Hydrogen from catalytic reforming of biomass-derived hydrocarbons in liquid water

R. D. Cortright, R. R. Davda and J. A. Dumesic ()
Additional contact information
R. D. Cortright: University of Wisconsin
R. R. Davda: University of Wisconsin
J. A. Dumesic: University of Wisconsin

Nature, 2002, vol. 418, issue 6901, 964-967

Abstract: Abstract Concerns about the depletion of fossil fuel reserves and the pollution caused by continuously increasing energy demands make hydrogen an attractive alternative energy source. Hydrogen is currently derived from nonrenewable natural gas and petroleum1, but could in principle be generated from renewable resources such as biomass or water. However, efficient hydrogen production from water remains difficult and technologies for generating hydrogen from biomass, such as enzymatic decomposition of sugars2,3,4,5, steam-reforming of bio-oils6,7,8 and gasification9, suffer from low hydrogen production rates and/or complex processing requirements. Here we demonstrate that hydrogen can be produced from sugars and alcohols at temperatures near 500 K in a single-reactor aqueous-phase reforming process using a platinum-based catalyst. We are able to convert glucose—which makes up the major energy reserves in plants and animals—to hydrogen and gaseous alkanes, with hydrogen constituting 50% of the products. We find that the selectivity for hydrogen production increases when we use molecules that are more reduced than sugars, with ethylene glycol and methanol being almost completely converted into hydrogen and carbon dioxide. These findings suggest that catalytic aqueous-phase reforming might prove useful for the generation of hydrogen-rich fuel gas from carbohydrates extracted from renewable biomass and biomass waste streams.

Date: 2002
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (56)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature01009 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:418:y:2002:i:6901:d:10.1038_nature01009

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/nature01009

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().