8 ms·

Directly converting CO2 into a gasoline fuel (2017)

AndrewDucker 5y ago
Fascinating. Can anyone spot how efficient it is? It declares that it's "Highly efficient", but then no details on what the actual efficiency is.
danieldbird 5y ago
And then put it back in the ground, or burn it again..?
- jokoon 5y ago
  Yes, it doesn't make sense. Where would the CO2 come from? Capturing CO2 is not a proven technology. Or maybe cars would be equipped with a tank that compresses CO2, but even then. It's funny how the solution is all about stopping to use fossil fuels, but people still find ways to CREATE fossil fuels.
bartwe 5y ago
Wondering if this could be combined with solar peaking to buffer summer overcapacity till winter time.
5ersi 5y ago
So this process is "CO2 hydrogenation" meaning that it needs elemental hydrogen, which is not naturally available (except in trace amounts). To make this work one needs to first produce hydrogen which is itself an energy consuming process. So basically, we'd burn fossil fuels producing CO2 and then reverse this process via "CO2 hydrogenation" (with significant losses) to again get the hydrocarbons (aka gasoline) ? This whole thing would only make sense if we had abundant source of elemental hydrogen. But then why burn fuel in the first place. (This would only make sense if all fuel totally ran out and then we'd need this process to make hydrocarbons for material use: plastics, etc..)
- pfdietz 5y ago
  The energy has to come from somewhere.
  - mlatu 5y ago
    yes, and it is our duty to think about where we lose it and how not to.
- ben_w 5y ago
  Can also make sense if this is cheaper than batteries. Electrolytic hydrogen is so easy I did it when I was nine years old — the only reason I powered the reaction using a battery instead of PV was that back in 1992, PV wasn't something a kid could easily get hold of with pocket money.
  - gefhfffh 5y ago
    Well, short term it may be cheaper. Long term you are going to pay, because the efficiency is horrible, 10-30% depending on who u ask
    - ben_w 5y ago
      PV is so cheap the efficiency is the least important part of this. PV without batteries is the cheapest power source on earth, bids in the order of single US ¢ / kWh, but last I saw batteries had LCOE comparable with nuclear reactors (about 15¢/kWh in 2020). I’m certainly hopeful that batteries will improve, but right now even a mere 10% efficient process for turning electricity into gasoline and then burning it is still useful as both heating and aviation fuel, and just about on the edge of useful as strategic diversity for nations that don’t want to limit strategic energy storage to just batteries.
      - gefhfffh 5y ago
        PV needs physical resources that aren't for free or unlimited. PV needs space. Most energy used has still an high negative impact on the atmosphere. Low efficiency somewhere is energy potentially wasted that could reduce carbon emissions somewhere else. Heating is waaay more efficient with heat pumps. Aviation... Well who can still afford it... There are other forms of storage as well, e.g. hydro, heat storage, and many more I'm not saying it doesn't have it's uses, but efficiency is important
londons_explore 5y ago
It's a shame that currently there is no economic incentive to use such tech, even if it was 100% efficient. It's always cheaper to use oil from the ground than it is to use another power source to manufacture oil.
- gefhfffh 5y ago
  It's cheaper, but the costs are external costs (calculated for the next 100 years about 600 Euro per ton of emitted CO2). They could be internalized by CO2 pricing, such as CO2 tax or certificates
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    Fossil fuels are cheaper because nature did the energy intensive "turn dinosaurs into oil" part (i.e creating the hydrocarbon molecules) for us over the span of millions of years and we just extract it from the ground and do some chemistry magic to make it into useful stuff. The "create the useful hydrocarbon out of atmospheric carbon" step needs to necessarily be cheaper than getting dead dinosaurs to a refinery and refining them. Screeching about externalities adds nothing to the discussion. Burning synthetic hydrocarbon fuel would also release carbon. A CO2 tax would hit it just as hard as it hits traditional hydrocarbon fuels unless you do stupid "craft the tax to pick and choose winners" crap that a carbon tax is explicitly supposed to avoid.
    - gefhfffh 5y ago
      It wouldn't because as a producer you would remove CO2 from the atmosphere which brings its carbon footprint close to zero
john567 5y ago
Elon Musk once pointed to the low energi state of CO2 as a problem meaning it doesn't react with other things without additional energy added. This makes carbon capture fundamentally hard and anyone claiming otherwise is either in possession of some infinite power supply or we live in a post scarcity society. Either way, planting trees appears to be a good mechanism for carbon capture. So go do that instead!
- JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  One step better: don't create it to begin with. Use electric devices instead.
  - gbear605 5y ago
    Some activities are much more difficult to do with electricity because of the weight of batteries or because the environment is cold, flying planes or existing in Arctic climates being the most notable. So if we want a totally carbon-neutral world while still being able to do everything we can today, some carbon capture is important. Hopefully we’ll have a huge innovation in batteries, but oil is very energy dense and some burning seems likely for a long time. We also will probably want to reduce CO2 levels from wherever we peak, even assuming we’re not burning any more oil, so carbon capture is important for that too. Now some of that carbon capture can be in the form of well managed trees, but they take up a lot of land and you have to chop them down and store the wood somewhere that it won’t break down, and that becomes its own storage problem.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
If this worked, then you'd still need it to be better than using the money expended to offset other other fossil carbon usage, one means of which could be converting gasoline using processes to use electricity directly. As a result, I don't think this can ever make logical sense under any circumstances, very similar to carbon capture attached to fossil fuel generators. It just doesn't pencil out, even in theory. Basically, gasoline isn't a particularly good fuel unless society is letting you dump the pollution for free, in which case it still isn't particularly good, but some other sucker is paying the price for it. And that other sucker is often you.
- fsh 5y ago
  Hydrocarbons are fantastic fuels when high energy density is required. In fact, airliners would be completely impossible without them. Even the most fantastic experimental batteries have nowhere near enough energy density for efficient powered flight. There are some plausible concepts for hydrogen powered planes, but those waste a lot more space on fuel tanks compared to hydrocarbon powered ones. Synthetic hydrocarbons will probably remain the only option for carbon-neutral long-distance travel in the foreseeable future.
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    Simply offsetting the carbon, by replacing fossil fuel uses in other sectors, makes more financial/economic/practical sense than creating synthetic hydrocarbons to greenwash your own specific usage. People really are stuck in a fossil-fuel mindset when the real solution is to stop using them as fast as possible. A simple carbon fee does this without much fuss. People peddling synthetic hydrocarbons are, again like carbon capture and storage attached to fossil fuel generators, simply bullshitting. They might as well claim to be transitioning to perpetual motion powered flight that they have working today at lab scale. Because, basically that is what they are saying.
    - PaulHoule 5y ago
      The concern about aviation is not so much today (being responsible for of 3.5% climate change) https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID/587/ArticleID/2667/Aviation-is-responsible-for-35-percent-of-climate-change-study-finds https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID/587/ArticleID/2667/... but tomorrow, in that we expect a lot of growth in aviation. That might not be the case, why take a lover for a weekend to Paris when you can go to Montréal? A nuclear powered aircraft carrier could synthesize jet fuel from the ocean and atmosphere and even if it is $15 a gallon it is a bargain -- so the US Military sponsors this kind of research. The best case for carbon capture now is this technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_and_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_... applied to sugar cane alcohol factories in Brazil. You can catch CO2 from fermentation and not have to separate it from N2, compress to 1500 psi and inject into a saline aquifer. Those bioenergy plants are much better than bioenergy plants in the US by any economic or environmental metric. They'd have to get paid something per ton of CO2 captured to make it worth it. This industry is located close to populated areas such as São Paulo and does no harm to rainforests that Brazil must also protect. Another case is the petrochemical industry in the southern US where CO2 streams are abundant and could be aggregated for scalable saline injection. Any sort of space manufacturing will require a "circular economy" for carbon (it's precious) and whatever passes for a "petrochemical factory" will produce CO2 and that needs to have energy put into it into some form that can be put back into the "head end", methane would be great. The unique opportunity there is very high temperature chemistry with 24-7 sunlight concentrated with metallized plastic membranes made from the produce of the "petrochemical factory".

Fascinating. Can anyone spot how efficient it is? It declares that it's "Highly efficient", but then no details on what the actual efficiency is.

danieldbird 5y ago

And then put it back in the ground, or burn it again..?

jokoon 5y ago
Yes, it doesn't make sense. Where would the CO2 come from? Capturing CO2 is not a proven technology. Or maybe cars would be equipped with a tank that compresses CO2, but even then. It's funny how the solution is all about stopping to use fossil fuels, but people still find ways to CREATE fossil fuels.

bartwe 5y ago

Wondering if this could be combined with solar peaking to buffer summer overcapacity till winter time.

5ersi 5y ago

So this process is "CO2 hydrogenation" meaning that it needs elemental hydrogen, which is not naturally available (except in trace amounts). To make this work one needs to first produce hydrogen which is itself an energy consuming process. So basically, we'd burn fossil fuels producing CO2 and then reverse this process via "CO2 hydrogenation" (with significant losses) to again get the hydrocarbons (aka gasoline) ? This whole thing would only make sense if we had abundant source of elemental hydrogen. But then why burn fuel in the first place. (This would only make sense if all fuel totally ran out and then we'd need this process to make hydrocarbons for material use: plastics, etc..)

pfdietz 5y ago
The energy has to come from somewhere.
- mlatu 5y ago
  yes, and it is our duty to think about where we lose it and how not to.
ben_w 5y ago
Can also make sense if this is cheaper than batteries. Electrolytic hydrogen is so easy I did it when I was nine years old — the only reason I powered the reaction using a battery instead of PV was that back in 1992, PV wasn't something a kid could easily get hold of with pocket money.
- gefhfffh 5y ago
  Well, short term it may be cheaper. Long term you are going to pay, because the efficiency is horrible, 10-30% depending on who u ask
  - ben_w 5y ago
    PV is so cheap the efficiency is the least important part of this. PV without batteries is the cheapest power source on earth, bids in the order of single US ¢ / kWh, but last I saw batteries had LCOE comparable with nuclear reactors (about 15¢/kWh in 2020). I’m certainly hopeful that batteries will improve, but right now even a mere 10% efficient process for turning electricity into gasoline and then burning it is still useful as both heating and aviation fuel, and just about on the edge of useful as strategic diversity for nations that don’t want to limit strategic energy storage to just batteries.
    - gefhfffh 5y ago
      PV needs physical resources that aren't for free or unlimited. PV needs space. Most energy used has still an high negative impact on the atmosphere. Low efficiency somewhere is energy potentially wasted that could reduce carbon emissions somewhere else. Heating is waaay more efficient with heat pumps. Aviation... Well who can still afford it... There are other forms of storage as well, e.g. hydro, heat storage, and many more I'm not saying it doesn't have it's uses, but efficiency is important

londons_explore 5y ago

It's a shame that currently there is no economic incentive to use such tech, even if it was 100% efficient. It's always cheaper to use oil from the ground than it is to use another power source to manufacture oil.

gefhfffh 5y ago
It's cheaper, but the costs are external costs (calculated for the next 100 years about 600 Euro per ton of emitted CO2). They could be internalized by CO2 pricing, such as CO2 tax or certificates
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  Fossil fuels are cheaper because nature did the energy intensive "turn dinosaurs into oil" part (i.e creating the hydrocarbon molecules) for us over the span of millions of years and we just extract it from the ground and do some chemistry magic to make it into useful stuff. The "create the useful hydrocarbon out of atmospheric carbon" step needs to necessarily be cheaper than getting dead dinosaurs to a refinery and refining them. Screeching about externalities adds nothing to the discussion. Burning synthetic hydrocarbon fuel would also release carbon. A CO2 tax would hit it just as hard as it hits traditional hydrocarbon fuels unless you do stupid "craft the tax to pick and choose winners" crap that a carbon tax is explicitly supposed to avoid.
  - gefhfffh 5y ago
    It wouldn't because as a producer you would remove CO2 from the atmosphere which brings its carbon footprint close to zero

john567 5y ago

Elon Musk once pointed to the low energi state of CO2 as a problem meaning it doesn't react with other things without additional energy added. This makes carbon capture fundamentally hard and anyone claiming otherwise is either in possession of some infinite power supply or we live in a post scarcity society. Either way, planting trees appears to be a good mechanism for carbon capture. So go do that instead!

JoeAltmaier 5y ago
One step better: don't create it to begin with. Use electric devices instead.
- gbear605 5y ago
  Some activities are much more difficult to do with electricity because of the weight of batteries or because the environment is cold, flying planes or existing in Arctic climates being the most notable. So if we want a totally carbon-neutral world while still being able to do everything we can today, some carbon capture is important. Hopefully we’ll have a huge innovation in batteries, but oil is very energy dense and some burning seems likely for a long time. We also will probably want to reduce CO2 levels from wherever we peak, even assuming we’re not burning any more oil, so carbon capture is important for that too. Now some of that carbon capture can be in the form of well managed trees, but they take up a lot of land and you have to chop them down and store the wood somewhere that it won’t break down, and that becomes its own storage problem.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

If this worked, then you'd still need it to be better than using the money expended to offset other other fossil carbon usage, one means of which could be converting gasoline using processes to use electricity directly. As a result, I don't think this can ever make logical sense under any circumstances, very similar to carbon capture attached to fossil fuel generators. It just doesn't pencil out, even in theory. Basically, gasoline isn't a particularly good fuel unless society is letting you dump the pollution for free, in which case it still isn't particularly good, but some other sucker is paying the price for it. And that other sucker is often you.

fsh 5y ago
Hydrocarbons are fantastic fuels when high energy density is required. In fact, airliners would be completely impossible without them. Even the most fantastic experimental batteries have nowhere near enough energy density for efficient powered flight. There are some plausible concepts for hydrogen powered planes, but those waste a lot more space on fuel tanks compared to hydrocarbon powered ones. Synthetic hydrocarbons will probably remain the only option for carbon-neutral long-distance travel in the foreseeable future.
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  Simply offsetting the carbon, by replacing fossil fuel uses in other sectors, makes more financial/economic/practical sense than creating synthetic hydrocarbons to greenwash your own specific usage. People really are stuck in a fossil-fuel mindset when the real solution is to stop using them as fast as possible. A simple carbon fee does this without much fuss. People peddling synthetic hydrocarbons are, again like carbon capture and storage attached to fossil fuel generators, simply bullshitting. They might as well claim to be transitioning to perpetual motion powered flight that they have working today at lab scale. Because, basically that is what they are saying.
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    The concern about aviation is not so much today (being responsible for of 3.5% climate change) https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID/587/ArticleID/2667/Aviation-is-responsible-for-35-percent-of-climate-change-study-finds https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID/587/ArticleID/2667/... but tomorrow, in that we expect a lot of growth in aviation. That might not be the case, why take a lover for a weekend to Paris when you can go to Montréal? A nuclear powered aircraft carrier could synthesize jet fuel from the ocean and atmosphere and even if it is $15 a gallon it is a bargain -- so the US Military sponsors this kind of research. The best case for carbon capture now is this technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_and_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_... applied to sugar cane alcohol factories in Brazil. You can catch CO2 from fermentation and not have to separate it from N2, compress to 1500 psi and inject into a saline aquifer. Those bioenergy plants are much better than bioenergy plants in the US by any economic or environmental metric. They'd have to get paid something per ton of CO2 captured to make it worth it. This industry is located close to populated areas such as São Paulo and does no harm to rainforests that Brazil must also protect. Another case is the petrochemical industry in the southern US where CO2 streams are abundant and could be aggregated for scalable saline injection. Any sort of space manufacturing will require a "circular economy" for carbon (it's precious) and whatever passes for a "petrochemical factory" will produce CO2 and that needs to have energy put into it into some form that can be put back into the "head end", methane would be great. The unique opportunity there is very high temperature chemistry with 24-7 sunlight concentrated with metallized plastic membranes made from the produce of the "petrochemical factory".