Water Water Everywhere
My inner skeptic cries “fraud” but the rest of me says, now that’s cool I hope it works as it would certainly solve the biggest part of the CO2 equation in global warming.
Genepax Co Ltd explained the technologies used in its new fuel cell system “Water Energy System (WES),” which uses water as a fuel and does not emit CO2.
The system can generate power just by supplying water and air to the fuel and air electrodes, respectively, the company said at the press conference, which took place June 12, 2008, at the Osaka Assembly Hall.
The basic power generation mechanism of the new system is similar to that of a normal fuel cell, which uses hydrogen as a fuel. According to Genepax, the main feature of the new system is that it uses the company’s membrane electrode assembly (MEA), which contains a material capable of breaking down water into hydrogen and oxygen through a chemical reaction.
Though the company did not reveal the details, it “succeeded in adopting a well-known process to produce hydrogen from water to the MEA,” said Hirasawa Kiyoshi, the company’s president. This process is allegedly similar to the mechanism that produces hydrogen by a reaction of metal hydride and water. But compared with the existing method, the new process is expected to produce hydrogen from water for longer time, the company said.
That’s not the only potentially good thing on the environment from. There’s also The Day Cycle, a new method for converting municipal waste into usable products. Using massive plasma furnaces this process uses less energy than it creates (excess electrical energy that can be sold) and it produces Hydrogen and Oxygen as by products, not CO2.
The purpose of the system is to simultaneously produce hydrogen, electricity, oxygen, biofuels/biomass, syngas, and other useful products from waste.
Now, with one of the heroic oversimplifications I am known for, I’ll explain that the rest of the Day Cycle involves injecting steam into the syngas to create even more hydrogen along with lots of carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide can be used to grow algae, yielding both biomass and oxygen in copious amounts. The final outputs of the plant are whatever can be made from the algae (biodiesel, ethanol, or — what the heck — SwiftFuel). All heat is recycled, no carbon dioxide is released (that’s the theory) and all that gets pumped out of the plant is some excess electricity (not sure how much of that), hydrogen, all those algae products, and of course oxygen.
Their claimed net production from each ton of municipal solid waste:
112 pounds of hydrogen
55 gallons of biodiesel
a little electricity
926 pounds of oxygen
According to Cringley’s calculation about 7,000 of these furnaces would be needed to deal with the entire waste production of the US. Bonus - assume those 7000 furnaces were spread out somewhat evenly across the US then you have solved the problem of producing and selling hydrogen to replace petroleum for the transportation network.
It “appears” like the Day family have their act together better that Changing World Technologies did, which used a similar but different process.
Technorati Tags: Water Energy System, CO2, Genepax, Day Cycle, plasma furnaces, entire waste production of the US, Changing World Technologies
