ST. PAUL, Minn. – Flip a light switch in five or 10 years and there’s a fair chance the electricity that flows through your lamp will arrive courtesy of a Midwestern staple: corn.

If that alternative-energy vision becomes reality, thank three University of Minnesota researchers who appear to have removed a major stumbling block in the search for a cleaner way to use hydrogen to power conventional fuel cells.

In a breakthrough outlined in the Feb. 13 issue of Science, they’ve discovered an efficient way to capture hydrogen from ethanol, produced in great quantities in Minnesota and other Corn Belt states. Not only does it promise to boost the state’s ethanol industry, but it also could spark efforts to create a “hydrogen economy” that’s less dependent on imported fuels such as gasoline and natural gas.

The most immediate applications, they said, are in places where cheap power often isn’t available: Isolated homes or air-conditioning units of diesel trucks. But eventually, they said, communities could build their own power plants, and not have to rely on huge power producers located hundreds of miles away.

“Every county or town could build its own local power system rather than having to have a megaplant,” said Lanny Schmidt, the project leader and a Regents professor of chemical engineering.

But how soon and where the technology would be applied, he and others say, depend on a variety of factors, including public interest, the price of the energy and existing regulatory obstacles.

Schmidt said that question ultimately comes down to how soon the public is willing to pay a premium for renewable energy. “Until they are, it’s not going to happen,” he said.

Even though hydrogen is the most common element on earth and has been touted as a clean, renewable energy source, the typical process of extracting it from fossil fuels in large refineries has been costly, dirty and energy consuming, limiting its appeal.

Enter Schmidt and two assistants, Gregg Deluga and graduate student James Salge. All are from the university’s department of chemical engineering and materials science.

Over the past year, they’ve built a reactor at the university that converts ethanol, a renewable corn-based product produced in 14 plants statewide, into hydrogen. That, in turn, can be used to power a fuel cell, a battery-like device that converts hydrogen and oxygen into electricity and heat.

Schmidt said their three-foot high prototype reactor could be built small enough to hold in a hand. Besides being used for mini power plants, he said it, eventually could be adapted to vehicles.

The researchers accomplished the breakthrough by making two adjustments to a process already used to extract hydrogen from methane, natural gas and gasoline.

The first was altering the composition of a plug-like material that acts as a catalyst to convert ethanol into hydrogen. The second was using an automotive fuel injector that vaporizes an ethanol-water mix.

The effort was not without complications. For a long time, fires in the reactor plagued the project, but that problem eventually was solved.

“We were kind of surprised nobody had done it previously,” Schmidt explained. “But after you look at it, we see why people may have tired and given up.”

Private industries, he said, have a keen interest in hydrogen technology and can be expected to expand on the technology’s opportunities and options.

The most obvious immediate boost, Schmidt said, is to the state’s ethanol industry, which relies on homegrown corn. The energy content of ethanol, he said, is similar to fossil fuels such as natural gas.

“Someone made the line up that Minnesota is the Saudi Arabia of renewable products,” he said. “We could supply the energy needs of the country from the Upper Midwest.”

“Time will tell if this technology really does make it more practical to use ethanol to produce hydrogen,” said Ralph Groschen, senior marketing specialist for the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. “If it does, it could be quite a development.”

“I think it’s a significant advance,” said David Morris, vice president of the Minneapolis-based Institute for Local Self-Reliance. “But we should be clear about what the implications are. What the University of Minnesota development enables is the use of ethanol in fuel cells used as power plants.”

Morris said he doesn’t see a long-term application for transportation, primarily because ethanol already is being used by vehicles. “It wouldn’t make sense to extract hydrogen from ethanol and inject it into vehicles, especially if the vehicle itself has to be redesigned as a fuel cell vehicle,” he said.

The discovery comes as Minnesota and the rest of nation work to make hydrogen more feasible as a power source.

President Bush, for example, has made widespread use of hydrogen fuel cells, the centerpiece of his energy plan.

The Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, meanwhile, recently submitted a report to the Legislature examining ways to develop a hydrogen economy in Minnesota. In the report, it argues the technology should be developed across the state, where renewable resources such as ethanol are immediately accessible, rather than in specific, targeted enterprise areas.

In its most elementary form, the university’s process works this way: Ethanol is fed through a fuel injector, vaporized and heated, and then converted by a catalyst into hydrogen, which can then be fed to a fuel cell to produce electricity.

One of the benefits of converting ethanol into hydrogen for fuel cells, Schmidt and Deluga said, is improved energy efficiency. A bushel of corn, they said, yields three times as much power if its energy is channeled into hydrogen fuel cells rather than burned along with gasoline.

“Ethanol in car engines is burned with 20 percent efficiency, but if you used ethanol to make hydrogen for a fuel cell, you would get 60 percent efficiency,” Schmidt said.

The reason, Deluga said, is because all water must be removed from ethanol before it can be put into a gas tank. But he said the new process, which strips hydrogen from both ethanol and water, doesn’t require such a pure form of ethanol.

The work was funded in part by the University of Minnesota’s Initiative on Renewable Energy and the Environment, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy.

Morris said a number of regulatory issues must be dealt with before the university application can flourish.

“Right now, if you want to put a power plant in your house, the utility puts a great deal of obstacles in your way,” Morris said. “In some ways, we have to deal with that before we have to deal with what fuel to use for a power plant.”

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(c) 2004, Saint Paul Pioneer Press (St. Paul, Minn.).

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Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

AP-NY-02-15-04 0603EST