thing-to-oil In appreciation to create a renewable carbon economy, you can use solar power to element carbon dioxide. Combine the lesser carbon monoxide with hydrogen and you fasten the early years of a solar fuel that may perhaps one day altercation oil. For example 2008, a European presume led by Athanasios Konstandopoulos at the Centre for Scan and Tackle Hellas, Thessalon'iki, Greece, has been vigorous a 100-kilowatt experiment plant that generates hydrogen from a partnership of sunlight and steam. The plant is sited at a concentrating solar power arise - the Plataforma Lunar de Almer'ia, in Almer'ia, Spain - which houses a usual of mirrors to good turn the sun's daylight onto solar panels below. The self-same technology can too be used to element CO2 - the lesser CO can be determined with the hydrogen to form hydrocarbon fuel, they say. The experiment plant contains a stoneware reactor riddled with a honeycomb network of channels layered in a miscellaneous iron and cerium oxide. Compact solar energy heats the reactor to sequence 1200 ^0C, releasing oxygen gas, which is pumped elsewhere. The reactor is along with relaxed to sequence 800 ^0C by means of steam is fed with the honeycomb - the depths material steals subsidize oxygen and in the process converts the steam within hydrogen gas. Guide Develop The team has run the experiment plant in around week-long bursts like its initiate as part of the European Commission-funded Hydrosol II project. They say that it is liable to convert up to 30 per cent of the steam within hydrogen. Now, Konstandopoulos and colleagues fasten gleefully used the self-same reactor technology and process to element carbon dioxide within carbon monoxide in the lab. Two reactors direction as one may perhaps generate hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which may perhaps be determined within man-made fuel using one of two recognized chemical processes, says Konstandopoulos. In the Sabatier process the two gases are ardent at elevated induce in the mischievous spirit of a nickel launch pad to give birth methane or methanol, in view of the fact that in the Fischer-Tropsch process an iron-based launch pad is used to generate suspension hydrocarbon fuels. The process would attend to make not keep to use of the CO2 captured from power plants, which or intensity fair be covert enigma. Konstandopoulos says it may perhaps too remedy the treatment of storing and transporting hydrogen similar to it is formed - a treatment that may perhaps duck the development of a hydrogen economy. NATURE'S Determination "Hydrocarbons are the acme energy carriers that we fasten helpful - have an effect on has ahead of identified that," he says. "We accurate fasten to grasp a way not to use them as our primary energy source." Generating hydrocarbons this way would too normal few changes are obligatory to cars and open fuel transportation, he says. Furthest teams are investigating different reactor designs for producing solar fuel, by means of rotating charms of cerium oxide. A team led by Aldo Steinfeld at the Swiss National Commence of Tackle, Zurich, has built a 10-kilowatt plant in which steam and carbon dioxide are reacted with zinc oxide to give birth man-made gas in one indentation. They plan to pain a 100-kilowatt version contiguous court. Konstandopoulos and colleagues are now effective to scale up their technology and build a 1 megawatt hydrogen-producing plant, in a project community as Hydrosol 3D. " New Scientist gossip, explores and interprets the results of everyday endeavour set in the context of whoop it up and teaching, transport extensive range of science and technology news."