Biofuel researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have developed a new system that takes diluted carbon waste and turns them into valuable compounds. This system is superior to current methods of converting renewable carbon sources into fuels and produces usable hydrogen as a by-product. Check out the details below.
The PNNL researchers recently published their patent-pending system and reveal that with the patent-pending system, waste carbon from sewage, farms, and other sources can be processed into high-grade biofuels while generating usable hydrogen in the process. According to the lead researcher and PNNL chemical engineer Juan Lopez-Ruiz, this system could solve “several problems that have plagued efforts to make biomass an economically viable source of renewable energy.”
In the negatively-charged half of the cell called the cathode, there is a different scenario. Here, it can either hydrogenate organic molecules or generate hydrogen gas, which itself is a potential source of fuel.
“We see the hydrogen byproduct generated by the process as a net plus. When collected and fed into the system as a fuel, it could keep the system running with fewer energy inputs, potentially making it more economical and carbon-neutral than current biomass conversion operations,” Lopez-Ruiz further added.
