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Concerning point 1: Of course it will always be cheaper to pump Oil directly out of the ground. Nobody claimed otherwise. Concerning point 2: A few billion inv

by sprash 7y ago

Concerning point 1: Of course it will always be cheaper to pump Oil directly out of the ground. Nobody claimed otherwise. Concerning point 2: A few billion investment seems to me far less than forcing everybody to switch to electric and building a vast network of charging stations and additional power plants to power those cars. (Which right now predominantly work with coal what everybody somehow seems to be ignoring) Concerning point 2,3 and 4: Generating Hydrogen can easily be done with heat which you have plenty of when using solar as your primary energy source. Using electrolysis is overkill at that point. Besides that, 69 cents per liter diesel is really not that bad considering most people in e.g. Europe pay vastly more per liter because of massive taxes. The real problem I really see is the CO2 capture. As you said, nobody tried that at a huge scale. But maybe there is innovation possible. It won't work if synthetic fuels are taxed the same way as fossil fuels. That is entirely obvious. I agree with that.

philipkglass 7y ago
It's not easier to generate hydrogen with thermally driven processes than with electricity. People have certainly proposed thermally driven methods that could use solar heat or the output of high temperature nuclear reactors. But none of them have reached pilot plant scale, and IMO they are going to be hard to make reliable/affordable because they combine high temperatures with chemically aggressive environments.
- sprash 7y ago
  Again, here[1] a process is demonstrated that generates CO and H directly out of CO2 and H2O with a specialized catalyst using only heat from direct sunlight on a large scale. No electrolysis necessary. [1]: https://www.dlr.de/content/en/articles/news/2019/02/20190613_solar-fuel-breakthrough.html https://www.dlr.de/content/en/articles/news/2019/02/20190613...
  - philipkglass 7y ago
    That's another research project that hasn't even reached pilot plant scale. Here is the main web site for the project: https://www.sun-to-liquid.eu/ https://www.sun-to-liquid.eu/ The preceding EU-project SOLAR-JET has recently demonstrated the first-ever solar thermochemical kerosene production from H2O and CO2 in a laboratory environment (6). A total of 291 stable redox cycles were performed, yielding 700 standard litres of high-quality syngas, which was compressed and further processed via Fischer-Tropsch synthesis to a mixture of naphtha, gasoil, and kerosene (7). As a follow-up project, SUN-to-LIQUID will design, fabricate, and experimentally validate a more than 12-fold scale-up of the complete solar fuel production plant and will establish a new milestone in reactor efficiency. The field validation will integrate for the first time the whole production chain from sunlight, H2O and CO2 to liquid hydrocarbon fuels. If they achieved, say, a 13-fold scale-up, that would mean producing 9100 liters of synthesis gas in the course of the project. Based on the synthesis gas composition from the previous project [1], that might yield around 3 liters of diesel. 3 liters of liquid fuel from a multi-year research project. [1] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.energyfuels.5b00351 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.energyfuels.5b00351

by sprash 7y ago

philipkglass 7y ago

It's not easier to generate hydrogen with thermally driven processes than with electricity. People have certainly proposed thermally driven methods that could use solar heat or the output of high temperature nuclear reactors. But none of them have reached pilot plant scale, and IMO they are going to be hard to make reliable/affordable because they combine high temperatures with chemically aggressive environments.

sprash 7y ago
Again, here[1] a process is demonstrated that generates CO and H directly out of CO2 and H2O with a specialized catalyst using only heat from direct sunlight on a large scale. No electrolysis necessary. [1]: https://www.dlr.de/content/en/articles/news/2019/02/20190613_solar-fuel-breakthrough.html https://www.dlr.de/content/en/articles/news/2019/02/20190613...
- philipkglass 7y ago
  That's another research project that hasn't even reached pilot plant scale. Here is the main web site for the project: https://www.sun-to-liquid.eu/ https://www.sun-to-liquid.eu/ The preceding EU-project SOLAR-JET has recently demonstrated the first-ever solar thermochemical kerosene production from H2O and CO2 in a laboratory environment (6). A total of 291 stable redox cycles were performed, yielding 700 standard litres of high-quality syngas, which was compressed and further processed via Fischer-Tropsch synthesis to a mixture of naphtha, gasoil, and kerosene (7). As a follow-up project, SUN-to-LIQUID will design, fabricate, and experimentally validate a more than 12-fold scale-up of the complete solar fuel production plant and will establish a new milestone in reactor efficiency. The field validation will integrate for the first time the whole production chain from sunlight, H2O and CO2 to liquid hydrocarbon fuels. If they achieved, say, a 13-fold scale-up, that would mean producing 9100 liters of synthesis gas in the course of the project. Based on the synthesis gas composition from the previous project [1], that might yield around 3 liters of diesel. 3 liters of liquid fuel from a multi-year research project. [1] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.energyfuels.5b00351 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.energyfuels.5b00351