Sustainable fuel for the transportation sector

Journal Article · Tue Mar 20 00:00:00 EDT 2007 · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0609921104· OSTI ID:21021713

Agrawal, R; Singh, N R; Ribeiro, F H; Delgass, W N ^[1]

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1. Purdue Univ., West Lafayette, IN (United States). School of Chemical Engineering and Energy Center at Discovery Park

A hybrid hydrogen-carbon (H{sub 2}CAR) process for the production of liquid hydrocarbon fuels is proposed wherein biomass is the carbon source and hydrogen is supplied from carbon-free energy. To implement this concept, a process has been designed to co-feed a biomass gasifier with H{sub 2} and CO{sub 2} recycled from the H{sub 2}-CO to liquid conversion reactor. Modeling of this biomass to liquids process has identified several major advantages of the H{sub 2}CAR process. The land area needed to grow the biomass is <40% of that needed by other routes that solely use biomass to support the entire transportation sector. Whereras the literature estimates known processes to be able to produce {approx}30% of the United States transportation fuel from the annual biomass of 1.366 billion tons, the H{sub 2}CAR process shows the potential to supply the entire United States transportation sector from that quantity of biomass. The synthesized liquid provides H{sub 2} storage in an open loop system. Reduction to practice of the H{sub 2}CAR route has the potential to provide the transportation sector for the foreseeable future, using the existing infrastructure. The rationale of using H{sub 2} in the H{sub 2}CAR process is explained by the significantly higher annualized average solar energy conversion efficiency for hydrogen generation versus that for biomass growth. For coal to liquids, the advantage of H{sub 2}CAR is that there is no additional CO{sub 2} release to the atmosphere due to the replacement of petroleum with coal, thus eliminating the need to sequester CO{sub 2}.

• OSTI ID: 21021713
• Journal Information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 104, Issue 12; Other Information: doi: www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0609921104; ISSN 0027-8424
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

01 COAL, LIGNITE, AND PEAT
02 PETROLEUM
08 HYDROGEN
09 BIOMASS FUELS
14 SOLAR ENERGY
32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATION
AVAILABILITY
BIOMASS
CARBON DIOXIDE
CARBON SEQUESTRATION
CARBON SOURCES
COAL
EFFICIENCY
HYDROCARBONS
HYDROGEN
PETROLEUM
PRODUCTION
SIMULATION
SOLAR ENERGY CONVERSION
STORAGE
TRANSPORTATION SECTOR