McDermott: Trends in Offshore Oil & Gas - GineersNow GineersNow Engineering Magazine Issue No. 021, McD | Page 42

Engineers are Trying to Turn Metal
Into Sustainable Fuel
By theory, metal in powdered form fed into a burner produces
metal fuel.
With our carbon footprint reaching
dangerous levels, it’s high time that
engineers and scientists need to find
sources of power to add to the sun, wind,
hydro, and geothermal. Now, researchers
at McGill University are looking at steel to
turn into fuel.
The Canadian scientists want to figure
out how metal behaves in space to better
understand how its particles react in
weightlessness.
This is not an entirely new field of study
as one of the researchers, Andrew
Higgins, has been studying the potentials
of steel as a fuel for almost two decades
now.
By theory, metal in powdered form fed
into a burner produces metal fuel. The
researchers believe that more energy and
heat is generated per liter of iron powder,
compared to one liter of gas, which
makes this an efficient process.
It is also a sustainable process because
instead of releasing carbon dioxide, it
emits iron oxide, or commonly known
as rust. Higgins said that there is a way
to capture and collect the rust for it to
be burned again so there is ideally zero
waste.
He added that it is a closed-loop system,
and one that is far more efficient than
other alternative fuels for vehicles, such
as biofuels.
But the researchers believe that in order
for the system to be truly ‘green’, the
recycling needs to have its own clean
energy source.
Meanwhile, Jeffrey Bergthorson also from
McGill who has been studying metal fuels
for more than ten years, said that he’d
like to think big: first ships and trains, and
then trickle down to smaller vehicles, like
cars.
He sees great economic benefits by
shipping iron for fuel to other countries.
Ships could be powered on iron, carrying
iron to other nations like China which
suffers from extreme air pollution.
“The whole idea is to close the loop,”
Bergthorson said. “The key idea is to
have energy that goes from one place to
another, but the material just goes around
and around and around without losses to
the environment.”
For now, the problem, as Higgins and
Bergthorson pointed out, is the lack of
metal fuel researchers to advance the
technology.
“To put it all together into a real
technology, we’re going to need a lot of
other people to help us on this,” Higgins
said. “We hope people will continue to
collaborate with us to keep advancing the
technology.”
“To put it all together into a real
technology, we’re going to need a lot of
other people to help us on this,” Higgins
said. “We hope people will continue to
collaborate with us to keep advancing the
technology.”