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H2 from ethanol: cheap and fast

Although hydrogen is often touted as the fuel of the future, the gas is currently made at high cost from fossil fuels--a fact critics cite as a major stumbling block in the "hydrogen economy." AUTHORS have built a reactor that efficiently and economically converts ethanol--a renewable fuel made from biomass--into hydogen. In AUTHOR s process, an automotive fuel injector sprays wet ethanol onto the walls of the reactor tube, which are heated to about 140 °C. The wet ethanol vaporizes, mixes with air, and passes over a rhodium-ceria catalyst at around 700 °C, where it is converted into H2 and CO2. AUTHOR s group reports greater than 95% conversion and nearly 100% selectivity for the catalytic partial oxidation process. Furthermore, they add that using wet ethanol would not incur the significant costs associated with removing all water from ethanol currently used as a fuel additive.



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