Advanced Fuel Research ::
Developing Energy Technologies for the 21st Century

By Bill Clayton

THE COST PER BARREL of petroleum from oil-producing countries has skyrocketed. Prices at the pump have jumped to unprecedented levels, sapping Americans' financial resources. The automotive industry is researching non-petroleum options, including gas-electric hybrid and all-electric cars. The president and his administration have announced a ground-breaking energy initiative.

That's the energy situation in 2006. However, the paragraph above is part of a report published in 1980, when the United States was suffering through its last true energy crisis.

Johannes Schwank, a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and director of Michigan Engineering's Transportation Energy Center (TEC), said that to break through the barriers which have stymied researchers and industry for so long, researchers at the TEC are working on a number of programs to lay the scientific foundation for synthetic-liquid transportation fuels derived from a variety of sources, such as coal or biomass (vegetation and agricultural waste).

Chemical Engineering graduate student Jim Bucher measures
the surface area of a catalyst.
PHOTO COURTESY OF JOHANNES SCHWANK

"One of the most interesting of those programs is the development of modular 'digital' reactor networks for custom-tailoring synthetic fuels," he said. "The raw materials for these fuels are gas streams that contain carbon monoxide and hydrogen derived from coal, stranded natural gas or biomass."

Stranded natural gas is gas that's abandoned because there's no economical way to transport it. Biomass is nothing more than plant material, vegetation or agricultural waste that's used as an energy source.

"In a process known as Fischer- Tropsch synthesis, these gases are converted in large catalytic reactors into a wide variety of hydrocarbon products. This is the conventional way to convert bases, and it requires additional processing to refine the products into gasoline or diesel. The TEC's idea is to replace the large, custom-built reactors in use today with an array of interconnected, high-tech, mass-produced reactor modules."

This approach, Schwank said, challenges the conventional wisdom of economy of scale. However, it offers the intriguing prospect of custom-tailoring the product distribution. "It could do that, thanks to multi-port feed strategies, localized temperature control in the individual reactor modules, better heat- and masstransfer characteristics, increased energy efficiency, and process intensification. In these novel high-tech reactors, the catalyst serves as a structural element - it's built into the reactor modules. Chemical sensors are directly embedded into these catalysts to give us unprecedented control of catalytic reactor performance."

This approach is a breakthrough that makes it possible to create a product that's much closer to the desired composition of cleanburning synthetic fuel.

"Once we develop this compact, modular reactor technology to its full extent," Schwank said, "it's conceivable that we'll be able to mount these reactor modules directly on combines, turning them into 'biomass harvesters' that convert biomass directly into liquid fuel on the field. This technology would eliminate the high cost of transporting biomass to central processing facilities, and it would improve the economics of biomass conversion."

This program - and all the work of the TEC - might someday make it possible to extract fuel from diverse sources that are plentiful in the United States. This would be a monumental step toward decreasing the nation's dependence on imported sources of energy and, in the process, safeguarding the American way of life, the national economy and international harmony. -E

Program supported by the National Automotive Center, United States Army and the United States Department of Energy.