I was recently sent some information updating the potential of methanol from biomass. For information on this subject, go to Chapter 2 of SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Planet Earth, or my Huffington Post articles on "What is the Best Biofuel?" and "Is there an Option More Promising than the Plug-In Electric Vehicle?"
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One city in Denmark, for example, has chosen biomass to methanol to hydrogen into a fuel cell as their transport choice, but with a reformer to convert methanol into hydrogen. While hardly sensible (the reformer part), industry is getting close to removing that step.
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In August of this year Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies announced an educational direct ethanol fuel cell powered by vodka, so if anyone can actually make a DEFC work, a direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC) should be a virtual slam dunk. The simple matter of MeOh having only one carbon atom and EtOH two should give MeOH an overwhelming advantage. It's also much cheaper to produce methanol by gasification/catalysis than ethanol from hydrolysis/fermentation.
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The Department of Commerce did award $4.6 million to MTI Micro, a company partly owned by Dupont, to develop a micro DMFC. But that was nearly a decade ago. They continue to exist and supposedly have a proprietary DMFC rechargeable power pack, while hinting about hand held electronic applications.
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Motorola, apparently, has given up, although they keep appearing at specialty conferences on the subject. While another American company, DTI Energy Inc., regularly announces that the DMFC will be widely commercialized by 2010, I noticed that Japanese companies have kept awfully quiet recently.
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E-mail exchanges with some world class specialists, though, give me confidence that the concept of the DMFC is real, and should someday be available to run a fuel cell powered automobile five times further than the lithium battery. However, we are nowhere close to developing such a widget, and this could well be a decade or longer away. The USDOE, for example, still prohibits funding for this pathway, so this is one hurdle that needs to be removed, plus, of course, that other one of only supporting ethanol and biodiesel research and commercialization.
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Interesting that many of those NOVA, Discovery and Science programs on determing the future of remewable transport keep only mentioning hydrogen as the fuel for fuel cells. One would think that the ease with which methanol can replace the gasoline infrastructure and that counterintuitive fact about one gallon of methanol having 1.40 times more accessible hydrogen than liquid hydrogen would be logically convincing. However, I guess I'm the only one I know who has any interest in this option, for I last week asked a swarm of colleagues if anyone was interested in this system, and I got no response. Well, on to the Blue Revolution or the Hawaiian Hydrogen Clipper.
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The Dow Jones Industrials dropped about a hundred points today, but slowly recovered to minus 25 at 8449. World markets all generally fell. Crude oil rose $1.83 to $38.97/barrel. The U.S. Department of Energy predicted that oil prices will average $43.25/barrel this year, compared to $99.55/bbl last year, and, further, projected that the price will be $54.50/bbl next year. Also, in the U.S., we will use 19.12 million barrel/day this year, having averaged 19.51 MMBD last year. Gold slipped a dollar/toz to $822.
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