Natural Gas to generate hydrogen, fuel cell?

[4220Fox]

Hi all, one last question for today - Given steam reforming of natural gas to generate hydrogen, what is the major difficulty with it with respect to most fuel cells? Thank you,

 

[russ_watters]

I'm not sure there is a difficulty with it. You can reform it or use it directly.

 

[4220Fox]

So we would use the hydrogen (Made from steam reforming via natural gas) to make the fuel cells then? Thank you-

 

[4220Fox]

Any other fuel cell pros in the community?

 

[russ_watters]

I'm not really sure what you are asking. Could you rephrase? Have you done any of your own research?

 

[jim mcnamara]

This kind of sounds like an assignment/homework question.

Can you please post your requirements?

 

[NascentOxygen]

So we would use the hydrogen (Made from steam reforming via natural gas) to make the fuel cells then? Thank you-

I think I've seen (a test setup described) where the hydrogen content in natural gas is used by having the fuel cell connected to the town gas system and incorporating a filter to extract only the light molecules of hydrogen and use that as its fuel.

 

[CWatters]

Hi all, one last question for today - Given steam reforming of natural gas to generate hydrogen, what is the major difficulty with it with respect to most fuel cells? Thank you,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_reforming

Disadvantages of reforming for supplying fuel cells

The reformer–fuel-cell system is still being researched but in the near term, systems would continue to run on existing fuels, such as natural gas or gasoline or diesel. However, there is an active debate about whether using these fuels to make hydrogen is beneficial while global warming is an issue. Fossil fuel reforming does not eliminate carbon dioxide release into the atmosphere but reduces the carbon dioxide emissions as compared to the burning of conventional fuels due to increased efficiency.[8] However, by turning the release of carbon dioxide into a point source rather than distributed release, carbon capture and storage becomes a possibility, which would prevent the carbon dioxide's release to the atmosphere, while adding to the cost of the process.