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Scientists Recycle CO2 with Sunlight to Make Fuel
An anonymous reader brings us this article from Wired about a new method to produce fuel with the help of concentrated sunlight and carbon dioxide. The process "reverses" combustion, breaking down the CO2 into carbon monoxide, which is then used as a building block for hydrocarbons. Quoting:
"The Sandia team envisions a day when CR5s are installed in large numbers at coal-fired power plants. Each of them could reclaim 45 pounds of carbon dioxide from the air daily and produce enough carbon monoxide to make 2.5 gallons of fuel. Coupling the CR5 with CO2 reclamation and sequestration technology, which several scientists already are pursuing, could make liquid hydrocarbons a renewable fuel."
a great invention!
My other
My grandfather used to be an employee in a biotechnology venture in the 30's. It was a two stage process. The first was a corn - or sometimes a potato - plant. The second was a still. ( He was a tinsmith. ) The input was CO2 and sunlight, the output was ethanol.
Here is a link for more technical information on how this works http://www.greencarcongress.com/2007/12/sandia-applying.html
dammit, edited out my *cough*'s (don't use html-style next time)
My other
This sounds a lot like vaporware, in both senses of the word.
2.5 gallons of fuel produced per plant, per day? It's nice that it might scrub pollutants but it seems the solar energy could be more profitably used to directly produce electricity.
aint that like recycling dung from a big white elephant in a room?
It doesn't make sense to me: first you burn coal, which basically creates energy by oxidizing carbon and creating CO2; then you use solar energy to undo that and turn the CO2 back into CO. Wouldn't it make more sense to make electricity directly from the solar energy and not involve the coal at all? Besides which, if the CO is later used as fuel as they say, then eventually you're going to oxidize that anyway and create the same CO2 you would have in the first place. It seems like a very roundabout way to add solar energy into the mix.
i think plants have been doing this for millions of years
Even a small leak at this plant can kill many workers or even people in a nearby town without them even realizing they should run away for safety. I don't see CO being a practical fuel in any setting, and if you burn it you stop being carbon-neutral. They should just stick with generating hydrogen or electricity.
So long as any of the carbon in the cycle is coming from sources currently in the ground or oceans (e.g. coal, oil, natural gas, or methane clathrates). I.e. we are harvesting energy by oxidizing previously reduced carbon -- it is NOT RENEWABLE or SUSTAINABLE!
The only cycles which potentially work over the long term are: (a) solar; (b) fusion reactors; (c) breeder reactors; (d) thorium fuel cycle reactors. That is probably in decreasing order of length of time we could sustain our civilization off of those sources (your opinions may differ).
The coal power plant output conversion of CO2 to liquid fuels simply shifts the problem from an CO2 source one can easily sequester (coal plant smokestacks) to one which is much less easy to sequester (automobile exhausts). You have a fundamental problem here which is when are we going to incorporate the cost of "full sustainability" into our energy costs? That means any carbon you put into the atmosphere you pay to take back out of the atmosphere. Ideally you do more than that to reduce atomospheric CO2 levels back to pre-industrial levels [1], i.e. you are taking more CO2 out of the atmosphere than you are putting into it. We are currently very far from being able to do that.
So long as we continue to live off of the reduced carbon sources (stored solar energy harvested by plants hundreds of millions of years ago) and don't fully pay for them we have a real problem.
Robert
1. Or humanity makes a decision to allow the glaciers and icecaps to melt, the sea levels rise a bit, some islands and low lying areas get flooded, weather patterns to change a bit *and* spends the money necessary to mitigate the negative effects of these processes.
There are lots of ways to put energy in a liquid that can move a car. The problem has been that they are not cheap. But since oil is no longer cheap, and associated from people who want to do us harm, the disincentive for alternative fuels is rapidly fading. Get ready to see gas from corn, grass, algae, recycled food, recycled plastics, and now CO2.
All it adds up to is getting a bit more energy out of the coal.
In the middle of the process there's a small C02 -> CO ->CO2 stage.
Probably better to use all those mirrors to heat some water and drive a turbine.
No sig today...
45 pounds of carbon dioxide.... but out of how many?
sounds to me like they should just filter the carbon dioxide out and sell it to soda companies, and the rest send to mars. (ok, i know i'm going to get flamed for that. it was just a joke.)
really though, it would be great if we could get an economically feasible way to get CO2 from our cars and smokestacks to mars without burning more of the stuff or letting it get away from the planet's gravitational pull.
Those of us who think they know everything annoy those of us who do.
Instead of attempting to make hydrocarbon based fuels the article toots about, crack CO down even further using an Old School catalytic cracker containing platinum, breaking CO into the base components of ultra-pure carbon (graphite) and high levels of oxygen.
Now I'd release the oxygen since atomic oxygen is the most corrosive element on the table, recover the graphite and sell it off.'
This would give the high polluting coke refineries something to grieve about since this would put a ding in their profits.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Seems to be a couple years old though, this page (second story down) which includes the same photo is dated feb 2006, and includes a much better description of how it works, including how they use alternate direction rotation rings for heat conservation within the drum, although it looks like they've more recently been trying it with CO2 instead of H20. This page contains more info and diagram of the counter rotating drum. Very interesting stuff though.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Once oil is gone from drilling reserves, it's gone. It takes a very long time for oil to form. We're talking about a scale in the millions of years! Not exactly renewable.
I'll probably get flamed for this, but isn't one of the big issues with solar and wind the inability to store large amounts of energy for use in the grid? it would seem that a system like this would allow the fuel that it produces to be stored for a long period of time and used as needed. It doesn't seem like a lot of fuel at first (2.5 gallons a day???) but as with all technologies, it's in its infancy and will only get better with time. Give it some time, and I'd be surprised if we're all not still driving ICE vehicles, but the Greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere (even regionally smoggy areas could become the new 'oil wells' for this type of technology) have been drawn down to pre-industrial levels. This is the first time i've heard of man attempting to use engineering to reverse the process.
Please note that this post does not mean I'm against conservation or utilization of every possible technology to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. I'm a big renewables fan.
NASA wanted a pen that would work in zero G; spent millions on RnD
The russians used a pencil
much more productive to focus on using less energy in the 1st place, in terms of energy saved/research dollar
these tech fixes are really obscuring the problem: our basic life style is not good. the govt should stop building highways, put money and tax incentives to get homes and jobs at mass transit accessible sites; just getting one or two million people out of suburbs into nyc lifesytles would do more for the enviroment then a million years of Rnd
Scientists Recycle CO2 with Sunlight to Make Fuel
... all this thing does right now is produce carbon monoxide.
They're leaving the production of actual liquid fuel to other people
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Or you could use solar energy directly (photovoltaics or solar thermal) to generate electricity and not use as much coal decreasing Carbon dioxide emissions that way. Instead they generate electricity using coal, then use solar energy to convert the CO2 back, which is dumb because each processing step has inefficiencies associated with it and adds unneeded complexity to the system.
In the best case it takes as much energy to break the CO2 bonds as you get from generating the CO2, in reality it will take much more.
Veramocor
http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp
Claim: NASA spent millions of dollars developing an "astronaut pen" which would work in outer space while the Soviets solved the same problem by simply using pencils.
Status: False.
At the short term, it seems to make coal based energy production more efficient. That is significant, no matter what your long time goals are, coal is going to be a very important source of energy for the next many years.
At the long term, they hope to develop the technology further so it can extract the CO2 needed directly from the atmosphere, and then it will be a renewable if successful.
A problem with the energy and climate discussion is the idea that we should have one solution to all our needs. Short of a dramatic breakthrough in fusion, I don't see that happen.
We are going to see an increase in renewable energy. Different kinds in different places, there are good reasons why "wind" is more relevant than "solar" in my country (Denmark), and why "water" is dominating in Sweden. Fission to ought get a renaissance. Use of fossil sources should decrease. if nothing else then for economic and geopolitical reasons. Biofuel will hopefully not be significant, until we get global population growth under control. There is a huge potential in efficiency, just proper isolation would make US consumption much closer to other industrialized countries.
And we are going to have to adapt to a changing climate, that is a given.
Is this basically the same process used in wood gasification? In a wood gasifier, wood turns to charcoal, to CO2 then to CO. This seems to be the same thing but using the sun as the heat source instead of hot burning charcoal.
http://www.windmeadow.com/
Gee, so, given that coal powerplants in the USA alone produce 1.8 millon metric tons of CO2 per year, we would need 11 million of these devices installed in the US to make American coal power carbon neutral.
Maybe this should help everyone realize just what a bad, bad idea coal power really is, especially when we have much better alternatives.
Photovoltaics are great, and biofuel is nice, but why not just directly generate fuel from sunlight? I haven't heard of the particular technique the Sandia guys are using.
The technique most people are using is based on titanium dioxide catalysis in UV light. Japan is crazy for this stuff. It oxidizes pollution, makes it easier to clean buildings and windows and breaks water into oxygen and hydrogen (it's also in paint and sunscreen). It also can convert (reduce) CO2 into alcohols or methane in the right kind of atmospheric conditions, unfortunately not our atmospheric conditions. For the last 10 years or so, a few people have been looking at new crystal structures and dopants to enhance its efficiency, sunlight adsorption and reductive properties.
A big guy in this field is Masakazu Anpo, I think his papers describe all of the above.
While this kind of technology gets going, you're going to see a lot of press releases talking about reducing emissions and increasing efficiency of fossil fuels, but the end goal is to replace fossil fuels.
Church of Global Warming's worst nightmare.
Convert CO2 to fuel with sunlight. We've had that for years. They're called plants.
Have gnu, will travel.
However, creating a powerful and efficient solar power system to get the cobalt ferrite hot enough remains a major hurdle in implementing the technology on a large scale, said Aldo Steinfeld, head of the Solar Technology Laboratory at the Paul Scherrer Institut in Switzerland, in an e-mail.
Using solar power to generate the heat introduces a lot of practical problems to overcome such as space for the solar reflectors, dependence on time of day and weather and other issues. It seems that a compact nuclear reactor could easily generate the 2600 degrees Fahrenheit required to heat cobalt ferrite rings and excess heat used to turn steam turbines to generate even more electricity. In essence it would be a coal/nuclear hybrid plant.
One of the BIG problems I always imagine when I think about the entire economy becoming electric is that of aircraft. I have a hard time conceiving of an airplane that operates on an electric motor. One possible solution is to phase out aircraft in favour of fast, electric trains. This technology, if it works as claimed, could provide another solution. Even if the amount of infrastructure necessary to satisfy all of our energy needs with reclaimed CO2 would be too cumbersome, it might be feasible to use this technology to satisfy the energy needs of those process that really are best served by hydrocarbon fuels.
Virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea
If it's really a heat engine, then it might be powered better by something other than sunlight. Sunlight does offer an average (across night/season/weather/latitude) of about 400W:m^2 in North America, but this machine will consume quite a lot of energy to produce and maintain, while consuming area that could deliver more energy in direct power from the sunlight than what it stores in "reformed CO2". Which either way means displacing petrofuel with sunlight, but likely more petrofuel is replaced net with direct solar power (or even biomass, the most scalable solar power).
However, much of the inefficiency of solar power generation is lost as heat. If this system could capture more of that wasted heat as power, then it could sit under the direct solar generators, improving their efficiency. Since direct solar power now operates at up to 45% efficiency (concentrated by cheap reflectors), capturing even half of the wasted heat could represent a huge boost to the solar process.
Again, the power investment in the heat engine must be considered against the net energy budget. But maybe it performs even better on chemical reactions that aren't CO2 -> CO -> fuel. Even just cracking the CO2 down to carbon solids and O2 could be a more efficient net result. Or some totally different chemical process currently powered by petrofuels which can be made much more efficient by capturing some waste heat (of which industry produces quite a great amount as other hard-to-manage pollution).
But then, there's another application for heat engines that's probably even better than any of those. Perhaps geothermal power can be more efficiently tapped with better heat engines than the traditional. Geothermal sources typically don't need high efficiency, because they're such large amounts of original power ("the interior heat of the Earth"). But there are places with meager geothermal recoverability that might be feasible if there were more efficient transduction tech.
No matter what, research into converting heat into more usable power sources is extremely worthwhile. This is exactly the kind of basic research for which I'm glad to pay taxes that support Sandia and other National Labs like it.
--
make install -not war
The article says that the process doesn't actually produce fuel. It breaks down carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide and oxygen. This is nice but carbon monoxide is still a green house gas and without a way to actually convert carbon monoxide into fuel, whats the point?
Property is theft.
I feel like I should point out that this does not remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
Fuel made by this, when burned, releases the CO2 back into the atmosphere. I suppose the only reason they talk about doing it on coal plants is because the concentration of CO2 is higher where it's being used. However, as usual there's no way that the energy input is equal to the energy in the fuel, so what is the point? If you put that solar electricity on the grid, you need to burn that much less *actual* oil, so you have no energy loss at all...
NASA wanted a pen that would work in zero G; spent millions on RnD
Coming up with a pressurized ball-point mine and optimizing it to make it feasable and 'certified for flight' costed only about 100.000$. Paying the team, building the prototypes, testing them NASA-style, building the tools and rigging a new assembly line for something like that costs that much. Fairly cheap considering they ditched the ball-point pens biggest downside: Unable to write overhead, under water or - as the case may be - in zero gravity. I only use pressurized ball-points and must say, comparing them to regular ones: The effort was worth it.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
How about: ``photosynthesis''. From the Greek root meaning light, plus synthesis: making up larger hydrocarbons from smaller units.
Whaddya guys think?
It's called a tree.
Brett
I am working on a similar process that synthesizes hydrocarbon fuels from carbon dioxide, water, and non-fossil energy (could be solar) and should eventually have some publications out about this. There are several ways to go about this. But first, let me comment on some of the comments:
... all this thing does right now is produce carbon monoxide." comment, reducing CO2 to CO is the hardest part of the process. Once you have concentrated CO, you can follow the coal-to-liquids processes and water-gas shift (CO + H2O => CO2 + H2) to get hydrogen and run the syngas (CO + H2 mixture) into Fischer-Tropsch reactors. They've been doing this for 50 years in South Africa to produce synthetic diesel.
Regarding the "They're leaving the production of actual liquid fuel to other people
Regarding the "Renewable not!" comment and using power-plant flue gas CO2 as the input to this process, this would indeed not be sustainable. However, if industrial capture of CO2 from the air is available, one can fully close the loop and have a sustainable hydrocarbon fuel cycle. Flue gas CO2 could be a good option in the short term, however. For instance, if solar and other nearly-carbon-free energy sources begin to rapidly take over, coal plants will not immediately be shut down. Other CO2-emitting industrial plants such as aluminum smelters, etc, will also have CO2 emissions to deal with, and this form of using it to store non-fossil energy by recycling it once as a liquid fuel would be worthwhile. One comment discussed this transition well.
Related, other comments say "why not just use the solar energy to produce electricity". These intermittent resources need storage, and liquid fuel storage is not a bad method (and very versatile). Others responded about storage.
So, processes like this are a way to store non-fossil energy as a convenient energy-dense fuel which can be used in our existing petroleum fuel infrastructure and vehicles (as opposed to hydrogen and batteries). Biofuels can do the same, and there are many comments above ("I saw something like this... it's called a tree") mentioning biofuels and how this process replicates it with much more complexity; indeed you could call this whole process including the Fischer-Tropsch fuel synthesis "artificial photosynthesis". However, this process cuts out the middle-man of the plant in biofuels processes, which has much lower sunlight-to-fuel efficiency than industrial solar collectors (PV or thermal) and requires a lot of fertilizers and pesticides to boost growth rate. Such land- and resource-intensive agriculture is not sustainable in its current form and may not ever be on the scale we will need it.
TFA discusses a solar-heat-driven thermochemical process that has potential. A somewhat similar solar-heat thermolytic process splits CO2 directly at higher temperatures. There are many other methods of accomplishing this that are at different levels of development and being researched, including electrochemical (pdf link1, pdf link2), photoelectrochemical, photo(bio)chemical...
lets hypothesize that it takes x units of energy and pollution to live in an auto dominated suburb and x in nyc
what right do you have to cause extra pollution ?
OK, if you want to do it, you should pay, fully, the cost
it is not that I am against technological improvemtn, it is that i am against ti when it is not necessary: the problem is not technology;' the problem is people who think it is ok to drive a hummer 10 miles to get a coke. the probelm is people who think it is ok to live in a 4,000 sq foot house and have a ski lodge
what right do you have to trash the world ?
Maytee. Thar be garlons in those pumps and rings...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Some places actually use pump storage to help correct the power factor at night. Very few motors are running at night but a lot of lights, so it's the best time for a electricity generator to run some large motors and the water gets let down later during the peak. Base load is usually not a problem, there's normally a vast excess at night if you have a lot of thermal plants - peaks are the problem.
the article says 88 square meters per 2.5 gallon/day - 45 pound of CO2 elimination thermal reactor.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Actually, converting CO2 to fuel and oxygen is done with 19th century chemisty and is a very practical way to bring a spacecraft home from Mars (which has an atmosphere that is 95 percent CO2). it's practical to take 500 days of power and convert it into a form that can burn in under 10 minutes to send a craft home from Mars.
On earth, roles where you need to concentrate power in a carbon-neutral way also exist. But it's not the routine. It's not for homes or cars.
There are tons of awesome technologies relating to "green" energy. The only problem is they usually spend more energy on creating fuel than the fuel itself provides.
Sounds like a typical Alberta well.
Ah yes, but this new methods emits poisonous carbon monoxide insteads of oxygen. The legal team are looking at sending cease and desist letters to infringing forests.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
It is easier...but doesn't help transportation very much. And growing plants is a very inefficient way to gather solar energy for transportation.
Using sunlight to turn CO2 into fuel? Haven't plants been doing that for thousands of years now? I am not a chemist, but I always thought it would be more convenient to mimic the way that plants chemically harvest solar power and turn it into usable energy, instead of the mechanical / electrical ways they're doing it now.
Gasification of wood is achieved via partial combustion. Instead of the wood burning completely to produce H2O and CO2 as it would under ideal circumstances, the amount of oxygen is limited so that the hydrocarbons composing the wood are instead only partially oxidized, producing appreciable amounts of CO and H2, along with an unavoidable amount of H2O and CO2. The CO and H2 are the products which can be oxidized at a later time in a more convenient fashion than by burning wood, or used to produce intermediate hydrocarbons such as liquid fuels. Ultimately, the process of gasification and combustion always entails the oxidation of complex hydrocarbons and some mixture of H2O and CO2 are the end result.
This process, however, is the reverse of oxidation. It is the reduction of CO2 to produce CO and O2, which, for any technology besides the humble plant, is quite a difficult feat. To do so requires a substantial energy input, in this case in the form of thermal energy from solar concentrators.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
It doesn't need a scientist to do that!
Plants do it, naturally, every day of their lives.
Is this yet another pork-barrel activity?
I'm interested in ways to produce carbon monoxide to feed the Fischer-Tropsch reaction but I'm not sure that you get away from the need to produce hydrogen. If they gave up on hydrogen, then perhaps they are running into inefficiencies. The temperatures they want for the solar furnace seems high. One can get part of the way to methanol using the Sabatier reaction and skip the formation of carbon monoxide: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction. So, I'd expect that this will be more common since hydrolysis can be pretty efficient.
I think that pulling cabon dioxide directly from the atmosphere makes sense in some applications: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/12/jet-fuel.html
Christopher,
Nice post. Something I've been thinking about is what is our irreducible need for liquid fuels and I think that it really comes down to aviation. Because of this, I'm looking in the direction of using the waste heat from Fischer-Tropsch for home heating and producing aviation fuel using renewable energy in the home and resuing the current oil/gas delivery system to collect the fuel for delivery to airports. The scale of energy use is similar between home heating and aviation. I've given an outline using zeolite to capture CO2 as a feedstock but I'd be happy to hear from you or Klaus about the potential for using the GRT method in this application. The outline is here: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/12/jet-fuel.html
I seem to recall that "photosynthesis" is already taken. I think "photosynthesis" refers to some obscure and unimportant process in biology, so for a lay-person it might not matter, but still it's best to avoid confusion and invent a new name for this new synthesis process.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
Since one of the drawbacks to wind power is variability, would there be any advantage to using electrical heating in place of solar for these CO (or H2) generators? Maybe to smooth out electrical production peaks? I've heard of electrolysis being proposed as a way of collecting and storing wind power, but would this be competitive?
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Run the coal plants with insufficient oxygen and you will get plenty of carbon monoxide.
They can reclaim what? 2.5 gallons of fuel a day from an entire coal plant?
Reclaim 45 lbs of CO2 per day? Isn't that like 0.00001% of the output per day per plant?
Looking it up on line (http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/CGD_Ranks_CO2_Emissions_From_Power_Plants_Worldwide_999.html), 8000 US plants produce 2.8 billion tons of CO2 a year, that makes an average output of CO2 by a coal plant in the US is 958 tons a day!
?!?!?
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
Perhaps synthetic photosynthesis, aka "synthephotosynthesis"?
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Holy legwork batman! That's one of the most thorough replies (not to be confused with the longest) I've seen on Slashdot. It's practically an entire slashback discussion in one post. Good work (but don't over-exert yourself). Mods, this comment deserves a +5 rating if any comment does.
Dead on. The energy density of liquid hydrocarbon fuels is still completely unrivaled (except by nuclear, but size makes it prohibitive for transportation). Commercial aircraft currently dedicate around a quarter of their weight to fuel, and there is little room to accept growth of that fraction in exchange for an alternative source, so efficient synthesis of liquid fuels may become critical for the future of aviation.
Automobiles, in contrast, dedicate only about 4% of their weight to fuel. If you had to quadruple that for something like batteries (we're still working on making that competitive, of course), you're still only carrying around 16% of your weight in fuel. If you make the same compromise for an airplane, you've got 100% of your weight in fuel. Does not compute.
Hi mdsolar. I think I've seen your name around in relation to CitizenRe... You're a representative or so, no? Is the program active yet or still taking pre-orders?
I agree that aviation is the number one irreducible need. The anonymous reply to you said it well with fuel as % weight of the vehicles. But I also suspect we won't be loading up sea vessels with batteries either. And cars will be using liquid hydrocarbons for a long time, even if plug-in hybrids make a transition.
Your proposal is interesting- you want to produce aviation fuel in the home, electrolytically I assume (since electricity would be the only energy input into a person's home; no high-temperature solar collectors), and heat the home with waste F-T heat, and ship out the aviation fuel? Unfortunately, I don't think that kind of a distributed fuel production system will pan out. There are reasons fuel production/reforming/etc takes place as an industrial operation under controlled conditions, economically and otherwise. Logistically you've got to keep track of tons of tiny fuel sources rather than a huge production plant. And you're installing CO2 collectors and F-T reactors in houses. People may not want those kind of reactors in their basement just to fuel some jets. I think it belongs in an industrial setting.
Although, it could be possible that the homeowner gets free home heating if the price is right (they sell the produced fuel for more than their electricity cost)... but also who pays for installing the F-T reactor and CO2 collector? Not the homeowner. I think there are better non-residential ways to do it, even in a distributed or small-scale fashion. Waste F-T heat can have other good uses besides home heating as well.
Electrical heating by itself to split CO2 or H2O wouldn't likely be economical, but electrolysis (as you suggest) could be, especially high temperature electrolysis (where the inefficiencies in the process are effectively electrically heating the electrolysis cell).
If such electrolysis can be made efficiently and cheaply enough and wind (or solar or nuclear) electricity is inexpensive enough, sure it can be competitive: note that $0.03/kWh of electricity is equivalent in terms of raw energy content as $1/gal gasoline. "In terms of raw energy content" assumes 100% electrochemical conversion efficiency and neglects capital cost of the electrolyzer.
CR should be doing more installations beyond the TV ones this quarter, but they will be using panels from other manufacturers. These will be systems that will be used to test the billing software and installation methods. So far as I know, the factory has still not been started.
I was hoping more for a hint on the energy requirements for CO2 collection in your neck of the woods, but your point about doing small scale F-T are pretty strong. I would say that one reason for doing it on an industrial scale is that the feedstocks are concentrated. Using atmospheric feedstocks provides a somewhat different situation. In terms of tracking lots of small sources, I think that there are some cost issues involved, though the infrastructure to manage this already exist since we deliver to all those small storage tanks already. The issue of maintaining product quality should be an engineering problem and one would wish for something that just works but it might be necessary to include an array of sensors and controls to provide a feedback loop to handle this. I agree that there might be other ways to use the F-T heat. Chicken houses come to mind. But, I'm not sure that the energy use scale would be such a good match. In any case, the realization that we are better than plants at collecting carbon from the air should be something we all keep in mind going forward because we do need to lay off the ecosystem and there seems to be no good reason not to.