5 ms·

I'm skeptical, but fascinated by what you're doing. It sounds like all of the steps of your process are known, except: 1. CO2 fixation uses only electricity -

• rmcginnis 7y ago
  We could use the alcohols as fuels directly (in flex fuel vehicles), but this wouldn't address the much larger market for gasoline. It's a simple and inexpensive upgrade, so makes sense to do it. We will definitely take advantage of carbon credits, tax incentives, etc too!
  • apo 7y ago
    Organic feedstocks (non-fuel), although smaller isn't exactly a tiny market. Depending on how much control you have over the fixation process you might be able to tap into some high-value alcohol markets. That's the main reason I added the follow-up to the original questions. In other words, the flow of material would look like: CO2 -> polymers, drugs, and other useful solid materials There would be no [product] -> CO2 step at the end. It cuts out the re-release of CO2 and eliminates a dependence on petroleum.
    • pcl 7y ago
      I believe that as long as we have a huge worldwide oil / diesel / gasoline infrastructure in place, from transport to refining to distribution to combustion, it makes a lot of sense to build reasonably-efficient carbon-neutral mechanisms to plug into that infrastructure. In other words, for the next handful of decades, the worldwide fleet of cars, trucks, generators, boats, etc. are going to be burning carbon that comes from somewhere. Products like this provide a carbon-neutral means of supplying that demand. It's like working on a huge existing codebase, but at much larger scale, and with geopolitics. People are working on rebuilding it all from scratch, but iterating within the existing infrastructure could also deliver huge wins. And, if we somehow found ourselves in a world in which carbon-neutral petrochemicals were the norm, well, we can always generate a surplus and sequester that surplus, right?
      • jacobush 7y ago
        If I am allowed to daydream freely, a huge fusion reactor with a gasoline pipeline flowing from it, is (in my mind) a beautiful thing.
    • rmcginnis 7y ago
      Ultimately anything we make now with petroleum feedstocks could be made from CO2 mined from the air instead. Gasoline and other transportation fuels is a logical first step, but we don't need to stop there. Agreed!
  • rlucas 7y ago
    If the alcohol upgrade to gasoline makes sense technically and economically for you, why is it not commonly done with (presumably much cheaper and extant in great volume) industrial alcohol today?
    • gridlockd 7y ago
      He said "inexpensive", not "economical". The whole process isn't economical yet. Perhaps conversion is more economical with their particlar sorts of alcohol though.
      • rlucas 7y ago
        Understood, although eventually it has to become "economical" or it doesn't fly. My point was, you can view the alcohols as a feedstock for the gasoline production, and given that, you might just stream in large quantities of already-produced and cheap grain ethanol etc. from Indiana.
        • hndamien 7y ago
          It is more likely that polluting methods (net non-zero) will be forced to become uneconomical.
    • askvictor 7y ago
      I might have misunderstood your point, but I believe alcohol is commonly used as a fuel in Brazil, where most cars are capable of using it directly.
    • Iv 7y ago
      Actors are not necessarily as rational as Econ 101 would have us believe. Incomplete information, misinformation and advertisement distort the market. As well as monopolistic practices. A lot of conspiracy theories are paranoid, but the propaganda machine of the oil industry is very real and managed to incite a lot of economically counter-productive policies.
    • m1sta_ 7y ago
• mikorym 7y ago
  I think one has to look at this from a business minded point of view. One way of doing that is going for what could be an immense market.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
  • fxfan 7y ago
    If you don't like Saudi's I'm guessing you don't use twitter or Citibank?