A Step Closer to a Zero Emission Car?
by Jeremy Elton Jacquot, Los Angeles on 02.12.08
Take two promising technologies - alternative energy and carbon capture - add a dash of ingenuity, and you may have the ideal recipe for a zero emission car. Or so a team of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology hope: they've developed a technology to store and eventually recycle the carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles.
They envision a system that could trap the carbon emissions - which would be collected and processed at a fueling station - and reuse them to power vehicles, thus forming a sustainable closed-loop system. The scientists are currently working on a fuel processing device to separate the carbon dioxide from the hydrogen and store it in liquid form; the hydrogen would be used as a fuel source.
Andrei Fedorov, a professor at the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and a lead researcher on the project, explained that - in the short term - his team plans on finalizing the design of the onboard fuel processor, called CO2/H2 Active Membrane Piston (CHAMP) reactor. By producing the hydrogen fuel onboard, the CHAMP reactor avoids introducing air into the process, creating a liquefied, easy-to-capture carbon by-product (while eschewing the need for a costly, elaborate hydrogen infrastructure).
The stored carbon dioxide will first be transported to a central location, after which it will be sequestered at one of several permanent sites - under the oceans, in geological formations - under investigation by the researchers. In the future, Fedorov hopes to take the carbon dioxide and synthesize a high energy density liquid fuel from it that would be suitable for all vehicles.
Image courtesy of Georgia Tech
See also: ::Microcab: An Urban Zero-Emissions Taxi Cab, ::Greenbox: Captures Carbon Dioxide to Make Biodiesel
Sadly, this is not a step closer to a zero emission car. Much of the energy inherent in oil (gasoline) is in the form of Carbon. Forfeiting this energy and attempting to only use the available hydrogen will probably result in lower energy density than a lithium ion battery.
I was excited to read this article only to find it was a lot of sizzle and no steak.
There were a lot of parts of the model that haven't been worked out yet with sequestration as a long sustainable model. Additionally, how heavy is CHAMP and what will that do to fuel economy? Isn't oil becommming a scarce commodity? Shouldn't our resources be focussed on an energy that is a bit more abundant, generates more energy than it uses, and doesn't involve a waste product that we need to lock away and monitor from now until forever?
Looks like nothing more than a natural-gas fed,membrane based fuel reformer that partitions C02. I can't wait to have a car with its own chemical plant on board
Unless I remember my stoichiometry incorrectly, I thought the result of hydrocarbon combustion was CO2 and H2O not CO2 and H2.
The steps have already been taken in the UK.
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http://viewer.zmags.co.uk/showmag.php?mid=dshgp&preview=1&_x=1 – Climate Change 2008