Lanny D. Schmidt.

• Localización: Scientific American, ISSN 0036-8733, Vol. 291, Nº. 6, 2004, págs. 48-48
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Examines the development of a chemical reactor that produces hydrogen from renewable fuel by Lenny D. Schmidt, a regents professor of chemical engineering at the University of Minnesota. Hydrogen has been touted as the clean energy source of the future, but to achieve that rosy prospect, scientists must first overcome many challenges. Chief among those is the obstacle of wresting hydrogen from petrochemicals, water or other sources takes energy--energy that is very likely to come at the environmental price of carbon dioxide emissions or nuclear waste by-products. A team of University of Minnesota researchers led by Lanny Schmidt proposed this past February in Science a way to address many of these issues by producing hydrogen from ethanol via a chemical catalysis that requires little added energy. Renewable ethanol, though still energy-intensive to make, is relatively easy to distill from the cellulose in plant material such as corn, and it can be transported and stored easily.