New Technology extracts Hydrogen from "Wet" Ethanol

Direct injection of "wet" ethanol in standard engines could provide a market for this cheaper ethanol until fuel cell vehicles using the same fuel are perfected.
"Independence Way" by Sam Jaffe:
July/Aug 2004
"...There is, however, a better way of storing the hydrogen needed for fuel cells: in ethanol, each molecule of which bundles six hydrogen atoms, two carbon atoms, and one oxygen atom into a package far more compact than gaseous hydrogen. Until recently, no one could figure out how to unbundle the ethanol molecules in an energy-efficient way. But Lanny Schmidt, a chemical engineer at the University of Minnesota, may now have found a silver bullet. He has developed a glass tube containing a series of metal plates about the size of a Bic lighter. Made out of the exotic metals rhodium and cerium, these plates can suck the hydrogen out of ethanol and feed it into a fuel cell. (Ironically, Schmidt had been looking for a catalyst that would strip hydrogen from plain old gasoline, but the ethanol turned out to work even better.) 'We can produce about 85 percent pure hydrogen right now,' he says. 'And there's no reason to believe that we can't push that up to another 10 percent.'
The working prototype of Schmidt's ethanol 'reconstituter' costs about five dollars, so it's cheap technology. And just as important, the reconstituter works even if the ethanol is 'wet,' or has a high water content. Schmidt estimates that over half of the energy used to produce fuel-grade ethanol for internal combustion engines is consumed in squeezing out that last five percent of water content. 'If you don't have to refine that out,' Schmidt points out, 'you save a lot of energy and money'--on top of the energy and money saved by using non-food crops to produce cellulosic ethanol."