SciAm reports a potentially interesting breakthrough in biofuels:

Dreyer and his colleagues built a reactor capable of producing hydrogen from soybean oil, biodiesel or sugar water without any of the buildup that would have resulted from a conventional process. To get the reactor warmed up, the researchers ignited a mixture of methane and oxygen in order to bring the catalyst to a searing 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Addressing concerns about keeping the process carbon-neutral, Paul Dauenhauer, another graduate student working on the project, notes that while methane is a fossil fuel, there are other ways to heat the catalyst that don't involve burning petrochemicals. What's more, once the reaction is running, it's self-sustaining, and methane and oxygen are no longer required.

A fuel injector like those used in a car atomized the biofuels into tiny droplets that landed on a hot rhodium-cerium catalyst, which converted the fuel to syngas. This reaction released energy and heated the catalyst. The heat and ratio of carbon and oxygen in the reaction kept the buildup from sticking to the catalyst. For each type of biofuel, nearly all the fuel was converted and about 70 percent of the hydrogen bound up in the fuel molecules was given off as gas, the researchers report in this week's Science. "We find we reach the theoretical maximum," says Dauenhauer.

Cool.

So they now have a reactor design that can transform the material from an easily and cheaply storable form to one that's expensive and difficult to store?

Why not just use biodiesel as _diesel_?

How big is that reactor?

Might be cool in things like trains.

Doesn't the story also mention the ability to harvest the hydrogen from sugars? Thats a rather plentiful source Phil.

It's a lab thing, but it's pretty cool, not to mention it looks really cool.

Yikes! Rhodium is expensive. Nearly $5000/oz. Wonder how much is used in this catalyst?

"Best of all, no more carbon comes out of their system than went into it."

Gosh, thanks for the vital information that no nuclear reactions are taking place.

"So they now have a reactor design that can transform the material from an easily and cheaply storable form to one that's expensive and difficult to store?

Why not just use biodiesel as _diesel_?"

Soy oil triglyceride was a test molecule for more complicated processes involving complex mixtures of low value biomass that would not be considered for a transportation fuel. There is ample supply of lignin, hemicellulose, cellulose.

"How big is that reactor?"

A reactor with about the proportions of a bread plate produces enough syngas for a gallon of synthetic gasoline per hour.

"Yikes! Rhodium is expensive. Nearly $5000/oz. Wonder how much is used in this catalyst?"

More engineering is required to minimize catalyst loading, and catalyst screening could allow use of cheap metals such as Ni/Ce that have shown promise with other oxygenate reforming experiments.

"So they now have a reactor design that can transform the material from an easily and cheaply storable form to one that's expensive and difficult to store?
Why not just use biodiesel as _diesel_?"

Soy oil triglyceride was merely a test molecule to show that ultra-fast pyrolysis and catalytic reforming of volatile c1-c4 components could be combined autothermally. This process makes the most sense for low value, low energy density biomass components such as cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin.

Cool Paul, and it still looks cool.