The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded $1.6 million to Ohio State's Department of Engineering for a three-year research project to fight global warming.
"The project is concerning the generation of hydrogen from coal," said Dr. L.S. Fan, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and lead researcher on the project.
Fan said his research team proposed and patented a method called "chemical looping technique," in which raw coal is converted into a synthetic gas, or "syngas," and then into pure hydrogen.
"The hydrogen produced from coal would then be used in the transportation sector in either hydrogen-fired, internal combustion engines, or maybe another 15 to 20 years from now, we could be using hydrogen-fired fuel cells, which would drive automobiles," said Dan Ciccero, technology manager for hydrogen and syngas for the National Energy Technology Laboratory, a branch of the Department of Energy.
The Department of Energy had approximately 20 proposals for the project, but chose OSU because of the chemical looping technology, which "is a very strong area that L.S. Fan has been particularly well known for," Ciccero said.
"It was a unique technique that we saw among all the proposals," he said. "It also showed, because of Dr. Fan's work over the last 8 or 10 years, he's been able to show with some substantiating research data that this chemical looping process could actually meet the objectives of what we had hoped to do; separate hydrogen, carbon dioxide and chlorides, as well as sulfur."
Once the coal has been transformed, the syngas is then put through a reactor where it encounters steam. Fan said at a certain temperature and pressure a reaction will turn the syngas into hydrogen, without using any catalyst.
"This particular chemical looping technique allows the carbon dioxide, which is global warming gas, to separate directly from that reaction and then stored without being emitted into the atmosphere," Fan said. "It is a very efficient, economical and technology-viable way to generate hydrogen."
"The process would help to reduce the steps in producing hydrogen from coal, and in doing that would save costs of the production of hydrogen from coal," Ciccero said.
Chemical looping involves a single-stage reactor, which Fan said will be built on campus.
"The research will be conducted on West Campus," Fan said. "We have a site there that is adequate for us to set up this type of looping reactor system."
Fan's research might also help to reduce the United States' dependence on foreign oil reserves, another potential benefit of President Bush's Hydrogen Fuel Initiative. One looping strategy could convert the syngas into jet fuel which Fan said would demonstrate "the benefits of using coal converted for fuel as compared to foreign oil."
Andrew Kieta can be reached at kieta.2@osu.edu.
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