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Argonne National Lab Breakthrough Turns Carbon Dioxide into Ethanol
- maxk42 6y agoIf anyone is interested I have found the press release directly from the Argonne National Laboratory: https://www.anl.gov/article/turning-carbon-dioxide-into-liquid-fuel https://www.anl.gov/article/turning-carbon-dioxide-into-liqu...
- Harvesterify 6y agoAnd the related direct link to the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-020-0666-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-020-0666-x
- azinman2 6y agoThis is the kind of thing that could motivate big industry to get into carbon scrubbing, and maybe eventually cause it’s price to drop to levels where it outcompetes digging for oil.
- Animats 6y agoThis has to be energetically uphill, of course. How many units of energy do you have to put into get one unit of energy in ethanol form? Need numbers on this. Would it be a win to use wind energy during low price periods to make ethanol this way?
- lukehutch 6y agoThey say in the article that the conversion efficiency is 90%, which I assume means that if the reagent supply is infinite, 90% of the electrical energy you put into the catalyst is turned into chemical bond energy.
- jlokier 6y agoIt says the Faradaic efficiency is 90%, which unfortunately is not the total energy efficiency. Total energy efficiency also includes thermodynamic and practical constraints. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_efficiency#Faradaic_loss_vs._voltage_and_energy_efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_efficiency#Faradaic_lo... However that's still a great figure. I'm in awe that a carbon-substrate catalyst converts CO2 so well without degrading itself.
- lukehutch 6y agoPresumably when the ethanol is burned, all the captured carbon is released again... So you have to re-capture each time you use it.
- dna_polymerase 6y agoThat's true, and the reason why we need healthy oceans and rain forests. They are carbon dioxide sinks and store carbon for eons.
- jsmcgd 6y agoRoughly speaking, if the carbon is captured from the atmosphere and later released into the atmosphere, the technology is carbon neutral. If the carbon is sequestered (stored permanently) it is carbon negative. If the carbon is obtained from an unsustainable source and released to the atmosphere it is carbon positive. The current consensus is that only carbon positive systems are considered a problem.
- gervwyk 6y agoThis is really cool! Since the ocean releases a good amount of CO2. Imagine pods sitting in the ocean capturing CO2 and using wave energy to generate ethanol..
- boxed 6y agoOffshore wind could use this system too. It could be more efficient than the transmission loss.
- LatteLazy 6y agoI did this in Alevel chemistry back in ~2001...
- rsfern 6y agoThis comes across as kind of dismissive, as if the innovation here is just a realization that a well-known electrocatalytic reaction can be used for carbon sequestration. Am I reading your tone wrong? The really hard bit in this kind of research is designing a catalyst that can mediate the reaction efficiently, doesn’t degrade rapidly, and isn’t prohibitively expensive to deploy at scale.
- rweir 6y agoIt seems very unlikely they'll be able to resist burning it, though.
- Nihilartikel 6y agoWith a twist of lime, they might just end up drinking it.
- jvanderbot 6y agoThis is an energy storage mechanism (in the form of combustable fuel), not a fuel-generation mechanism.
- sliken 6y agoyes, exactly right, but a pretty exciting one. Combustible fuel can be stored for hours, days, weeks, months, and even years... unlike most forms of storing electricity. A alcohol burning car could be carbon neutral, have great range, and be relatively cheap.
- ADent 6y agoThis is going to be big. You can make solar more reliable by over building. Then you can use that sporadically surplus electricity to make liquid fuels - needed for aviation and handy for trains and trucks.