Things get stuck in my head and I cannot get them out. This is how geeks end up surfing the Web from a laptop in bed at 2AM, and they aren’t looking for porn.
What started this bizarre mental journey was a bit of research on the current state of splitting H2O into Hydrogen and Oxygen via various means. For a change there was a pretty good writeup on Wikipedia. It appears electrolysis works and seems to get more efficient as the temperature of the water rises. This got me thinking that Ethanol plants were really missing the boat. Instead of taking a beating about how much water they consume, they should use that water completely. The left over hot water from the hooch making needs to be pumped into/around in-house fish farms. When you look at fish farms, one of their biggest costs is keeping the water warm enough for the fish. If you already have hot water as a waste product, then your fish business should easily be able to turn a profit…and you can feed some of your DDGs to the fish.
Naturally, the water will be either too hot or have too much volume for the fish business to use it all. Why not produce Hydrogen and vent the Oxygen? Electrolysis is known to work and it is known to get more efficient as the temperature of the water elevates. Why not pump it through an electrolysis system at the point in time where you recombine/condense the steam from the brewing process? Now you have an Ethanol plant which produces tank grade hooch, DDGs, farm raised fish, and hydrogen. You could even enhance the fish environment by pumping the separated oxygen through the fish tanks giving them even more air to breath without the expense of operating a tank fresh air pump.
Of course, one cannot help but think about the other side of the equation. Why can’t we use electrolysis at the point of exhaust creation to split carbon and oxygen? It turns out that we can.
http://rtreport.ksc.nasa.gov/techreports/2002report/600%20Fluid%20Systems/609.html
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=16346191
It is the role of both the DOD and NASA to piss unspeakable amounts of money down drains the average citizen cannot begin to understand. As long as they document what they did completely, time and marketing can turn even their biggest failures into successes. (If you happen to wear NITAL framed glasses, you wear a shining example of just this process.)
NASA could really care less about us dying here. They focus their efforts on keeping astronauts alive in space. As such, they have been trying to split CO2 to get the O2 back for decades. They have restrictions that we on the planet do not have. They need it to be doable with only solar power and weigh absolutely nothing. Thankfully, one of their proven failures operates flawlessly at 900 degrees Celsius. It does tend to get gummed up if there is a lot of other stuff in the inbound stream, but the sequestering lobby has already fixed much of that.
http://www.siemens.com/innovation/en/highlights/energy/co2_separation/co2_separation.htm
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2007/09/new-membrane-te.html
Creating an environment where we can maintain an operational temperature of 900 degrees Celsius really isn’t a problem when you are talking about processing exhaust gas directly out of the coal burner for a power plant. Obviously there is plenty of electricity at the plant. So, really the final step necessary is these high temperature filters that pull CO2 out of the exhaust and route it into the separation devices. Then we only have to decide what to do with the carbon dust. Do we collect it and press it into bricks on-site for sale to other businesses that will turn these pure carbon bricks into carbon fiber car parts, industrial diamonds, and a host of other things, or do we co-locate that business right where the carbon is being created?
In theory, you could even use this system on coal burning open pit blast furnaces if you could put some kind of soot screen in front to weed out the metal filings and other “dust” in the clouds rising from the pit.
