Transportation Fuels

The University of Colorado Boulder will develop 3D-printed, biodegradable soil sensor nodes to enable farmers to precisely assess soil moisture and nitrogen levels, which will provide insight into crop water and fertilizer needs. These low cost nodes can be embedded in a field to accurately and continuously monitor soil health for an entire season before degrading completely and harmlessly into the soil. This approach could enable real-time soil monitoring by farmers, enabling them to reduce agriculture’s energy footprint and water needs and increase soil carbon.

The University of Delaware will build an electrochemical “pump,” based on a special membrane, to remove cell-damaging CO2 from ambient air before feeding it along with hydrogen into an HEMFC designed by the team. This method eliminates the need for vehicles using HEMFCs to carry an onboard oxygen supply or scrub carbon dioxide by other more expensive routes. The same principle could be applied to direct carbon capture from air for any system with a similar challenge.

The University of Utah will develop ultra-low power sensors engineered to passively detect specific volatile emissions, and enable the early detection of invasive weeds and/or insects in biofuel crop production. Farmers currently lose about 40% of crops due to weeds and insects that ideally need to be removed within a week of detection to prevent significant damage.

Johns Hopkins will scale up a novel process to convert natural gas into hydrogen and solid carbon with no water input while reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Leveraging industrial partners Southern Company and Cabot Corporation, the team will scale up its cyclic process based on early laboratory demonstration. ETCH, INC, is commercializing the process, which is expected to produce H2 from NG at costs comparable to the state-of-the art commercial technologies, while lowering energy input, reducing CO2 emissions, and producing high-value pure carbon materials.

Syzygy Plasmonics will develop a system that uses light to catalyze reactions inside a traditional chemical reactor. The team will construct a reactor that can be used for small-to-medium-scale generation of fuel cell quality hydrogen from ammonia, to be incorporated into existing infrastructures like hydrogen refueling stations for fuel cell vehicles. By using light instead of heat to drive the ammonia decomposition, the reactor can keep temperatures much lower, which reduces energy consumption, carbon emissions, and operational and capital costs while enhancing flexibility.

Ecolectro is developing alkaline exchange ionomers (AEIs) to enable low-cost fuel cell and electrolyzer technologies. Ecolectro’s AEIs will be resilient to the harsh operating conditions present in existing alkaline exchange membrane devices that prevent their widespread adoption in commercial applications. This technology will be simple, cost effective, and well suited to large-scale processing.

ASU will collect CO2 from air using a low-cost polymer membrane-based DAC process. The team will use water evaporation to drive to capture CO2, decrease emissions, and improve the energy efficiency of the overall carbon capture process. The project will use novel materials to create high-surface area membranes to continuously and actively pump CO2 against a concentration gradient. The process will capture distributed CO2 emissions that can be sequestered or converted into a wide range of energy-dense fuels, fuel feedstocks, or fine chemicals.

Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and its partners will explore a targeted molten metal as a catalyst in a methane pyrolysis mist reactor to convert natural gas into hydrogen and solid carbon at a low cost without carbon dioxide emissions. The technology could augment or replace current H2 production methods, while simultaneously sequestering carbon in high value materials.

The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) will develop an electrochemical ammonia generator capable of using intermittent energy delivered by renewable sources. The team will build an electrochemical device based on a solid-state electrolyte that converts nitrogen from the air and hydrogen to ammonia in a single step at temperatures and pressures far lower than today’s dominant ammonia production technology, the Haber-Bosch process.

Northeastern University will develop a maintenance-free sensor network to improve energy and agricultural efficiency by monitoring water content in biofuel feedstocks. The team’s zero-power sensors will form distributed networks that can capture, process, and communicate in-field data to help farmers determine how to maximize yield. Specifically, sensors will monitor water stress-related plant characteristics and relay this data wirelessly to a control center in the irrigation system.