Advanced BioFuels USA

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest)  One of these days your personal transportation system might look like this. A solar or wind energy facility generates renewable electricity, which is converted into a solar fuel using electrofuel technology that converts CO2 and water to a fuel using electricity (rather than photosynthesis) to power the operation. That fuel is then used in a Microbial fuel cell that is loaded on your vehicle, which translates the fuel back into an electric current for an electric motor.

Advantages? First, renewable electricity. Second, we bypass the metal battery which causes range anxiety and the endless re-charge blues in transport vehicles. Third, we switch to higher-efficiency electric motors.

You could even power a plane this way — since the problem with the solar plane is not the electric motor itself, but rather the weight of the conventional batteries compared to their energy storage capacity.

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Two key takeaways. One, a carbon nanotube material is outperforming gold in aspects of a microbial fuel cell. Uh, that helps on cost. Two, the power density is around 3X of what we usually see with microbial fuel cells. Though this does not predict results at engine-scale, starting with a lot more power density is sure to help.

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The precision-length nanotubes, it is believed, will allow for more elegant design of 3D anodes in a microbial fuel cell, sharply improving the efficiency and reducing the cost. We’ll have to see about scale-up, that’s for later.

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Assuming it scales effectively to transport-scale, that microbial fuel cell uses selected cyanobacteria or bacteria to generate electricity for an electric motor, from an energy-dense fuel. That is to say, a bio-battery that has immense range compared to an electric battery.

In turn, that fuel is solar fuel, which is to say that it is made using solar or wind energy, plus CO2 and water (one day, might be wastewater, and even now it can be brackish non-potable water).

So, if you see a solar facility providing power, a wastewater facility providing water, and a coal-fired power plant providing captured CO2 — all working together symbiotically to provide utility services to a metro area, but also the elements for a solar fuel — well, that’s the picture. No emissions of course — it’s all captured for an industrial symbiosis.

That fuel can be distributed as liquid energy via pipeline, truck and rail to conventional re-fueling facilities. No need to depend in the long-term on slow-charging electric battery stations, only.

If you’ve considered the range efficiency, the charging time, and the zero emissions — you might think that’s a really great way to power an industrial economy going forward. And that’s true zero emissions, not Obamemissions where only the tailpipe output is considered regardless of whether you are producing electricity using renewables, or coal or oil.

How possible is it?

Feeding a Joule or Algenol solar fuel to a fuel cell to produce electricity, that can be done. There are direct-ethanol fuel cells, and a vehicle using an early-stage of this technology competed in a Shell Eco-marathon in France in 2007. But we probably have a while to wait for true electrofuels, that use renewable energy, CO2 and water — rather than photosynthetic technologies. More about the Electrofuels, here.  READ MORE