Audi Creates "Fuel of the Future" Using Just Carbon Dioxide and Water 486
EwanPalmer writes: German car manufacturer Audi says it has created the "fuel of the future" made solely from water, carbon dioxide and renewable sources. The synthetic "e-diesel" was made following a commissioning phase of just four months at a plant in Dresden, Germany. Germany's federal minister of education and research, Dr Johanna Wanka, said she has already used the fuel in her Audi A8, and the company hopes to produce at least 160 liters of the crystal clear fuel every day in the coming months. "This synthetic diesel, made using CO2, is a huge success for our sustainability research," Wanka said. "If we can make widespread use of CO2 as a raw material, we will make a crucial contribution to climate protection and the efficient use of resources, and put the fundamentals of the 'green economy' in place."
With the best will in the world... (Score:5, Insightful)
...renewables are going to have their work cut out for themselves just supplying a majority percentage of the power for national electricty grids. I'm not sure where they think the extra renewable power to do this will come from.
Now if they plugged the process into a nuclear power plant OTOH...
Of course the big question is how efficient is the process? Is it more efficient than just using the electricity to charge up batteries in an electric car for example?
Re:With the best will in the world... (Score:5, Interesting)
You're right that we don't have enough renewable energy yet to make this a useful technology. But hopefully that day is coming.
Re synthetic diesel, it's like I've always said: screw the "hydrogen economy", hydrogen is cryogenic, low-density, and difficult to work with. You'd be better off joining those hydrogens to some nice stable carbon atoms to create a storable, pumpable, relatively safe room-temperature liquid fuel.
Maybe, maybe not, but I guarantee you it has a higher energy density than batteries, which is super important for vehicle applications.
Re:With the best will in the world... (Score:4, Interesting)
What is the chemical composition of the output I wonder? Looks like the steps are:
1) 2x H2O --> 2 H2 + 1x O2
2) 2x H2 + 1x CO2 --> 1x H2O & ?? (C, O, & H2 are left over)
Re:With the best will in the world... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Is it more efficient than just using the electricity to charge up batteries in an electric car for example"
Think of ships, planes, and remote locations where you must transport fuel like Alaska.
"You're right that we don't have enough renewable energy yet to make this a useful technology. But hopefully that day is coming."
No it will not.
Nuclear is the key to low carbon power. Wind and Solar will help but they do not work well as baseload. Thorium based nuclear and possibly Fusion aka Lockheeds High Beta reactor is what is needed.
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Recent navy research has shown it may be easier to concentrate oceanic C02 than atmospheric, meaning we could eventually retrofit old oil platforms with a nuclear core and fill up tankers with synthetic fuels.
Re:With the best will in the world... (Score:4, Insightful)
We still need nuclear for everything that isn't fungible in time, though.
If we ever have a reasonably efficient way of producing hydrocarbons from CO2 with solar energy, we won't have any need for nuclear power for a long time (and by then we might have working fusion). Just burn the hydrocarbons. Using a fuel cell to directly produce electricity might take off, too, if we have process which makes clean hydrocarbons of desired type. We've got most of infrastructure from giant oil tankers and pipelines to distribution and final storage built up, all we need is a synthesizing technology to take place of drilling, pumping and fraking.
Re:With the best will in the world... (Score:5, Insightful)
There will be another Chernobyl/Fukushima scale nuclear disaster.
Fine by me. Industrial accidents are part of the price we pay for our life of ease. If I have to choose between a 3MI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima spread over 40 years, and a Kingston, Macondo, Valdez, Fergana Valley, Ixtoc, Chevron Richmond - you know, the list of fossil fuel accidents affecting tens of thousands of people is just too long to go through. Nevermind the occasional train derailment and fire.
You design things as best you can against the problems you can think of, and you design mitigation plans against the ones you can't. Every time a new problem comes up, you improve the design. You can not live in a perfectly safe world. If you use electricity, you could shock yourself. If someone produces electricity, they could blow up. If you don't use electricity, a grue might eat you in the dark. Choose your risk, but try to be rational about it. There's nothing inherently worse about the nuclear boogeyman than the coal boogeyman, except that you've been living with the coal boogeyman for 2000 years.
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"....they do not work well as a baseload". Mr.Nuke, please enlighten us with arguments iso fud. Thank you, Family Solar
I think a little phenomenon called the 24-hour day/night cycle of our little planet is all the argument he might need to counter your kindergarten-level rebuttal. Perhaps instead there's something magical about your 'Family Solar' that I've missed that you might like to share with the rest of us?
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I feel the same way. Hydrogen takes a lot of effort to store compared to a compound like diesel or even gasoline which can be stored in a (mostly) unpressurized tank.
TFA has me wondering a number of points:
1: What is the energy density of this fuel compared to diesel or gasoline. Is it as dense as diesel, or is it about half to 3/4 as much, like ethanol?
2: How easy is it to have a fuel cell use it, as opposed to direct combustion?
3: How toxic is it? Ethanol is arguably the least toxic, but one atom aw
Re:With the best will in the world... (Score:4, Informative)
According to Audi's press release, this fuel is "chemically identical" to petroleum based diesel. So that pretty much answers your questions 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 8.
Re:With the best will in the world... (Score:4, Insightful)
5: The Sabatier reaction is over 100 years old. The process itself at factory scale may be encumbered by patents.
7: Nickel, ruthenium on alumina, ruthenium on titanium dioxide, and several others have been tried in the open literature.
Re:With the best will in the world... (Score:4, Informative)
Technically, Diesel is combustible, not flammable; gasoline is flammable.
YMMV
Re:With the best will in the world... (Score:5, Informative)
"Maybe, maybe not"? Please, you know that the answer is "not even remotely close". Even when you start with petroleum as your feedstock and only waste 10-15% of the energy it contains in refining and distribution, you've still got the car only turning 20% of the energy therein into useful kinetic energy (25% in the case of diesels), versus an average of about 85% of the electricty into kinetic energy (minus about 8% transmission losses), plus automatically gaining hybrid-style regen. Even if the process was 100% efficient - which it won't be anywhere even close to that - just the difference in propulsion technolgies would put the EV at 4 times the efficiency. Based on related processes, I'd wager that this tech is probably along the order of 30% efficient, so you're looking at about 13 times more range per kWh on an EV than a ICE car fuelled by this fuel. Which means 1/13th as many square kilometers of wind turbines, 1/13th as many solar panel factories, 1/13th as many dammed rivers, etc. Yes, it really matters.
But come on, don't play dumb and pretend that you actually think that the efficiency of taking electricity, extracting gases from the air, converting them into a mixture of complex hydrocarbons, then burning them in an ICE and facing Carnot losses, is somehow "maybe, maybe not" more efficient than using the electricity directly.
It really, really isn't. Almost everyone on the planet would be driving an EV at today's energy densities if one factor was significantly improved, but that factor isn't energy density. It's cost per kilowatt hour.
A 250Wh/mi EV that can go 400 miles (8 hours driving without a stop at an average speed of 60mph) needs 100kWh. At a reasonably good but not spectacular 200Wh/kg, that's 500kg. Due to electric drivetrains' superior power density, switching a low power gasoline drivetrain to an equivalent electric one saves about 100kg. Switching a high power gasoline drivetrain to electric can save a couple hundred kilograms. So you're increasing the weight of a car by a few hundred kilograms. You really think your average consumer would give a rat's arse if their car is a couple hundred kilometers heavier if it lets them drive on fuel that costs a third as much?
Of course, these are only a couple of the issues (I'll ignore environmental ones for now because I know a lot of people here don't give a rat's arse about them). Added weight hurts handling on cornering. But EVs make better power to weight ratios easier, and especially improve performance on low end torque. They also give designers a lot more flexibility on placement of components, which can translates into things like more spacious interiors for a given vehicle footprint, and almost always means a lower CG. One has to charge, but one never has to go to a gas station, and most people would find plugging in in their garage much more convenient than a special trip to a gas station and standing outside in whatever weather. This leaves open the question of charge times, of course. But if you can drive hundreds of miles on a single charge and charge up on a fast charger during lunch and then take off again, it's pretty irrelevant. Gasoline cars need big tanks to minimize the inconvenience of having to stop for gasoline regularly in your daily life. Using fast chargers of course means having a fast charger infrastructure, but that's an eminently addressable chicken and egg problem. Modern li-ion batteries deal quite well with fast charges.
The short of it is, if today's batteries were cheap enough - no better density or anything else - electric cars would very quickly take over the market place. Other improvements in technology will improve the sales proposition, but they're not essential.
Re:With the best will in the world... (Score:5, Interesting)
Slow down there. You're comparing the complete-cycle efficiency for petroleum to just the end-stage efficiency for electric. That electricity needs to be made somehow. Toss in 40% efficiency for coal plants (we'll leave out pumping/mining and fuel transport costs for now, assuming they're similar for oil and coal), battery charging efficiency of about 75% [futurepundit.com] (discharge efficiency is unspecified, but since the EPA mileage estimates are based on battery capacity it's safe to ignore it), and the 85% motor efficiency you've specified, and suddenly your EV is .4*.75*.85 = 25.5% efficient. Same as a diesel.
This is the big thing a lot of EV proponents miss. Their EV is cheaper to operate not because the EV is more energy-efficient, but because coal is so much cheaper than gasoline. Coal costs about $50 per ton. A ton of coal has approximately 24 GJ of energy. That's about 0.21 cents/MJ. Gasoline costs about $3/gallon, and has about 120 MJ/gallon, or 2.5 cents/MJ. For the same amount of energy, coal is an order of magnitude cheaper than gasoline, which gives the EV a huge advantage in terms of operating costs. This is not a bad thing - being able to transfer a cheaper but traditionally static energy source into use in a mobile application is an economic win. But don't confuse it for better efficiency.
Yes you could argue that we can make electricity from renewables. But the vast majority of the cost of renewables is in the initial production of the turbine or PV panels. Operating costs are nearly nil (limited to maintenance). So for a fair comparison you then need to incorporate production and transport costs. At which point renewables lose because on a per Joule delivered basis, even with coal plants being only 40% efficient, coal is still cheaper than wind and solar power. (Wind is only about twice the costs of coal, so cheaper than gasoline, but I suspect solar would be about the same cost as gasoline.)
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What is the LED version of the vehicle? A replacement for a dead dino burner, but not a pure battery car that has to be recharged.
The perfect replacement is an EV with a better battery (or supercapacitor).
Re:With the best will in the world... (Score:4, Insightful)
The perfect replacement is an EV with a better battery (or supercapacitor).
Get me a battery with 400 miles of range that can be recharged in 5 minutes and I'm all ears.
I just don't think we'll see that in our lifetime, but I'd be happy to be wrong. :)
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Most oil deposits are pre-dino. There's a little dino in some fields, but most are rather less exciting.
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If Tesla could profitably sell the Model S, as it stands now, for $30k without subsidies then they would have a real winner on their hands.
Even $40-50k should work with the feature set it currently has. It's a luxury vehicle right now.
Re:With the best will in the world... (Score:5, Informative)
Saying "Now design a battery that can pull a 440,000 pounds or 200,000 kilograms triple trailer configuration across hundreds of miles of highway. " is silly, that's like saying "Now design a gas tank that can pull a 440,000 pounds or 200,000 kilograms triple trailer configuration across hundreds of miles of highway. " Batteries don't haul loads, electric motors do. And electric motors have far more power per unit mass and per unit volume than gasoline. Here's a comparison [enstroj.si] between a gasoline car engine and an equivalent power electric motor.
The heaviest haul vehicles *do* use electric drive. The vast majority of trains today, for example, are electric drive, and increasingly large haul trucks are switching to electric drive. The electric drive however is generally driven by either diesel generators or direct grid power to save the cost of having to buy batteries. Due to the battery cost, the largest ones out there re things like BYD's 60 foot / 120 passenger jointed bus and several models of 15-30 tonne haul trucks. The economics just aren't there for road trains like you're talking about at this point. It's not a tech issue, it's a battery cost issue.
Supplying the power is easy. Just thinking about it from a practical standpoint. These are batteries that can fast charge in half an hour or so. Discharging is generally easier on batteries than charging. But let's just say half an hour discharge. Li-ions now get up to a couple kilowatts per kilogram, but are only a couple hundred Wh/kg at best in terms of energy density. A road train may require something like 1000hp. That's 750kW electric. Actually less because you get a smoother torque curve, but let's ignore that. That's about 375kg of good li-ion batteries to be able to provide the needed power. Let's double that for poorer batteries, and add a bunch more for inefficiencies... let's go full overkill and say we need 1000kg of batteries to provide the needed power. 1000kg of batteries would hold about 200kWh of electricity. That's only 80 miles of range. Which is way less than you'd practically need for a road train.
That is to say, even with the most pessimistic look at it, even a pathetically under-ranged road train would have way more power than needed to run its engine. The more batteries you add, the more power becomes available. Power density is essentially a non-issue when dealing with li-ions.
Aviation is the highest-hanging fruit, but it's still a fruit that is within reach, and the small-scale electric prop plane market has gone from almost nonexistent to rapidly growing in the past 5 years or so. And there's lots of transitional techs, such as driving the compressor with electricity, which allows you to get rid of the turbine and thus increasing engine power and efficiency while reducing part count and maintenance.
False. First off, only permanent magnet motors require rare earths. Most modern EVs, like Tesla's offerings, don't use permanent magnets. Secondly, lithium-ion batteries do not use rare earths; I don't know where you got this idea. Lastly, rare earths aren't actually rare. China dumped the market, pushing other producers out of business, and then suddenly started holding back production for domestic uses, creating a temporary glut, but it's already started resolving itself.
This is once again false but I've already lost enough interest in this conversation to have to dig up research papers for you, so I'm just going to tell you "Google It". There've been many studies
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The crawlers that transported the Saturns and shuttles to the launch pads are also electric drive.
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.renewables are going to have their work cut out for themselves just supplying a majority percentage of the power for national electricty grids. I'm not sure where they think the extra renewable power to do this will come from.
No, the biggest problem with wind in particular is that to get reasonable amounts of energy you have to install large overcapacity.
Which leads to the problem of what you do with that energy on a windy day.
Up till now Germany has been selling it to (among others) France, for almost nothing. This is bad for Germany (they get very little money) and bad for France (it makes the nuclear fleet less profitable).
Making synthetic fuel when you have energy to spare could be a pretty smart storage mechanism.
Wonder w
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Up till now Germany has been selling it to (among others) France, for almost nothing.
For example they're currently exporting about 2.5GW to France.
http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/france/ [templar.co.uk]
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And what is France going to do with the remaining 0.29GW?
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Wonder what the efficiency is like though.
I'd assume it will end up somewhat close to Fischer–Tropsch, about 50-60% max efficiency.
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I'd assume it will end up somewhat close to Fischer–Tropsch, about 50-60% max efficiency.
With added losses due to having to extract CO2 from the air, hydrogen from water, and the conversion from CO2 to CO.
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Re:With the best will in the world... (Score:5, Interesting)
Regardless of the efficiency of the process, overgeneration of renewable power is still a huge problem. Germany actually pays its neighbors to take it when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining as the price of electricity between utility companies goes negative.
There are a few things we currently do with excess power, the ideal option is to store it until we need it, such as with compressed air in salt caverns.
In many cases, they dump it as heat into rivers as the storage infrastructure simply doesn't exist. This new option seems to be a great way to sequester carbon and deal with excess power generated through renewables. It also reduces our dependency on oil without having to sell new vehicles to utilize it, which is a very good thing.
One of the main problems with renewables... (Score:2)
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If H2O and CO2 are the only inputs, then I am not sure where your nitrogen is coming from.
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Re:With the best will in the world... (Score:5, Funny)
No, my car has an air filter.
There is this "thing"... (Score:2)
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They say "the company hopes to produce at least 160 liters of the crystal clear fuel every day in the coming months", how many liters of crystal clear fuel do you think we need per day?
Seriously though, if the hardware required to produce this fuel is small enough and cheap enough, would it be possible to be making our fuel at home? At the very least, it means that pumping stations would be able to produce their own fu
Re:With the best will in the world... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:With the best will in the world... (Score:5, Informative)
Diesel Fuel + Oxygen -> CO2 + H2O + Energy
So, I would assume the opposite would be...
CO2 + H2O + Energy -> Diesel Fuel + Oxygen
The reason why diesel engines have problems with NOx emissions is because the high temperatures and pressures in diesel fuel cause the nitrogen in the air to react with oxygen. Nitrogen is not normally a component in diesel fuel.
Along the same lines, cars burning this fuel would probably still have NOx emissions.
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Their diagram shows CO2 + H2O + energy --> H2O + "Blue Crude"
What the heck is in the magic stuff though?!
Re:With the best will in the world... (Score:5, Informative)
The high temperatures and pressures in the combustion chamber cause the nitrogen and oxygen in the air to react with each other to form NOx.
Source: I'm a diesel emissions engineer.
Re:With the best will in the world... (Score:4, Funny)
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You can put in 1MWh of energy in Diesel in about the same time it takes you to put 1kWh of energy into a battery.
(And hoses to carry significant power levels of electricity are huge compared to those for carrying diesel, and a good deal less safe).
Re:With the best will in the world... (Score:4, Informative)
I've noticed most criticisms of EV charging simply relate to a total lack of imagination about how to address engineering issues. For example I've seen people rant and rave and run all sorts of calculations about how it's impossible to run large amounts of power through a manageable cable for an electric car, and therefore fast chargers are a big scam... pure vitriol, and overlooking one tiny detail: ... nobody says that your cable has to be passively cooled.
All of those cable thickness guidelines for home wiring and the like are for passively cooled cables. You don't have to use a cable the thickness of your wrist to deliver a fast charge, you just have to wrap it in a cooling sheath. Some of the highest power chargers already do this. Problem solved really, really easily.
Re:With the best will in the world... (Score:4, Insightful)
What does that have to do with anything? Unless you're actually producing your fuel in the core of the nuclear reactor (in which case it would become radioactive itself, and you'd have a real challenge selling it), you don't care about the reactor temperature. Normally it's going to be Reactor->Electricity->Fuel generating plant.
Though admittedly, if you *could* use the heat from the reactor directly it would probably be considerably more efficient.
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A better plan would be to develop a smart charging car that can adjust its charging rate depending on the amount of excess electricity generation. And when there's a shortage, the car can sell some charge back to the grid.
good luck getting an electric car with a 400+ mile range and recharging in a few minutes
Good luck scaling up the production from 160 liters to 160 million liters per day.
Not impressed - make food with water, CO2 & li (Score:3)
The real question is how much ENERGY does it take to take water, CO2 and make a hydrocarbon.
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It would be even smarter to stop before hydrogen and store the electricity directly in a battery.
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There's surely a future in electric cars
The future for electric cars is closer than the future for synthetic fuel made from air.
Re:Not impressed - make food with water, CO2 & (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a great fuel. It leaks, because the molecules are so small. It causes some metals to go brittle.
You can get round these problems by sticking it to chains of carbon. A convenient side effect of that is it makes it compatible with existing engines & distribution infrastructure .
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Best Solution (Score:5, Funny)
If they could capture the water from the tailpipe, gather the CO2 from the air, and use a windmill on the roof of the car to generate the power to make the fuel, they could DRIVE FOREVER!!!
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In a sufficiently strong crosswind, yes.
(Why do you think we have a grid road system, if not for tacking?)
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Re:Best Solution (Score:5, Funny)
My God man. If you were to do that, you would have a car that not only would drive forever, but it would generate more energy that it used.
Clearly that would cause the car to never be able to stop, and always continue increasing in velocity.
Your vision ends with a world covered in cars that driving all around forever, asymptotically approaching the speed of light.
Is that really the world we want to live in?
Feedback Loop (Score:3)
it would generate more energy that it used...Clearly that would cause the car to never be able to stop, and always continue increasing in velocity.
That is not a problem; you reverse the polarity to the regenerative braking system, and feed the excess power into that to stop. I call it the "degenerative braking system"
Not enough resourcees (Score:2)
Re:Not enough resourcees (Score:5, Insightful)
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There was plenty of CO2 for plants to go around even before humans started burning coal at industrial scales.
This is basically just un-burning coal. And oil. And natural gas.
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And then burning it again. We're not just making barrels of diesel to look at like art - it's going back into a cylinder to be compressed with air until it explodes and blows out the tailpipe again.
Re:Not enough resourcees (Score:5, Insightful)
There isn't enough CO2 in the atmosphere to make this work.
That's okay, because they are unlikely to be taking the CO2 out of the atmosphere anyway. It would be much cheaper and easier to capture and reuse the outputs of an existing CO2 source (e.g. a coal plant) than it would be to suck CO2 out of the ambient air.
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And you're forgetting that once someone uses the diesel, it's CO2 in the atmosphere again.
What, did you figure that Audi was just making diesel to pump back into the ground and forget about?
Re:Not enough resourcees (Score:4, Funny)
What, did you figure that Audi was just making diesel to pump back into the ground and forget about?
Obviously not. They're going to mix it with kerosine, gasoline and bitumen to make synthetic crude. And then they'll pump that back into the ground,
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We're pumping enough CO2 into the air to manufacture a year's worth of fuel every year. We've been doing it for centuries. Direct logic.
Seltzer? (Score:2)
But does this stuff require clean, fresh, potable water? Lots of people are bent out of shape about fresh water shortages.
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Stop drinking my motor vehicle fuel!
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Not in Germany where this "e-diesel" is being made. Water shortages are unheard of here.
Curse you, Entropy! (Score:3)
All well and good, but doesn't exactly solve the problem of greenhouse gas emissions.
The most interesting application of things like this is if they can take advantage of spikes of excess energy availability-- essentially making them a battery.
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All well and good, but doesn't exactly solve the problem of greenhouse gas emissions.
Sure it does; you'd be extracting this carbon out of the air, or from a process stream that would otherwise dump to the atmosphere. Best case you have a net zero carbon emission, worst case you're using the same carbon twice (industrial waste stream to vehicle fuel to emissions) which is still a significant reduction.
Plus it cuts down on other pollutants, eliminates the environmental damage from oil extraction itself, eliminates emissions from the refining process and possibly reduces transport energy costs
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That depends entirely on the source of CO2
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Yes it does. The problem with CO2 as a greenhouse gas is that we're taking carbon that was part of the long-term carbon cycle (i.e., fossil fuels) and making it part of the short-term carbon cycle. In contrast, this process takes carbon that was already part of the short-term carbon cycle and keeping it as part of the short-term carbon cycle. It's "carbon-neutral."
Using synthetic fuels like this (as well as biofuels) won't
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It doesn't completely solve the problem, but it allows for some recycling where there is no solution today.
Pull burned carbon from air > make diesel > burn diesel > go to step 1.
How is this not preferable to:
Drill miles into the ground > inject god-knows-what fracking liquids > extract oil > flare off natural gas found with oil > ship oil to refinery > refine oil > burn diesel > go to step 1.
I don't understand the mentality of "It doesn't solve every aspect of every problem nea
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Sure it does. (Not that one small pilot project solves the problem, I mean if the tech is scaled up.) It's carbon-neutral just like biofuels are, it does not add any net CO2 to the atmosphere: it only puts in what it took out to make the fuel in the first place. (I suppose your could even use it to remove CO2, to get us back to 350ppm via carbon sequestration -- make up a bunch of "blue crude" and then stick it underground
Flash forward 100 years... (Score:2)
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This process is CO2 neutral. As the fuel is burned, the carbon is released back into the atmosphere.
How much energy does it take to produce? (Score:2)
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Very unlikely that this is a practical solution in the given form. Just the electrolysis step alone wastes more energy than the entire windmill to Tesla pathway.
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US Navy has done similar things (Score:3)
Let's put Americas first plant in California! (Score:2)
Hopefully, the exports will be off the charts. California needs the economic growth.
Another rubbish article...its just syngas (Score:2)
So, the have re-discovered syngas: brilliant!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... [wikipedia.org]
Apart from the amusing name of the minister, no much to see here
Fnarr fnarr (Score:2)
Is the production process automated, or is it a hand job? [urbandictionary.com].
Expensive ingedient? (Score:2, Funny)
From the article:
The clear fuel is made form juts water, air and renewable energy
I wonder what "form juts water" is and how much does it cost. It's probably quite uncommon.
It Runs on Water Man! (Score:2)
Based on the /. headline... (Score:2)
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Since burning the fuel returns it back into CO2 and H2O, the amount of energy in the various bonds is irrelevant. All the energy you put in will come out again.
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Soda (Score:5, Funny)
Shoot, now there will be a CO2 shortage and my soda will be flat.
"Need more info" (Score:2)
And how much energy does it take to create this fuel? How much does it cost?
Would a tank full of it allow the car to travel a comparable distance and speed as a similar-sized tank full of gasoline or diesel fuel?
Unless it is or can be economically comparable to CURRENT costs, its useless.
Didn't the US Navy just announce a similar process (Score:2)
I recall reading the USN had also created fuel using seawater by extracting H2 and CO2 from seawater and turning it into fuel via a catalyst, is this the same thing?
Re:So they've invented the plant? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So they've invented the plant? (Score:5, Interesting)
In their case, they're using intermittent power, from wind and solar, to do a modified Sabatier reaction [wikipedia.org] and make methanol, which then goes into an integrated Fischer-Tropsch process to make longer-chain hydrocarbons.
The resulting solar -> fuel conversion efficiency is HIGHER than going through biomass production.
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Remember hydrogen cars? They even built a hydrogen gas station near where I live. Cool right?... not really... basically no cars use it, the station is not economical, and I believe they may have only built one of these fucking things on the entire planet.
There's a handful of them on the left coast, and they're putting in another handful on the right coast. Statistically nobody in the middle of the country buys interesting vehicles anyway. Toyota is about to start selling a FCV finally, and they're licensing their fuel cell to BMW and it will probably make it into an i5 in a year or two.
The real problem with hydrogen is that it is horribly annoying at best. It's just dumb on every level.
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Nuke can run cogen with this as it's high temp electrolysis aka you can use the waste heat.
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To make the fuel, the following reaction occurs:
H2O + CO2 + energy -> synthetic diesel
Then, when burning the fuel, this reaction occurs:
synthetic diesel + air (O2, N2, etc.) -> energy + CO2 + H2O + normal diesel pollutants (soot, CO, NOx, etc.)
The advantages over regular diesel are that the carbon started in the atmosphere instead of the ground, so putting it in the atmosphere isn't a problem, and that (unlike dino-diesel) this fuel isn't contaminated with sulfur, so there isn't any SO2 produced.
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Efficient energy storage, though, is a massive barrier to using renewable energy sources. Creating energy from renewable sources is comparatively easy compared to the task of storing it and transporting it. You can have all of the wind farms and solar cells you like but you need storage to cope with those times where the weather isn't playing ball.
If this yields, even in the long term, efficient storage then it's a gateway technology to the useful deployment of renewables. Of course - that efficiency wil
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However, a diesel engine may not be standard type of engine of the future. Multiple companies are retrofitt
WTF? It's Methanol (Score:3)
CO2 + Water + electrolysis = Methanol.
This has been known forever. It is clear and burns extremely cleanly. It is not diesel or clean diesel; however, getting a diesel engine running on it is probably child's play and a flex fuel car is also probably easy (but a poor choice since diesel engines are superior.)
Without a monopoly at the gas station, you'd have had these choices for a long time and they'd be undercutting gas for decades... Maybe we'd have cars that wouldn't fall apart if we converted them! Th