MAR 10

Was covered a while ago here...
http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/2395/69/

David you are wrong!

Most small (up to a few hundred acres) farmers know far more about the environment than most greens will ever dream of.

The investment required, tight margins and government regulations mean they have to be very careful about costs and returns.

Provide them better tools such as environmentally friendly items and they use them providing they are workable.

I am not talking about gardens or organic types - I am talking about the ones who produce the food for market.

The farmers around here seem to care a lot about a lot of things:
http://will.illinois.edu/agriculture/
These programs (produced by a local NPR affiliate) have put the most time and sophistication into the food vs fuel issue with respect to biofuels than any eco-engineering blog I read. They're also at least as sophisticated about the operations of the commodities market as my friend who maintains the programming of an electronic commodities-trading machine on Wall Street. Though the farmers tend to operate on a vastly different timescale -- weeks for them, versus milliseconds for my friend. So, yeah, I agree with Russ on this point.

But, yeah, this tractor will be a flop. Because it's hydrogen powered, and hydrogen really comes from natural gas (CH4) -- though everyone wishes it came from other sources (and some people are working generate hydrogen from other sources). A farmer and an engineer are likely to agree that you'd be just as far ahead to burn the natural gas directly in a CNG-powered ICE -- or run an existing tractor on biodiesel.

Fortunately, farmers who already grow soybeans are in an excellent position to provide their own biodiesel. I read a few articles about farmers who started doing this during the last fuel-price spike.

Put an ethanol to hydrogen reformer on it, or a direct ethanol fuel cell, and it will be a hit in the corn belt. That would run on cheap, local, 100% domestic ethanol, which is simple liquid fuel, not highly compressed "where you gonna get it" hydrogen. By the way, fuel cells are twice as efficient as a diesel engine. A company in Italy just announced an ethanol powered fuel cell that is 90% efficient - 3 times diesel.

A feces reactor would make much more sense for farm equipment. Most farms have a lot of feces available for conversion into methane.

What you’re referring to is a biogas digester. Which is a great way to mitigate manure waste and get something out of it. Farmers have been making biogas from their manure for decades. They’ve been running stationary generators to supplement their electric bill, but they have not been running their tractors on biogas-methane. There’s a reason for that: Biogas is BULKY. It contains about 65% methane which only has about 650 btu’s per cubic foot. Biogas also contains some hydrogen, which is also bulky, so you would have about 1,000 btu’s per cubic foot of biogas. In order to get the same concentration of btu’s as ethanol, you would have to compress biogas 569 times into special high pressure fuel tanks used with expensive high pressure hoses and couplings. It can be done, but at what expense and time? Compare a cubic foot of gaseous methane at 1,000 btu’s, to liquid ethanol’s 569,000 btu’s. That makes ethanol much more convenient and practical as a moving, onboard fuel. Just pour it in to a liquid fuel tank. Why would farmers, who grow corn for ethanol and feed, replace diesel fuel with bulky biogas to fuel their tractors? They would replace diesel with a more practical fuel they helped to create, ethanol. Ricardo has an ethanol-optimized, turbocharged, high compression engine that gets better mileage on ethanol than it gets on gasoline, with about the same torque as diesel. This engine will be making its way into farm tractors, and consume cheap, locally made ethanol fuel. Ethanol fuel cells will later replace these engines, once they are mass produced using non-precious metals.

its helpful for those who use tractors