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Maybe we use electricity to scrub carbon from the atmosphere, create fossil fuels, and burn that again. Non-zero-emission and high energy cost but carbon neutra
by scarejunba 8y ago
Maybe we use electricity to scrub carbon from the atmosphere, create fossil fuels, and burn that again. Non-zero-emission and high energy cost but carbon neutral.
- kenneth 8y agoI've been thinking about this. Gasoline is a much better form of energy storage than lithium-ion. Perhaps if we mandated that gasoline (or a similar fuel) be synthesized from carbon extracted from the air instead of dug out of the ground, we'd be able to get, say, carbon-neutral flight with current technology.
- kabouseng 8y agoYou should read up on thermodynamic laws...
- rcxdude 8y agoThermodynamics is OK with this. It's not a way of producing the energy, just a means of storing transporting it which has some advantages over batteries (that said, energy in vs energy out efficiency is not one of them right now)
- greatpatton 8y agoWhich is really bad as ICE have a very poor yield... The efficiency of the global solution (transforming carbon to gas -> gas to mechanical energy) will be under 20%...
- jerf 8y agoOn the other hand, you tend to get energy -> liquid carbon fuel -> consumer, where once the fuel is liquid it's cheap to move around without much further loss, whereas with electricity you tend to get generator -> AC to DC -> transmission -> AC to DC -> lithium ion battery. Each step is individually more efficient, but the whole is not necessarily obviously worse than liquid fuels. Electricity does have a lot more optimization opportunity, though, whereas those liquid fuel processes are pretty much at their optimum already. A local solar panel DC'ing straight into your car's batteries is going to be pretty good compared to the "generic" pipeline I gave you above. (On the other hand, it can go the other way, too; if your electricity notionally passed through something like a gravity storage step, you lost more there too.) Although from what I've gathered from looking at solar setups, most local solar setups won't actually do that, so it's an optimization yet to be done rather than something all roof-mounted solar panels already do.
- dmurray 8y agoA YC company doing just this was the top story on HN just a few days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240
- notabee 8y agoCarbon neutral is not enough at this point to prevent a great deal of climate change. It just extends the timeline enough for us to figure out something better. Negative emissions technology is going to be necessary because the sheer quantity of excess carbon in the air is already far greater than what any of the natural sinks (which are also quite saturated already) will draw down in any reasonable timeframe. We also need at least a fighting chance if and when the natural feedbacks kick in. I encourage you to look up the number of metric tonnes of carbon debt we have above pre-industrial baseline and play around with the EPA equivalencies calculator. https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calc...
- chr1 8y agoFossil fuel cars are bad in cities not because of CO2, but because of other harmful substances they produce. If there was a good fuel cell working with fossil fuels then your suggestion would work.
- scarejunba 8y agoI guess we could all drive the Mirai.
- chr1 7y agoThat may work, in Europe Netherlands is planning to invest into updating natural gas infrastructure to work with hydrogen, as they have lots of wind, and possibility to store hydrogen in empty gas caverns in Groningen.
- ianai 8y agoThis is an over simplification. Pulling carbon oh of the air will not refreeze the already melted glaciers. It will not sequester methane released from undersea sources, etc.