Wheat Waste Product to Generate Heat, Power and Hydrogen

Wheat Waste Product to Generate Heat, Power and Hydrogen

I’m KayDee Gilkey with the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report .

A team of Washington State University students took second place in an international hydrogen design competition with their innovative design for a power plant that can produce heat, hydrogen, and electric power all from wheat straw.
 
WSU is located in Whitman County which is the top US producer of wheat with 650 million pounds of wheat straw, a harvest by-product. Most wheat straw is either burned or tilled under, and today there is little economic incentive to harvest it. Well, that might change if the students’ design is implemented in the future.

Their plan calls for collecting the wheat straw and then using a heating method to break it down into biochar, a material similar to charcoal. From the biochar, the students developed methods for extracting hydrogen. The hydrogen would then be used for fuel-cell powdered buses, for heating and electricity as well as producing fertilizer.

Exciting news for farmers is that a diverse team of WSU faculty have taken the students’ design plan and will be analyzing all elements of the project from the soil sustainability to the economic feasibility. WSU Assistant Professor Jacob Leachman shares:

Leachman: “So with everybody together we got almost all of the aspects needed to make sure from all angles that project could really work out. So that is what we are going to do as a faculty now and then if everything still checks out we try to get funding to actually build this thing.”

I’m KayDee Gilkey with the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report on the Northwest Ag Information Network.

To read more about this project go here.