National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 12(104), p. 4828-4833, 2007
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A hybrid hydrogen-carbon (H 2 CAR) process for the production of liquid hydrocarbon fuels is proposed wherein biomass is the carbon source and hydrogen is supplied from carbon-free energy. To implement this concept, a process has been designed to co-feed a biomass gasifier with H 2 and CO 2 recycled from the H 2 -CO to liquid conversion reactor. Modeling of this biomass to liquids process has identified several major advantages of the H 2 CAR process. ( i ) The land area needed to grow the biomass is <40% of that needed by other routes that solely use biomass to support the entire transportation sector. ( ii ) Whereas the literature estimates known processes to be able to produce ≈30% of the United States transportation fuel from the annual biomass of 1.366 billion tons, the H 2 CAR process shows the potential to supply the entire United States transportation sector from that quantity of biomass. ( iii ) The synthesized liquid provides H 2 storage in an open loop system. ( iv ) Reduction to practice of the H 2 CAR route has the potential to provide the transportation sector for the foreseeable future, using the existing infrastructure. The rationale of using H 2 in the H 2 CAR process is explained by the significantly higher annualized average solar energy conversion efficiency for hydrogen generation versus that for biomass growth. For coal to liquids, the advantage of H 2 CAR is that there is no additional CO 2 release to the atmosphere due to the replacement of petroleum with coal, thus eliminating the need to sequester CO 2 .