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Imagine a gigantic "oil derrick" out at sea that instead of pumping oil out of the ground dragged it out of the air. Gigantic filters, MEA beds, regeneration lo
by jjoonathan 4y ago
Imagine a gigantic "oil derrick" out at sea that instead of pumping oil out of the ground dragged it out of the air. Gigantic filters, MEA beds, regeneration loops, Sabatier, Fischer-Tropsch, all arranged around a nuclear reactor 100x the power of today's largest. The output is a variety of hydrocarbon fuels, and it's all overseen by a proper bond villain because the spice must flow.
I want to see this movie.
- yamtaddle 4y agoSimilar to Panchaea from the game Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
- jjoonathan 4y agoExactly -- but funded with a straightforward profit motive, not charity / policy / illuminati.
- vkou 4y agoIf it were profitable to build a machine to turn air into gasoline, I'd buy gasoline, burn it, and run that machine for free infinite money.
- jjoonathan 4y agoWhy buy and burn the gasoline? I think you are reaching for an "if it were easy, someone would have done it" argument, which is trivially true in the short term but not very informative in the long term because we get better and better at doing things that are not easy. Profitability is a function of execution, feedstock prices, scale, cost of capital, etc. So far air-to-fuel hasn't been profitable, even in contexts that help reduce profitability concerns (e.g. Air-to-Fuel on aircraft carriers), so there is clearly a long road between this "movie" and reality. However, variables vary. If the nuclear industry gets back in gear, air-to-fuel gets de-risked on smaller emissions-capture projects, and we see advances in construction and chemical engineering, who knows?
- vkou 4y agoPresumably this machine would work better if I were feeding CO2 straight into it, rather than have it suck it out of the 420 ppm air.
- somewhereoutth 4y agoThe profit motive can't exist without policy (for example, the policy of not letting thugs take everything you have)
- xattt 4y ago> nuclear reactor 100x the power of today's largest You would need some sort of a Navy to guard this against sabotage.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- __MatrixMan__ 4y agoThat's what the Bond villain is for. They come with henchmen.
- fsckboy 4y agoit's bristling with lasers, particle beam, and plasma weapons
- Anon4Now 4y agoMy movie fantasy is to create canals into the Sahara, and use solar-powered water desalination plants to irrigate and re-forest the desert.
- verdverm 4y agoFun fact, the Sahara cycles between desert and grasslands on N,000 year cycles. https://today.tamu.edu/2016/11/29/6000-years-ago-the-sahara-desert-was-tropical-so-what-happened/ https://today.tamu.edu/2016/11/29/6000-years-ago-the-sahara-... Not sure there is evidence it was a forest, so wouldn't really be a "re-forestation"
- jl6 4y agoIt takes a substantial amount of time to condense and process CO2 from the air into droplets of synthetic fuel. It would be an unnecessarily slow dripping mechanism.
- xorcist 4y agoIt would be horribly inefficient compared to nearly every other use of that energy imaginable. The movie might still be good but not because of the plot. But hey, it worked for The Matrix.
- jjoonathan 4y agoYes, that's why I described it as a movie. We have a lot of high-carbon energy substitution to do before DCC makes sense anywhere, let alone in the middle of an ocean, but before people trash DCC too hard I wanted to gently remind everyone that 1: industrial processes work better at scale, and 2: nature gives us magic rocks containing obscene amounts of low-carbon energy, so "inefficient" isn't necessarily a condemnation once we get past the energy substitution phase of decarbonization. I applaud the people working to de-risk the technology today so that when the time is right it can get off the ground.