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Charring Peanut Shells for Hydrogen
Fuel By Don
Comis August 25, 2004
Donald C. Reicosky, an Agricultural Research Service soil
scientist at the North Central Soil
Conservation Research Laboratory in Morris, Minn., has teamed up with an
inventor of a patent-pending process to turn agricultural biomasswastes
like peanut shellsinto hydrogen fuel and charcoal fertilizer. The
inventor, Danny Day, president of Eprida, Inc., a technology and
development company in Athens, Ga., has also joined forces with
U.S. Department of Energy scientists who
hold a patent on a related technology.
Volatiles and steam released by charring biomass produce
hydrogen. The charring turns the biomass into charcoal pieces. This charcoal
becomes a nitrogen-enriched fertilizer with the addition of ammonia formed by
combining a third of the hydrogen with nitrogen. The remaining hydrogen can be
sold as fuel, both for a hydrogen-based, clean diesel and to run fuel
cells.
This morning, at the
American Chemical
Society's 228th national meeting, in Philadelphia, Pa., Day made a
presentation
[view abstract] on the fuel production. Tomorrow, he will
discuss the charcoal's fertilizer value [view abstract]. The porous charcoal potentially gives soil
microbes an improved environment for nutrient cycling. If the charcoal were
used as a scrubber in the smokestack of a coal-burning power plant to remove
carbon dioxide, it could then become more valuable as an ammonium bicarbonate
nitrogen fertilizer.
Reicosky has devoted the past decade to measuring
tillage-induced carbon loss and improving soil carbon storage. His interest in
Eprida's technology lies in the fact that this is a biomass technique that
returns a large portion of harvested carbon to the soil, since plants are not
completely burned.
Reicosky used his knowledge of soil carbon and agriculture to
help Day with the original concept and continues to help in many ways,
including measuring yields of corn fertilized with the charcoal. The charring
process has been tested successfully in both the laboratory and in a pilot
plant, and will soon be tested on a larger scalegenerating a renewable
fuel for University of Georgia buses.
ARS is the U.S. Department of
Agriculture's chief scientific research agency. |