The use of hydrogen as transportation fuel is currently growing. On the one hand, manufacturers such as Hyundai and Toyota are already mass producing and selling fuel cell vehicles, while others like Honda, BMW and Nissan will follow suit in the next two years. In addition, certain areas like northern Europe, Japan, South Korea and California are already addressing the deployment of infrastructure to ensure that there are sufficient refueling stations available for these vehicles. However, we now have to address the following issue: how are we going to produce the hydrogen required to supply these stations, to fuel these vehicles? Obviously, hydrogen can be produced using conventional sources: natural gas reforming, but many countries are looking to hydrogen as a way to contribute to energy sustainability, to ensure security of supply and promote local development. This leads them to consider processes for producing hydrogen from biofuels, which has been called bio-hydrogen. From biogas reforming to bioethanol reforming; from conventional catalysis to biological approaches, the production of bio-hydrogen is conceived as a real and economic alternative for the production of hydrogen to power our transportation.

Dr. Thomas Foust is the Director of the National RenewableEnergy Laboratory’s Bioenergy and Biofuels Center. He has over 25 years of experience in the biofuels field. His areas of expertise include feedstock production, biomass conversion technologies to fuels products, and environmental and societal sustainability issues associated with biofuels.. He has over 100 publications in the biomass field covering all aspects of biofuels technology.Dr. Foust has a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and a M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the Johns Hopkins University, and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University. He is a licensed Professional Engineer.

The world desires both higher efficiency engines and lower greenhouse gas (GHG) emitting biofuels. To achieve these goals a large number of countries have passed provisions that require higher efficiency engines and lower GHG fuels. Unfortunately, these provisions have largely been developed independent of each other and can conflict with each other. For example the requirement to blend in ethanol at the 10% level into gasoline in the US decreases the distance traveled per volume basis (km/l) in current spark ignition engine powered cars due to the lower energy content of ethanol.A better approach would be to develop biofuels that as a minimum maintain status quo with current gasoline, diesel and jet fuels but ideally allow for higher engine and thus vehicle efficiencies. This talk will discuss some possibilities for producing biofuels that look promising for being superior to current gasoline, diesel and jet fuels for use in the next generation of higher efficiency heavy duty engines.