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Climate Change Can Be Stopped by Turning Air into Gasoline

165 points by ThomPete 8y ago

wmnwmn 8y ago
Very simple question that the article completely failed to address: does the process output more energy in the form of gasoline than it takes in? I am quite certain that the answer is, NO, which means that the factory ends up putting more CO2 into the atmosphere than it is taking out...unless the factory itself runs on renewable energy, in which case who needs it at all.
- JoshCole 8y ago
  The article does address the question, but I think you're coming at this from the wrong angle. Let me give an example of what I mean by that. Let's say a person swallows poisons. The poison is going to kill them if it stays inside them with the amount that they swallowed. They absolutely need to vomit or they are going to die. The way your comment is approaching this, you're basically saying that vomiting isn't worthwhile because it takes more energy than it gives back. In this analogy, taking carbon out of the atmosphere is like vomiting up a poison. If we extend the metaphor a little bit, then using renewable is like eating normal food. So if we take the way your comment is approaching things in an analogous way, you're also implying that vomiting up poisons is pointless if the energy we used to vomit was acquired from healthy food. The metaphor does start breaking down eventually, but its a lot more obvious why this matters when you realize it isn't whether a question of whether we need to vomit - its just a question of how we do it and what we gain from doing it. This method gives us a carbon-neutral fuel, which is valuable. It's also somewhat cheap. There are other ways to remove CO2 from the atmosphere that don't have those upsides.
gmoes 8y ago
Does the planet really need more gasoline? Maybe it’s time we consider the opportunity to allow people to convert their private property into dense carbon sinks that support plant and terrestrial arthropod diversity. http://www.elegantcoding.com/2018/03/reimagining-suburban-yard-to-reverse.html?showComment=1520978508113#c5891458890176884648 http://www.elegantcoding.com/2018/03/reimagining-suburban-ya... Maybe we should be considering every option we have to promote a healthy reduced CO2 environment.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  Gasoline generated out of thin air is as clean as the supply chain used to make it. It's hard to compete with liquid hydrocarbons for energy density (and therefore efficient of transporting energy to where you need it).
- godelski 8y ago
  > Does the planet really need more gasoline? Are you just going to buy everyone new cars? Or replace all existing vehicles? I mean I'm all for electric cars and other modes of transport, but the problem is that we have an existing infrastructure that will take a long time to replace. As an example, the vehicle I drive is from '97. I still see people driving cars from the early 90's (or even 80's) as their daily driver. (And it is more common for poorer people to drive older cars). So do we need a new gasoline? Yes, unless you want to either replace 30+ years of vehicles, or wait that long.
  - discreteevent 8y ago
    If the new gasoline costs 2 dollars more per gallon then you might pay off an electric car relatively quickly.
  - gnode 8y ago
    If producing gasoline requires extracting CO2 from the atmosphere, then providing enough H2 to make the fuel, then it may make more sense to replace your car. Bear in mind that H2 is mostly produced from natural gas today, and electrolytic production is somewhat more expensive. I think it will depend on how the prices for batteries and electricity evolve as well as advancements in electrolysis. There are also other advantages to electric vehicles, such as no particulate and NOX exhaust, which may encourage taxation / regulation of combustion vehicles.
  - gmoes 8y ago
    I have yet to replace my 19 year old low mileage car. I'd rather have a 1000 spiders and 1000 flower flies and a 1000 bees than another gallon of gasoline. Of course what organisms originally died to create that gallon of gasoline that you buy today?
dicroce 8y ago
WTF? This is amazing... Please be real! Please be real!
- igravious 8y ago
  Too good to be true I'd say… Still, I admire your hopefulness, me I'm just a bucket of inured cynicism.
LargeWu 8y ago
> The new paper says it can remove the same ton for as little as $94, and for no more than $232. At those rates, it would cost between $1 and $2.50 to remove the carbon dioxide released by burning a gallon of gasoline in a modern car. If those numbers are true, that's actually a pretty achievable cost to absorb that could be added directly as a tax on gasoline.
- gruez 8y ago
  I doubt most americans would support a 50%+ price hike at the pumps.
  - 24gttghh 8y ago
    Well they must be convinced one way or another.
  - roryisok 8y ago
    That's one of the reasons for government - to make unpopular decisions for the good of the people it governs. A 50% price hike would also have the knock on effect of making more economical cars increasingly desirable and maybe encouraging people to use public transport.
    - lozenge 8y ago
      "Unfortunately" we live in a democracy. Car makers will probably bet on being able to get the "gas tax" repealed in four years time.
  - loeg 8y ago
    More like 100% from these figures. Then again, Europeans already pay something like 100% more than we do, per-gal, at the pump.
- creaghpatr 8y ago
  And hopefully that tax would eventually offset by the increase in gas supply
- 8y ago
leoedin 8y ago
The article kind of glosses over the fact that one of the inputs to the process is hydrogen. That really makes this whole process a way of converting energy stored in hydrogen to energy stored in hydrocarbons. This is pretty desirable - hydrocarbon fuels are much easier to work with, fit in with our existing transport - but not really a new source of energy. The problem with sequestering CO2 as hydrocarbons is that you need to put a whole load of energy (embodied in the hydrogen you're combining it with) into the ground and leave it there. Fortunately renewables (especially solar) are heading in the right direction. On a sunny day in an area with lots of solar panels, electricity is essentially free. We're still some way from having enough free energy available to be able to put large amounts of it back into the ground though.
- gnode 8y ago
  > The problem with sequestering CO2 as hydrocarbons is that you need to put a whole load of energy (embodied in the hydrogen you're combining it with) into the ground and leave it there. If sequestering CO2, combining it with CaO to make CaCO3 (calcium carbonate) makes more sense, and is even exothermic. It's also biologically harmless and can be safely dumped, used in building materials, etc.
  - khuey 8y ago
    Isn't CaO largely produced from naturally occuring CaCO3 though? Where do you get a large supply of CaO to react with your sequestered CO2 from?
    - gnode 8y ago
      Apparently when CO2 is injected into hot underground basalt deposits, it is absorbed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration#Mineral_carbonation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration#Mineral_c... (last paragraph of section) So I would guess the reason for producing synthetic CaO from CaCO3 is that extracting natural CaO is uneconomical.
      - 8y ago
gnode 8y ago
Converting CO2 back to fuels to be burnt in combustion engines sounds counterproductive to me. If the goal is to reduce atmospheric CO2, then it would be better to more permanently sequester it in carbon-rich building materials, for instance.
- DennisP 8y ago
  Depends. Assuming we keep using hydrocarbon fuels to some extent, and want to be carbon neutral, we have to either (1) create them from atmospheric CO2, or (2) absorb the atmospheric CO2 emitted from fossil hydrocarbons, and sequester it somewhere. Which we should do depends on which is cheaper and more scalable.
- usrusr 8y ago
  Many things might be better served with other technologies, but we won't ever see long distance air travel without hydrocarbons (well, non-nuclear air travel...)
cletus 8y ago
I remember reading something a few years ago that this sort of thing was being investigated as a means of using wind power. As we know wind power (like most? all? renewable sources) have this undesirable property of not being constant. And I mean undesirable in the sense of the base load of an electrical grid. So the idea is to store excess power. Obviously rechargeable batteries are one way to do this. But another is artificially creating gasoline as a means of energy storage. This could have pretty desirable properties at places where gasoline might otherwise be expensive to ship in and wind power might be in abundance. Anyway I can't find the paper but at that time with that process it was looking at still over $5/gallon (which in remote places is still totally fine). So if this new process is real and scalable to an industrial level, that would be great. As much as EVs are a rapidly growing market, I think we're going to be stuck with ICEs for a long time yet.
- discreteevent 8y ago
  If there were a lot more electric cars they could act as a buffer to smooth out the variability of renewables.
sp332 8y ago
Would this have all the other downsides of regular gasoline - nitrous oxides and particulates? If so, I'm going to keep pushing for getting gas-powered cars off the roads at least in populated areas.
- godelski 8y ago
  > I'm going to keep pushing for getting gas-powered cars off the roads at least in populated areas. This technology is more trying to make it feasible to have a carbon neutral form of transportation. Most people do not have the money to buy an electric vehicle. I for one drive a vehicle made in '97.
  - kerbalspacepro 8y ago
    Most people on the planet don't have enough money to buy a gasoline vehicle, too. The price for EVs will come down, just like the price for GVs did and has.
  - philipkglass 8y ago
    Most people who can't afford to buy an EV can't afford to buy carbon-neutral synthetic gasoline either. I'd expect it to cost $8-$10 dollars a gallon, at least with foreseeable near-term technologies. People who already own ICE gas vehicles and don't drive them very much might still come out ahead buying $10/gallon fuel vs. acquiring an EV. (I put maybe 1500 miles/year on my car.)
    - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
      Biodiesel is just over $3. Citation?
      - philipkglass 8y ago
        Biodiesel is neither synthetic in the sense that I mean (direct chemical synthesis, no biomass) nor is it presently carbon-neutral. It also isn't suitable fuel for legacy gasoline-fueled vehicles. My estimate is based on adjustments to the LANL Green Freedom concept for synthetic gasoline from 2007: http://bioage.typepad.com/greencarcongress/docs/greenfreedom.pdf http://bioage.typepad.com/greencarcongress/docs/greenfreedom... The authors claim that for profitable operation "the price of gasoline at the pump must be about $4.60/gal." This number incorporated the authors' unrealistically optimistic expectations of low-cost Generation III nuclear reactor construction. It rises to $5.69/gallon, adjusting for inflation[1]. The rest of the cost increase comes from my estimate of using renewable electricity sources instead of cheap nuclear power. (It would be even more expensive if I used nuclear power at actually-observed costs of currently-in-progress American reactor construction.) [1] Yes, I used CPI, and I know it's not really appropriate for capital-intensive industrial projects. This is just a back-of-the-envelope estimate.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
> “This opens up the possibility that we could stabilize the climate for affordable amounts of money without changing the entire energy system or changing everyone’s behavior.” If you really want to accomplish something on a large scale, you need something like this. People have been talking about overpopulation dangers for centuries, and human population growth remained high. Cheap, effective birth control gets releases, and population growth is stabilizing. In general, tech solutions are easier than large scale social solutions.
dfee 8y ago
I imagine a future where an industry exists that is federally subsidized and pulls CO2 from the air. However, our need for carbon sequestration is ultimately surpassed by the industry’s “output”, and we end up heading in the other direction. Because regulators tend to be captured, we end up with one industry generating CO2 (for all the positive reasons we need CO2) so that the sequestration industry doesn’t kill off all the plants, etc.
- notabee 8y ago
  Not only would this not be a problem for many decades even if carbon capture is wildly successful, but releasing carbon into the air is much, much easier than pulling it back out. If that were not true, we would not be facing the catastrophe that is ahead of us. You could literally just burn old coal mines or something if in some far-flung future the nefarious carbon-capturers were somehow sucking down too much. We have over 100 years' worth of artificially introduced atmospheric carbon since the beginning of the industrial revolution to work through before this will ever be a problem. Please educate yourself on the actual quantities involved.
  - dfee 8y ago
    I don't think you understood my comment was about how people respond to incentives. Anyway, I'm particularly interested in this remark you made: > We have over 100 years' worth of artificially introduced atmospheric carbon since the beginning of the industrial revolution to work through before this will ever be a problem. Please educate yourself on the actual quantities involved. Is "100 years' worth" a unit of measure of CO2 I'm unfamiliar with? Are you saying that the industrial revolution was only 100 years ago? Is this the "actual quantities involved" you were referring to?
    - notabee 8y ago
      I'm sorry, I didn't realize you were inexperienced with searching the internet for information. Here's some handy links with some numbers: https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions https://www.earth-syst-sci-data.net/7/349/2015/essd-7-349-2015.pdf https://www.earth-syst-sci-data.net/7/349/2015/essd-7-349-20... "The total cumulative emissions for 1870–2014 are 545 ± 55 GtC. These emissions were partitioned among the atmosphere (230 ± 5 GtC based on atmospheric measurements in ice cores of 288 ppm (Sect. “Global atmospheric CO2 growth rate estimates”; Joos and Spahni, 2008) and recent direct measurements of 397.2 ppm; Dlugokencky and Tans, 2014), ocean (155 ± 20 GtC using Khatiwala et al., 2013, prior to 1959 and Table 8 otherwise), and land (160 ± 60 GtC by the difference)" Estimates may vary on what to count as the start of the industrial revolution, but the internet indicates that it started in Britain around 1760. It did not spread much from there until 1840 or so. Here's a quantity emitted into the atmosphere since 1870: 230 gigatonnes of carbon (GtC). That's 230,000,000,000 tonnes. Not carbon dioxide, just the carbon itself. Multiply that by 3.67 for weight of CO2 gas: 844,100,000,000 tonnes CO2. Note that this is metric tonnes, so 2,204.6 pounds per tonne for us in metric-challenged countries. This is just legacy CO2 without counting other greenhouse gases, starting from a few decades after the industrial revolution went global to close to present day. We're adding around 10 GtC (36.7 GtC CO2) every year to that total recently. I used this calculator, though I had to remove the commas from the number because there seems to be a character limit. https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calc... So let's take one of the measures from there. It said that that much CO2 could be absorbed by 994,228,504,122 acres of U.S. forest in a year. Let's try that out. There are 57,308,738 square miles of land surface area on Earth (habitable and non-habitable). Multiply that by 640 to get 36,677,592,320 acres. Alright, subtract the entire land surface area of Earth, whether we could grow trees on it or not, from the number of acres of trees we'd need to capture that carbon in a year: 994,228,504,122 - 36,677,592,320 = 957,550,911,802. That's a lot left over. How many planet Earths' worth of land area would we need to clear that much CO2 with just trees in a year then? 27.10 Earths. Okay, well that's easy then. We just need to somehow blanket the entire Earth including mountains, deserts, etc. with trees for 27 years to remove the CO2 backlog! So easy, right? Except we're also adding to that number constantly. So if we just assume for the sake of argument that this man-made carbon capture works as well as blanketing the entire land surface area in trees, and we somehow started at scale immediately, it would take 27 years to get back to baseline. (Let's put aside that there would be 27 * 3.9 = 105 GtC additional in the atmosphere to deal with if emissions were flat, and pray that the land and ocean would keep absorbing the rest) I guess if you're really worried about them overshooting that mark, you can go ahead and panic now about that, and not about the massive surplus of carbon we've got hanging around trapping the sun's heat. Oh, and I didn't even get into methane or N2O, which are also heating things up. I know it takes time and energy to google things (each search is about 0.2 grams of CO2 emitted equivalent) but I believe in your ability to do so.
prewett 8y ago
The article didn't talk at all about what the limestone is used for. What happens to the carbon in the limestone (CaCO3)? Is the limestone reusable? If we have to keep mining limestone, it just converts the problem, although I assume there isn't really a shortage of limestone at the moment, given how the ocean has been making it for billions of years.
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
I hope this is as good as it sounds. Liquid fuels have a lot of pros. If can see this being useful to nations who want to reduce their dependency on other nations for energy.
hokua2 8y ago
The article doesnt mention it takes more energy to recapture than you get out (you cannot violoate the laws of thermodynamics). Solar and Wind are thus key to making this sustainable
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jadedhacker 8y ago
I was thinking about this and looked into some of the research. We're not quite there yet though. However, if we do have a practical way of doing it, I think it would be best if we use volatile renewables like solar and wind and store the excess as hydrocarbons. That would give use a smooth transition path, reduce the energy storage problem, and provide a source of carbon-neutral fuels. However, longer term we must still move away from burning fossil fuels even if we make them completely carbon neutral, because while its a slow effect they are not oxygen neutral... http://scrippso2.ucsd.edu/ http://scrippso2.ucsd.edu/
- philipkglass 8y ago
  However, longer term we must still move away from burning fossil fuels even if we make them completely carbon neutral, because while its a slow effect they are not oxygen neutral... If synthetic hydrocarbons get their hydrogen from water (electrolysis or high temperature thermochemical cycles), their life cycle is oxygen-neutral as well. The extraction of hydrogen from water simultaneously produces a matching quantity of oxygen.
  - jadedhacker 8y ago
    That's an excellent point.
syntaxing 8y ago
I wish the article elaborated a little more on where the energy comes from to (re)form gasoline. Gasoline has an extremely high energy density. To force hydrogen to bond with CO2 must expense a large amount of energy. The energy has to come from somewhere and delivering the proper amount cannot be a trivial thing. There is a limitation on how hot things can get without chemical reaction (such as burning fuel). Also, a good chunk (I think over 75%) of hydrogen is created by super heating steam with petroleum based fuel...this would make the whole process counterproductive.
- philipkglass 8y ago
  To force hydrogen to bond with CO2 must expense a large amount of energy. The energy has to come from somewhere and delivering the proper amount cannot be a trivial thing. The reaction between CO2 and H2 to form hydrocarbons is actually energetically favorable (thermodynamically spontaneous). It doesn't require outside energy inputs to force the reaction forward. See e.g. "CO2 valorisation via Reverse Water-Gas Shift reaction" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221298201730433X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221298201... and "Turning carbon dioxide into fuel" http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/roypta/368/1923/3343.full.pdf http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/roypta/368/19... The key issue is, as you note later, producing large quantities of hydrogen without relying on fossil sources.
  - technicalbard 8y ago
    Except the reactions happen at 300C, and the FT reaction is exothermic between H2 and CO, not CO2. taking CO2 apart is endothermic. And then you need to refine the hydrocarbons (because they will look like diesel or wax, not gasoline).
    - philipkglass 8y ago
      Using the standard gas-phase enthalpies of formation, the production of 1 mole of n-octane and 16 moles of water from 8 moles of CO2 and 25 moles of hydrogen is exothermic by 923 kilojoules. 8 CO2 + 25 H2 -> C8H18 + 16 H2O Energy of products minus energy of reactants: (-208.7 + 16 * -241.83) - (8 * -393.52 + 25 * 0) = -923 Experimental values are from NIST WebBook. The hydrogenation of CO2 to CO and water is endothermic and kinetically hindered. The hydrogenation of CO2 to saturated hydrocarbons and water is exothermic (though still kinetically hindered). There are also hydrocarbon synthesis paths that involve less reforming and purification of high-boiling products than F-T, e.g. methanol synthesis starting from CO2 and H2 followed by Mobil methanol-to-gasoline.
thinkcontext 8y ago
This is a terrible article and I am a fan of The Atlantic and would probably be considered a climate hawk. The new science that Climate Engineering did has nothing to do with making gasoline from CO2. There is technology to do that and a number of companies working on it, its in the $10/gallon range. Some have estimated as low as $4, if they can get their process to scale up, which they haven't been able to do. There is already plenty of CO2 available for much less than $100/ton, this is not a barrier to making products out of CO2.
- thinkling 8y ago
  I read the article wondering why you'd want to do this by sucking in air when you could do it with exhaust from gas-powered power plants that is much richer in CO2 than regular air. In fact, there was coverage the other day of a new gas-fired power plant that throws off CO2 for storage in oil wells. Why not use that CO2? https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/6/1/17416444/net-power-natural-gas-carbon-air-pollution-allam-cycle https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/6/1/17416444...
  - thinkcontext 8y ago
    Exactly, that new plant design is a much bigger deal. It gives you the CO2 for "free" as part of its normal operation without a power penalty. This article tries to make a point about how if the gasoline is made from CO2 from the air, it makes burning it carbon neutral. This is true but it misses the point. You want to get the most CO2 reduction for your money, so do the cheapest carbon capture first. Its cheaper to collect it from large point sources, so do that first. Once those emissions are being captured or simply ended from the plant retiring then move on to more expensive DAC.
  - notabee 8y ago
    The reason is simple: we've already put enough CO2 into the atmosphere to cause adverse changes over a long period of time. A lot of the IPCC models and their discussion centers around more near-term climate threats over the next 100 years or so caused by continued emissions and overall severity of going ever more "over budget" with CO2 levels, but we're still 100+ ppm of CO2 over the highest average of the last half a million years or more. That CO2 is going to hang around in the atmosphere for quite some time as the natural processes like weathering that lower it are slow, and its presence will add extra heat from solar radiation while it's still there. If we suddenly stopping emitting now, we would still be above baseline but not in the apocalyptic range. If things don't change quickly though, we're going to have to suck CO2 from the atmosphere one way or another because just halting emissions won't be enough.
source99 8y ago
They claim to be pulling 1 ton of CO2 out of the air per day. Some older numbers I just found show we are putting 10 Billion tons per year. This only has to be scaled 27 million times to equal it out...
- igravious 8y ago
  I wonder what year it will be that CO₂ ppm in the atmosphere levels off and I wonder what level it will be at then? I wonder what the world will look like then.
squozzer 8y ago
I have my doubts. It always seems more expensive to work against the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics than with it.
vanderZwan 8y ago
> “This opens up the possibility that we could stabilize the climate for affordable amounts of money without changing the entire energy system or changing everyone’s behavior.” Regardless of whether this technology works as promised, the last part (and possibly the first part too) does not show the right attitude to solving this issue, I think. It's not just technology that got us into this mess. It's also how we decided to apply that technology. Silver bullet or not, we need to change that. It's one thing if the necessary changes don't have to be as drastic and doom and gloom as predicted until now, but if everyone thinks "oh it's fine, we fixed this!" we'll be hit by Jevon's Paradox[0] so hard that we somehow manage to destroy ourselves anyway. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
ams6110 8y ago
Call me skeptical. Hydrocarbon fuels have a lot of energy in the chemical bonds. That's why they are good as fuel! Making hydrocarbons from CO2 will require hydrogen and energy. Where does that energy come from? Maybe solar, or wind, which would actually be a good use assuming this process can stop and start as sun/wind is available, but the amount of solar panels or windmills needed to replace current amount of energy sourced from petroleum would seem to me to be staggering (I haven't done the math).
- notabee 8y ago
  We are going to need a staggering amount of renewable power anyways, but this could at least partly answer the concern of how to store that renewable power since it is variable in its output.
classicsnoot 8y ago
Can someone explain to me how any technology or change in mass habit will arrest changes and return us to, as well as hold us at, a perceived equilibrium that never truly existed within our dynamic climatic environment?
blisterpeanuts 8y ago
Reforestation, and a limitation to asphalt/concrete that replaces grass, would also take up CO2. I read somewhere that an acre of grass takes up over a ton and a half of CO2 per year. That's a lot. If we could revert a million acres a year to grasslands, we'd eventually put the Earth back on an even keel. There's also the algae in the ocean which generate a significant amount of the world's oxygen -- reduce pollution of the oceans and maintain a healthy food chain, and perhaps this will restore itself as well. The Amazon rain forest alone is responsible for a huge chunk of CO2-to-O2 work, and they're chopping it down at an alarming rate. Stop destroying the rain forest and restore as much of it as possible. I think these policies would be far more effective long term than this hokey air-to-fuel thing, and without needing to crack water for the H2 that the plan requires. That said, it sounds like cool technology and if it became competitive with fossil fuels, using (I suppose) solar energy to obtain the H2, it's a brilliant idea.
newnewpdro 8y ago
I once had to pass on purchasing a home because its well had been ruined by the nearby gas station. Even if they find a way to hypothetically enable a future for the internal combustion engine, why would we want it? Good riddance.

165 points by ThomPete 8y ago

Very simple question that the article completely failed to address: does the process output more energy in the form of gasoline than it takes in? I am quite certain that the answer is, NO, which means that the factory ends up putting more CO2 into the atmosphere than it is taking out...unless the factory itself runs on renewable energy, in which case who needs it at all.

JoshCole 8y ago
The article does address the question, but I think you're coming at this from the wrong angle. Let me give an example of what I mean by that. Let's say a person swallows poisons. The poison is going to kill them if it stays inside them with the amount that they swallowed. They absolutely need to vomit or they are going to die. The way your comment is approaching this, you're basically saying that vomiting isn't worthwhile because it takes more energy than it gives back. In this analogy, taking carbon out of the atmosphere is like vomiting up a poison. If we extend the metaphor a little bit, then using renewable is like eating normal food. So if we take the way your comment is approaching things in an analogous way, you're also implying that vomiting up poisons is pointless if the energy we used to vomit was acquired from healthy food. The metaphor does start breaking down eventually, but its a lot more obvious why this matters when you realize it isn't whether a question of whether we need to vomit - its just a question of how we do it and what we gain from doing it. This method gives us a carbon-neutral fuel, which is valuable. It's also somewhat cheap. There are other ways to remove CO2 from the atmosphere that don't have those upsides.

gmoes 8y ago

Does the planet really need more gasoline? Maybe it’s time we consider the opportunity to allow people to convert their private property into dense carbon sinks that support plant and terrestrial arthropod diversity. http://www.elegantcoding.com/2018/03/reimagining-suburban-yard-to-reverse.html?showComment=1520978508113#c5891458890176884648 http://www.elegantcoding.com/2018/03/reimagining-suburban-ya... Maybe we should be considering every option we have to promote a healthy reduced CO2 environment.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
Gasoline generated out of thin air is as clean as the supply chain used to make it. It's hard to compete with liquid hydrocarbons for energy density (and therefore efficient of transporting energy to where you need it).
godelski 8y ago
> Does the planet really need more gasoline? Are you just going to buy everyone new cars? Or replace all existing vehicles? I mean I'm all for electric cars and other modes of transport, but the problem is that we have an existing infrastructure that will take a long time to replace. As an example, the vehicle I drive is from '97. I still see people driving cars from the early 90's (or even 80's) as their daily driver. (And it is more common for poorer people to drive older cars). So do we need a new gasoline? Yes, unless you want to either replace 30+ years of vehicles, or wait that long.
- discreteevent 8y ago
  If the new gasoline costs 2 dollars more per gallon then you might pay off an electric car relatively quickly.
- gnode 8y ago
  If producing gasoline requires extracting CO2 from the atmosphere, then providing enough H2 to make the fuel, then it may make more sense to replace your car. Bear in mind that H2 is mostly produced from natural gas today, and electrolytic production is somewhat more expensive. I think it will depend on how the prices for batteries and electricity evolve as well as advancements in electrolysis. There are also other advantages to electric vehicles, such as no particulate and NOX exhaust, which may encourage taxation / regulation of combustion vehicles.
- gmoes 8y ago
  I have yet to replace my 19 year old low mileage car. I'd rather have a 1000 spiders and 1000 flower flies and a 1000 bees than another gallon of gasoline. Of course what organisms originally died to create that gallon of gasoline that you buy today?

dicroce 8y ago

WTF? This is amazing... Please be real! Please be real!

igravious 8y ago
Too good to be true I'd say… Still, I admire your hopefulness, me I'm just a bucket of inured cynicism.

LargeWu 8y ago

> The new paper says it can remove the same ton for as little as $94, and for no more than $232. At those rates, it would cost between $1 and $2.50 to remove the carbon dioxide released by burning a gallon of gasoline in a modern car. If those numbers are true, that's actually a pretty achievable cost to absorb that could be added directly as a tax on gasoline.

gruez 8y ago
I doubt most americans would support a 50%+ price hike at the pumps.
- 24gttghh 8y ago
  Well they must be convinced one way or another.
- roryisok 8y ago
  That's one of the reasons for government - to make unpopular decisions for the good of the people it governs. A 50% price hike would also have the knock on effect of making more economical cars increasingly desirable and maybe encouraging people to use public transport.
  - lozenge 8y ago
    "Unfortunately" we live in a democracy. Car makers will probably bet on being able to get the "gas tax" repealed in four years time.
- loeg 8y ago
  More like 100% from these figures. Then again, Europeans already pay something like 100% more than we do, per-gal, at the pump.
creaghpatr 8y ago
And hopefully that tax would eventually offset by the increase in gas supply
8y ago

leoedin 8y ago

The article kind of glosses over the fact that one of the inputs to the process is hydrogen. That really makes this whole process a way of converting energy stored in hydrogen to energy stored in hydrocarbons. This is pretty desirable - hydrocarbon fuels are much easier to work with, fit in with our existing transport - but not really a new source of energy. The problem with sequestering CO2 as hydrocarbons is that you need to put a whole load of energy (embodied in the hydrogen you're combining it with) into the ground and leave it there. Fortunately renewables (especially solar) are heading in the right direction. On a sunny day in an area with lots of solar panels, electricity is essentially free. We're still some way from having enough free energy available to be able to put large amounts of it back into the ground though.

gnode 8y ago
> The problem with sequestering CO2 as hydrocarbons is that you need to put a whole load of energy (embodied in the hydrogen you're combining it with) into the ground and leave it there. If sequestering CO2, combining it with CaO to make CaCO3 (calcium carbonate) makes more sense, and is even exothermic. It's also biologically harmless and can be safely dumped, used in building materials, etc.
- khuey 8y ago
  Isn't CaO largely produced from naturally occuring CaCO3 though? Where do you get a large supply of CaO to react with your sequestered CO2 from?
  - gnode 8y ago
    Apparently when CO2 is injected into hot underground basalt deposits, it is absorbed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration#Mineral_carbonation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration#Mineral_c... (last paragraph of section) So I would guess the reason for producing synthetic CaO from CaCO3 is that extracting natural CaO is uneconomical.
    - 8y ago

gnode 8y ago

Converting CO2 back to fuels to be burnt in combustion engines sounds counterproductive to me. If the goal is to reduce atmospheric CO2, then it would be better to more permanently sequester it in carbon-rich building materials, for instance.

DennisP 8y ago
Depends. Assuming we keep using hydrocarbon fuels to some extent, and want to be carbon neutral, we have to either (1) create them from atmospheric CO2, or (2) absorb the atmospheric CO2 emitted from fossil hydrocarbons, and sequester it somewhere. Which we should do depends on which is cheaper and more scalable.
usrusr 8y ago
Many things might be better served with other technologies, but we won't ever see long distance air travel without hydrocarbons (well, non-nuclear air travel...)

cletus 8y ago

I remember reading something a few years ago that this sort of thing was being investigated as a means of using wind power. As we know wind power (like most? all? renewable sources) have this undesirable property of not being constant. And I mean undesirable in the sense of the base load of an electrical grid. So the idea is to store excess power. Obviously rechargeable batteries are one way to do this. But another is artificially creating gasoline as a means of energy storage. This could have pretty desirable properties at places where gasoline might otherwise be expensive to ship in and wind power might be in abundance. Anyway I can't find the paper but at that time with that process it was looking at still over $5/gallon (which in remote places is still totally fine). So if this new process is real and scalable to an industrial level, that would be great. As much as EVs are a rapidly growing market, I think we're going to be stuck with ICEs for a long time yet.

discreteevent 8y ago
If there were a lot more electric cars they could act as a buffer to smooth out the variability of renewables.

sp332 8y ago

Would this have all the other downsides of regular gasoline - nitrous oxides and particulates? If so, I'm going to keep pushing for getting gas-powered cars off the roads at least in populated areas.

godelski 8y ago
> I'm going to keep pushing for getting gas-powered cars off the roads at least in populated areas. This technology is more trying to make it feasible to have a carbon neutral form of transportation. Most people do not have the money to buy an electric vehicle. I for one drive a vehicle made in '97.
- kerbalspacepro 8y ago
  Most people on the planet don't have enough money to buy a gasoline vehicle, too. The price for EVs will come down, just like the price for GVs did and has.
- philipkglass 8y ago
  Most people who can't afford to buy an EV can't afford to buy carbon-neutral synthetic gasoline either. I'd expect it to cost $8-$10 dollars a gallon, at least with foreseeable near-term technologies. People who already own ICE gas vehicles and don't drive them very much might still come out ahead buying $10/gallon fuel vs. acquiring an EV. (I put maybe 1500 miles/year on my car.)
  - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
    Biodiesel is just over $3. Citation?
    - philipkglass 8y ago
      Biodiesel is neither synthetic in the sense that I mean (direct chemical synthesis, no biomass) nor is it presently carbon-neutral. It also isn't suitable fuel for legacy gasoline-fueled vehicles. My estimate is based on adjustments to the LANL Green Freedom concept for synthetic gasoline from 2007: http://bioage.typepad.com/greencarcongress/docs/greenfreedom.pdf http://bioage.typepad.com/greencarcongress/docs/greenfreedom... The authors claim that for profitable operation "the price of gasoline at the pump must be about $4.60/gal." This number incorporated the authors' unrealistically optimistic expectations of low-cost Generation III nuclear reactor construction. It rises to $5.69/gallon, adjusting for inflation[1]. The rest of the cost increase comes from my estimate of using renewable electricity sources instead of cheap nuclear power. (It would be even more expensive if I used nuclear power at actually-observed costs of currently-in-progress American reactor construction.) [1] Yes, I used CPI, and I know it's not really appropriate for capital-intensive industrial projects. This is just a back-of-the-envelope estimate.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago

> “This opens up the possibility that we could stabilize the climate for affordable amounts of money without changing the entire energy system or changing everyone’s behavior.” If you really want to accomplish something on a large scale, you need something like this. People have been talking about overpopulation dangers for centuries, and human population growth remained high. Cheap, effective birth control gets releases, and population growth is stabilizing. In general, tech solutions are easier than large scale social solutions.

dfee 8y ago

I imagine a future where an industry exists that is federally subsidized and pulls CO2 from the air. However, our need for carbon sequestration is ultimately surpassed by the industry’s “output”, and we end up heading in the other direction. Because regulators tend to be captured, we end up with one industry generating CO2 (for all the positive reasons we need CO2) so that the sequestration industry doesn’t kill off all the plants, etc.

notabee 8y ago
Not only would this not be a problem for many decades even if carbon capture is wildly successful, but releasing carbon into the air is much, much easier than pulling it back out. If that were not true, we would not be facing the catastrophe that is ahead of us. You could literally just burn old coal mines or something if in some far-flung future the nefarious carbon-capturers were somehow sucking down too much. We have over 100 years' worth of artificially introduced atmospheric carbon since the beginning of the industrial revolution to work through before this will ever be a problem. Please educate yourself on the actual quantities involved.
- dfee 8y ago
  I don't think you understood my comment was about how people respond to incentives. Anyway, I'm particularly interested in this remark you made: > We have over 100 years' worth of artificially introduced atmospheric carbon since the beginning of the industrial revolution to work through before this will ever be a problem. Please educate yourself on the actual quantities involved. Is "100 years' worth" a unit of measure of CO2 I'm unfamiliar with? Are you saying that the industrial revolution was only 100 years ago? Is this the "actual quantities involved" you were referring to?
  - notabee 8y ago
    I'm sorry, I didn't realize you were inexperienced with searching the internet for information. Here's some handy links with some numbers: https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions https://www.earth-syst-sci-data.net/7/349/2015/essd-7-349-2015.pdf https://www.earth-syst-sci-data.net/7/349/2015/essd-7-349-20... "The total cumulative emissions for 1870–2014 are 545 ± 55 GtC. These emissions were partitioned among the atmosphere (230 ± 5 GtC based on atmospheric measurements in ice cores of 288 ppm (Sect. “Global atmospheric CO2 growth rate estimates”; Joos and Spahni, 2008) and recent direct measurements of 397.2 ppm; Dlugokencky and Tans, 2014), ocean (155 ± 20 GtC using Khatiwala et al., 2013, prior to 1959 and Table 8 otherwise), and land (160 ± 60 GtC by the difference)" Estimates may vary on what to count as the start of the industrial revolution, but the internet indicates that it started in Britain around 1760. It did not spread much from there until 1840 or so. Here's a quantity emitted into the atmosphere since 1870: 230 gigatonnes of carbon (GtC). That's 230,000,000,000 tonnes. Not carbon dioxide, just the carbon itself. Multiply that by 3.67 for weight of CO2 gas: 844,100,000,000 tonnes CO2. Note that this is metric tonnes, so 2,204.6 pounds per tonne for us in metric-challenged countries. This is just legacy CO2 without counting other greenhouse gases, starting from a few decades after the industrial revolution went global to close to present day. We're adding around 10 GtC (36.7 GtC CO2) every year to that total recently. I used this calculator, though I had to remove the commas from the number because there seems to be a character limit. https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calc... So let's take one of the measures from there. It said that that much CO2 could be absorbed by 994,228,504,122 acres of U.S. forest in a year. Let's try that out. There are 57,308,738 square miles of land surface area on Earth (habitable and non-habitable). Multiply that by 640 to get 36,677,592,320 acres. Alright, subtract the entire land surface area of Earth, whether we could grow trees on it or not, from the number of acres of trees we'd need to capture that carbon in a year: 994,228,504,122 - 36,677,592,320 = 957,550,911,802. That's a lot left over. How many planet Earths' worth of land area would we need to clear that much CO2 with just trees in a year then? 27.10 Earths. Okay, well that's easy then. We just need to somehow blanket the entire Earth including mountains, deserts, etc. with trees for 27 years to remove the CO2 backlog! So easy, right? Except we're also adding to that number constantly. So if we just assume for the sake of argument that this man-made carbon capture works as well as blanketing the entire land surface area in trees, and we somehow started at scale immediately, it would take 27 years to get back to baseline. (Let's put aside that there would be 27 * 3.9 = 105 GtC additional in the atmosphere to deal with if emissions were flat, and pray that the land and ocean would keep absorbing the rest) I guess if you're really worried about them overshooting that mark, you can go ahead and panic now about that, and not about the massive surplus of carbon we've got hanging around trapping the sun's heat. Oh, and I didn't even get into methane or N2O, which are also heating things up. I know it takes time and energy to google things (each search is about 0.2 grams of CO2 emitted equivalent) but I believe in your ability to do so.

prewett 8y ago

The article didn't talk at all about what the limestone is used for. What happens to the carbon in the limestone (CaCO3)? Is the limestone reusable? If we have to keep mining limestone, it just converts the problem, although I assume there isn't really a shortage of limestone at the moment, given how the ocean has been making it for billions of years.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago

I hope this is as good as it sounds. Liquid fuels have a lot of pros. If can see this being useful to nations who want to reduce their dependency on other nations for energy.

hokua2 8y ago

The article doesnt mention it takes more energy to recapture than you get out (you cannot violoate the laws of thermodynamics). Solar and Wind are thus key to making this sustainable

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jadedhacker 8y ago

I was thinking about this and looked into some of the research. We're not quite there yet though. However, if we do have a practical way of doing it, I think it would be best if we use volatile renewables like solar and wind and store the excess as hydrocarbons. That would give use a smooth transition path, reduce the energy storage problem, and provide a source of carbon-neutral fuels. However, longer term we must still move away from burning fossil fuels even if we make them completely carbon neutral, because while its a slow effect they are not oxygen neutral... http://scrippso2.ucsd.edu/ http://scrippso2.ucsd.edu/

philipkglass 8y ago
However, longer term we must still move away from burning fossil fuels even if we make them completely carbon neutral, because while its a slow effect they are not oxygen neutral... If synthetic hydrocarbons get their hydrogen from water (electrolysis or high temperature thermochemical cycles), their life cycle is oxygen-neutral as well. The extraction of hydrogen from water simultaneously produces a matching quantity of oxygen.
- jadedhacker 8y ago
  That's an excellent point.

syntaxing 8y ago

I wish the article elaborated a little more on where the energy comes from to (re)form gasoline. Gasoline has an extremely high energy density. To force hydrogen to bond with CO2 must expense a large amount of energy. The energy has to come from somewhere and delivering the proper amount cannot be a trivial thing. There is a limitation on how hot things can get without chemical reaction (such as burning fuel). Also, a good chunk (I think over 75%) of hydrogen is created by super heating steam with petroleum based fuel...this would make the whole process counterproductive.

philipkglass 8y ago
To force hydrogen to bond with CO2 must expense a large amount of energy. The energy has to come from somewhere and delivering the proper amount cannot be a trivial thing. The reaction between CO2 and H2 to form hydrocarbons is actually energetically favorable (thermodynamically spontaneous). It doesn't require outside energy inputs to force the reaction forward. See e.g. "CO2 valorisation via Reverse Water-Gas Shift reaction" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221298201730433X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221298201... and "Turning carbon dioxide into fuel" http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/roypta/368/1923/3343.full.pdf http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/roypta/368/19... The key issue is, as you note later, producing large quantities of hydrogen without relying on fossil sources.
- technicalbard 8y ago
  Except the reactions happen at 300C, and the FT reaction is exothermic between H2 and CO, not CO2. taking CO2 apart is endothermic. And then you need to refine the hydrocarbons (because they will look like diesel or wax, not gasoline).
  - philipkglass 8y ago
    Using the standard gas-phase enthalpies of formation, the production of 1 mole of n-octane and 16 moles of water from 8 moles of CO2 and 25 moles of hydrogen is exothermic by 923 kilojoules. 8 CO2 + 25 H2 -> C8H18 + 16 H2O Energy of products minus energy of reactants: (-208.7 + 16 * -241.83) - (8 * -393.52 + 25 * 0) = -923 Experimental values are from NIST WebBook. The hydrogenation of CO2 to CO and water is endothermic and kinetically hindered. The hydrogenation of CO2 to saturated hydrocarbons and water is exothermic (though still kinetically hindered). There are also hydrocarbon synthesis paths that involve less reforming and purification of high-boiling products than F-T, e.g. methanol synthesis starting from CO2 and H2 followed by Mobil methanol-to-gasoline.

thinkcontext 8y ago

This is a terrible article and I am a fan of The Atlantic and would probably be considered a climate hawk. The new science that Climate Engineering did has nothing to do with making gasoline from CO2. There is technology to do that and a number of companies working on it, its in the $10/gallon range. Some have estimated as low as $4, if they can get their process to scale up, which they haven't been able to do. There is already plenty of CO2 available for much less than $100/ton, this is not a barrier to making products out of CO2.

thinkling 8y ago
I read the article wondering why you'd want to do this by sucking in air when you could do it with exhaust from gas-powered power plants that is much richer in CO2 than regular air. In fact, there was coverage the other day of a new gas-fired power plant that throws off CO2 for storage in oil wells. Why not use that CO2? https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/6/1/17416444/net-power-natural-gas-carbon-air-pollution-allam-cycle https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/6/1/17416444...
- thinkcontext 8y ago
  Exactly, that new plant design is a much bigger deal. It gives you the CO2 for "free" as part of its normal operation without a power penalty. This article tries to make a point about how if the gasoline is made from CO2 from the air, it makes burning it carbon neutral. This is true but it misses the point. You want to get the most CO2 reduction for your money, so do the cheapest carbon capture first. Its cheaper to collect it from large point sources, so do that first. Once those emissions are being captured or simply ended from the plant retiring then move on to more expensive DAC.
- notabee 8y ago
  The reason is simple: we've already put enough CO2 into the atmosphere to cause adverse changes over a long period of time. A lot of the IPCC models and their discussion centers around more near-term climate threats over the next 100 years or so caused by continued emissions and overall severity of going ever more "over budget" with CO2 levels, but we're still 100+ ppm of CO2 over the highest average of the last half a million years or more. That CO2 is going to hang around in the atmosphere for quite some time as the natural processes like weathering that lower it are slow, and its presence will add extra heat from solar radiation while it's still there. If we suddenly stopping emitting now, we would still be above baseline but not in the apocalyptic range. If things don't change quickly though, we're going to have to suck CO2 from the atmosphere one way or another because just halting emissions won't be enough.

source99 8y ago

They claim to be pulling 1 ton of CO2 out of the air per day. Some older numbers I just found show we are putting 10 Billion tons per year. This only has to be scaled 27 million times to equal it out...

igravious 8y ago
I wonder what year it will be that CO₂ ppm in the atmosphere levels off and I wonder what level it will be at then? I wonder what the world will look like then.

squozzer 8y ago

I have my doubts. It always seems more expensive to work against the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics than with it.

vanderZwan 8y ago

> “This opens up the possibility that we could stabilize the climate for affordable amounts of money without changing the entire energy system or changing everyone’s behavior.” Regardless of whether this technology works as promised, the last part (and possibly the first part too) does not show the right attitude to solving this issue, I think. It's not just technology that got us into this mess. It's also how we decided to apply that technology. Silver bullet or not, we need to change that. It's one thing if the necessary changes don't have to be as drastic and doom and gloom as predicted until now, but if everyone thinks "oh it's fine, we fixed this!" we'll be hit by Jevon's Paradox[0] so hard that we somehow manage to destroy ourselves anyway. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

ams6110 8y ago

Call me skeptical. Hydrocarbon fuels have a lot of energy in the chemical bonds. That's why they are good as fuel! Making hydrocarbons from CO2 will require hydrogen and energy. Where does that energy come from? Maybe solar, or wind, which would actually be a good use assuming this process can stop and start as sun/wind is available, but the amount of solar panels or windmills needed to replace current amount of energy sourced from petroleum would seem to me to be staggering (I haven't done the math).

notabee 8y ago
We are going to need a staggering amount of renewable power anyways, but this could at least partly answer the concern of how to store that renewable power since it is variable in its output.

classicsnoot 8y ago

Can someone explain to me how any technology or change in mass habit will arrest changes and return us to, as well as hold us at, a perceived equilibrium that never truly existed within our dynamic climatic environment?

blisterpeanuts 8y ago

Reforestation, and a limitation to asphalt/concrete that replaces grass, would also take up CO2. I read somewhere that an acre of grass takes up over a ton and a half of CO2 per year. That's a lot. If we could revert a million acres a year to grasslands, we'd eventually put the Earth back on an even keel. There's also the algae in the ocean which generate a significant amount of the world's oxygen -- reduce pollution of the oceans and maintain a healthy food chain, and perhaps this will restore itself as well. The Amazon rain forest alone is responsible for a huge chunk of CO2-to-O2 work, and they're chopping it down at an alarming rate. Stop destroying the rain forest and restore as much of it as possible. I think these policies would be far more effective long term than this hokey air-to-fuel thing, and without needing to crack water for the H2 that the plan requires. That said, it sounds like cool technology and if it became competitive with fossil fuels, using (I suppose) solar energy to obtain the H2, it's a brilliant idea.

newnewpdro 8y ago

I once had to pass on purchasing a home because its well had been ruined by the nearby gas station. Even if they find a way to hypothetically enable a future for the internal combustion engine, why would we want it? Good riddance.