Clean Jet Fuel Startup Fires Up New Carbon Converter (spokesman.com) 41
Thursday a climate technology startup called Twelve "took a major step toward producing sustainable aviation fuel..." reports Bloomberg, "by launching its commercial-scale carbon transformation unit."
Twelve is among the emerging companies working on ways to transform captured CO2 into useful products. In the case of the Berkeley, California-based startup, its nascent technology will be critical to cleaning up one of the hardest-to-decarbonize sectors: aviation. Twelve uses a technique called electrolysis that uses electricity to repurpose carbon dioxide and water into various products. When the electricity is generated from renewables, the process is essentially no-carbon. The company's CO2 electrochemical reactor — called OPUS — will be at the center of its first commercial production plant for sustainable aviation fuel, under construction in Moses Lake and set to be completed this year. The plant will run on hydropower and use CO2 captured from a nearby ethanol plant. That CO2 and water will be fed through OPUS and turned into synthetic gas, the basis of sustainable aviation fuel.
Twelve's airline customers can blend it with traditional jet fuel. The resulting carbon credit can be bought by corporate customers like Microsoft to offset their business travel-related emissions...
Although Twelve's carbon transformation technology can be used to make products ranging from spandex pants to car parts, it pivoted to focus more fully on sustainable aviation fuel after the announcement of tax credits for SAF blending, carbon capture and utilization, and hydrogen production, said Twelve co-founder and Chief Science Officer Etosha Cave. Those tax credits helped the company launch this commercial unit. "Without that, we would not be competitive in terms of being able to get to market at the stage we're at," Cave said.
It's still not cost competitive with traditional jet fuel, the article points out, "but airlines are under increasing pressure from governments and their own net zero commitments to integrate SAF into their fuel mix.
"Twelve would not disclose its cost to make the fuel, though it said it expects prices to go down as its technology scales up and eventually reach parity with traditional jet fuel."
Twelve's airline customers can blend it with traditional jet fuel. The resulting carbon credit can be bought by corporate customers like Microsoft to offset their business travel-related emissions...
Although Twelve's carbon transformation technology can be used to make products ranging from spandex pants to car parts, it pivoted to focus more fully on sustainable aviation fuel after the announcement of tax credits for SAF blending, carbon capture and utilization, and hydrogen production, said Twelve co-founder and Chief Science Officer Etosha Cave. Those tax credits helped the company launch this commercial unit. "Without that, we would not be competitive in terms of being able to get to market at the stage we're at," Cave said.
It's still not cost competitive with traditional jet fuel, the article points out, "but airlines are under increasing pressure from governments and their own net zero commitments to integrate SAF into their fuel mix.
"Twelve would not disclose its cost to make the fuel, though it said it expects prices to go down as its technology scales up and eventually reach parity with traditional jet fuel."
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One way to make clean jet fuel, which at least satisfies carbon neutral requirements to address climate change. First one must extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Which can be done on an industrial scale through costly means such as fractional distillation or pressure swing adsorption. Or through a cheaper but unproven at industrial scale method of taking waste material from agriculture, such as corn or wheat stalks and leaves, as well as chaff and cob from the later stages of processing. You can co
CO2 captured from a nearby ethanol plant (Score:5, Informative)
which inefficiently uses lots of energy to make a product that exists to keep the corn farmers happy
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It's just a prototype, they could get a lot of CO2 from many sources.
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You can collect the farmer's plant waste and process that. Instead of processing the food part of the agriculture, which always seemed like a huge waste to me.
I also wouldn't want to handle ethanol or use it as jet fuel. But there is definitely a big push for ethanol-to-jetfuel. I don't think it can scale, and once you have ethanol that's already valuable, so why process it further to sell as jet fuel when that's generally not going to be worth nearly as much. Except of course if you can convince the govern
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which inefficiently uses lots of energy to make a product that exists to keep the corn farmers happy
Right. They missed step zero: close the ethanol plant.
The rest of the plan seems interesting. I actually like the sanity of capturing carbon at a power plant, where it's relatively concentrated, rather than from the open air. I think there's going to be use cases for liquid fuels and combustion engines for quite some time. If you want to get to net zero, this might be a good process. The devil is in the details, of course, and price will be one of those important details.
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Here's the rub: turning the combustion end products (CO2 and H2O) back into hydrocarbons takes more energy than burning the fuel produced, especially if you burn it to run a heat engine.
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which inefficiently uses lots of energy to make a product that exists to keep the corn farmers happy
Perhaps the farmers should reduce their consumption of Ethanol.
Why electrolysis? (Score:1)
There must be a dozen more efficient ways to get hydrogen from water than electrolysis, so why choose that for synthesizing hydrocarbons?
I guess electrolysis is easy enough to do that this is the cheapest way to get started, though they pay for it later in energy costs. Other systems will require some unique chemicals, heat than just electricity to provide energy to the process, and perhaps some expertise that might not be readily available.
Synthesizing aviation fuel from CO2 and hydrogen has been somethin
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There must be a dozen more efficient ways to get hydrogen from water than electrolysis, so why choose that for synthesizing hydrocarbons?
Please list some.
Fundamentally, splitting water molecules takes a lot of energy and naively splitting pure water is inefficient, but there are ways to mitigate that, and in practice efficiency of around 75% can be achieved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I presume the combination of hydrogen and CO2 results in something a bit easier to handle and store than pure hydrogen, but the process must require additional energy.
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Please list some.
There's a few options listed on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
One that appears promising is the sulfur-iodine cycle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I presume the combination of hydrogen and CO2 results in something a bit easier to handle and store than pure hydrogen, but the process must require additional energy.
It is a process that requires additional energy. It is also a process that doesn't require the hydrogen be split off from the water before being added to the system.
The reason natural gas is called "natural" is because before people figured out how to drill for it an pipe it to homes and businesses there was synthesis gas, or syngas. https:// [wikipedia.org]
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The only process suitable at an industrial scale to split water into hydrogen is electrolysis. There are lots of interesting ways that are very useful in a laboratory setting but are not developed at an industrial scale.
Of course, the cheapest and most scalable way to get hydrogen is to split methane (natural or syngas), but that's not very green.
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This makes a lot of sense, but only if there is a lot of extra power that would otherwise be wasted and there are not more efficient ways to store it long term. Fortunately, that is an issue solar power faces.
Subsidies... (Score:4, Interesting)
So, aside from the fact that this is a first roll-out of a new technology that needs some time to mature, of course it's not competitive right now; the other guys are getting a $2.5 million subsidy every minute .
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receives over $1.3 Trillion in direct subsidies each year... ... That's before you add the unpaid environmental costs, estimated to be in excess of $5B annually, that the fossil fuel industry manages to externalise (i.e. get the rest of us to pay for).
If these numbers are true, then it just emphasizes how much of a distraction the environmental argument really is.
Why would I focus on $5B of externalized and socialized costs compared to $1.3T of externalized and socialized costs? To put it another way, when framed as you have, the environmental impact is shown to be negligible.
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Fossil fuels are only the cheapest option because even having the largest market share they get 1.5T in subsidies every year. So in addition to having the very obvious environmental impacts, we're also paying 1.5T per year for that extra impact.
Versus investing in and subsidizing at a far far lower rate, renewables.
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Why would I focus on $5B of externalized and socialized costs compared to $1.3T of externalized and socialized costs?
Sorry, that was a typo. The IMF data that I linked to puts the externalised environmental cost at $5 trillion, not billion. My bad.
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The GP switched a B for a T in that $5B. It's 5 trillion dollars of externalized environmental costs.
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Hydro power can be started or stopped within seconds in some cases, and minutes in others, so it can definitely do load following or even peaking.
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Big fart noise (Score:3)
No numbers on how much energy the process uses, no cost of production or cost of sale, no process efficiency claims.
Look I want this stuff to work, I think synthetic fuels absolutely have a place but if this is just another situation like ethanol where we play a game that actually increases total emissions in some ways just for companies to play a carbon credit shell game, well, gonna need a little more than that to convince me.
Even the fact this is using hydropower is a deception, hydropower as i understand is pretty fixed and pretty always the first option for electricity to be used on a grid so there is only so much of it. If this was using natural gas as it's power source would we look at it and say "end result is may as well just continue burning kerosene"
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The point is that you can use electricity. That electricity can come from whatever's convenient. Excess capacity from wind and solar, for example.
Synthesizing hydrocarbon fuel from CO2 and hydrogen isn't terribly difficult. A bunch of different people have been doing it for years, including the US Navy. It's an engineering problem making it efficient enough to be competitive. The current state of the art of working plants seems to be about twice the cost of regular fuel, which is probably not viable for aut
Re:Big fart noise (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah I get that, I absolutely want projects like this to continue researching but it seems like almost all of them for the last couple decades, all the way back to mid aughts when cellulosic biodiesel was all the rage run into the same scaling issue, you need electricity, a lot more than the energy you get out of the fuel. This is a lossy process and we aren't hearing about how lossy it is when that's the most important part.
I could convinced a bit more if there was currently enough excess renewable demand and this plant is only running off the excess to make this viable but to me anytime they are running off the grid when there is power in demand feel like the electricity is better off used elsewhere because any gaps are at the end of the day made up by burning gas.
Just feels a bit of cart-before-the-horse to me when we haven't finished cleaning up the grid yet, air travel feels a bit low on the priority list, it will remain under 5% of emissions for awhile even as its growing.
One of the reasons I strongly support nuclear power is it has the potential to make these alternative fuel systems totally feasible, you can even imagine a "refinery" just being a fuel conversion factory strapped to it's own nuclear power source.
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This is why aviation is a good application. There is currently no reasonable alternative to hydrocarbon fuel for aviation, except maybe ammonia for short haul, which you also have to synthesize. So if you don't want to use oil you dug out of the ground, you have to make the fuel one way or another.
As I said, the cost of making synth
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The current state of the art of working plants seems to be about twice the cost of regular fuel, which is probably not viable for automobiles, but is pretty reasonable for an industry like air travel where there isn't any realistic alternative.
There is a niche of auto enthusiasts for whom this is indeed viable. I have no plan to ever drive a BEV, but I can work with double the price for clean fuel. Otherwise I'll just keep using traditional gasoline even if it is double the price instead.
Unicorn Fart (Score:2)
Might as well use it instead.
Stupid carbon credits again... (Score:2)
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Seems better to just by the blended fuel for Microsoft's 17 jets.
https://www.ncesc.com/how-many... [ncesc.com]
The return of the Carboniferous period? (Score:3)
So let's say humans end up depleting oil, and the only way to get diesel is these machines connected to unlimited power supplies (say... fusion) to start sucking all the carbon out of the atmosphere. Will we get giant bugs as a result? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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It wasn't lower CO2, it was higher O2. If we just suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere, sequester the carbon and release the O2 again... it'll have a negligible effect on atmospheric O2 levels.
In the Carboniferous period, oxygen levels reached about 35% compared to 21% today. It's the extra O2 that made insect circulatory systems efficient enough to support larger body plans.
Having said that... modern insects retain the ability to grow larger if raised in high O2 environments (at least the ones who had it t
Cost parity with the regular stuff? No. (Score:3)
We aren’t gonna get this under control until we a) give up petrochemicals in most industries or b) resort to geoengineering and/or direct carbon capture.
Which means that it’s gonna take us at least a century to make the changes. Stay under the 1.5C limit? It was obvious to me 5 years ago that we were gonna blow by that number like it didn’t even exist.
Scientists and engineers need to be researching geoengineering strategies. We’re gonna need them.
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But itâ(TM)s idiotic to claim that synthetic fuel can be produced at the same cost as simply pumping it out of the massive pools of fermented dinosaur left over from 20 million years ago.
Perhaps they are expecting prices to rise, possibly in the form of carbon taxes they won't have to pay (or will pay less of, anyway, varying depending on how efficient their process is.)
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Yeah, I remember reading some studies saying that if we stopped subsidizing oil and started pushing the externalized costs onto them, IE Charging them for carbon dioxide emissions and everything, gasoline would be over $10/gallon, here in the USA, and we can do "green" fuels for around $8.
That's before considering that EVs can have a lower per-mile cost TODAY against the subsidized fossil fuels, and really, the only thing holding EVs back at the moment is manufacturing ability. Well, that and the tradition
I have an idea (Score:2)
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"Clean" .... Not even remotely clean .... (Score:2)
They are using electricity to make jet fuel rather than pumping it out of the ground and refining it ... it's wildly inefficient and injects just as much CO2 into the atmosphere as ordinary jet fuel ...
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You're pro