The potential to develop the ethanol-to-hydrogen energy pathway is being explored through the Upper Midwest Hydrogen Initiative -- a public-private partnership run under the auspices of the Great Plains Institute in Minneapolis.
UMHI was formed to bring fuel cell technology into use in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, the Dakotas and Manitoba, Canada -- and it is pursuing about $2 million to fund a hydrogen-fuel-cell bus demonstration project in Minnesota. As part of the federal transportation bill, Congress has allocated $49 million to a program called the National Fuel Cell Bus development program.
"UMHI has a decent shot at getting money from this program to do a hydrogen fuel cell bus," said UMHI executive director Rolf Nordstrom.
The UMHI project will use as a starting point the technology of Lanny Schmidt, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Minnesota, who demonstrated how ethanol could be used as a source for hydrogen in a fuel cell in 2004.
A number of different hydrogen technologies are quickly approaching commercial viability, including both fuel cells and internal combustion engines. Nordstrom said it would make sense to develop a stationary reformer that turns ethanol into hydrogen -- such a technology would be useful regardless of which hydrogen technology the bus demonstration uses.
The site for such a demonstration could be the University of Minnesota, where it could be employed for student shuttle buses running between the Minneapolis and St. Paul campuses.
"Hydrogen is going to play a major role in our energy future," said Duane Adams, a farmer in Cosmos, Minn., who serves on Renewable Fuels Association's fuel cell task force. "What we have to do is figure out how agriculture can fit into this -- will it be through ethanol, or by every farmer putting a windmill on his farm to generate hydrogen from water, or will we use methane digesters that reform the methane gas into hydrogen?"
Adams and Nordstrom were among many participants in a national hydrogen conference held in Long Beach, Calif., in March.
