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CO2 To Fuel, Closing the "Carbon Loop"
leprasmurf writes "Inhabitat has posted an article detailing a recent announcement of a process to turn CO2 into fuel. The process, which used to be considered too energy inefficient, uses a multi-step, low pressure, and low temperature biocatalyst to break the CO2 into 'basic hydrocarbon building blocks.'"
Searching the company's website, there is no mention whatsoever of even a single gallon of usable fuel being susccessfully produced using their method. There is, of course, mention of "investment opportunities".
Caveat Utilitor
Photosynthesis?
ROMANES EUNT DOMUS
Imagine that, we could power the universe!
The process, which used to be considered too energy inefficient, uses a multi-step, low pressure, and low temperature biocatalyst to break the CO2 into 'basic hydrocarbon building blocks.
1) Grow a plant.
2) Stick in the ground for a few thousand years.
3) Dig up resultant black goo.
4) Distill goo into reactive liquid and distribute...
How is this new? When did it become more efficient?
Self owned. No spell check in the title bar....
Just Basic Organic Chemistry... This process of "upgrading" has been done for decades to create "Synthetic" oils and other hydrocarbons. They just are using something magical called "Biocatalytic Reactors" (Probably contain high temperature enzymes and catalysts but operate at lower temps than current industrial processes). This is just reversing the hydrocarbon oxidation (burning) process using some for of "upgrader" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_petroleum_industry_in_Canada_(oil_sands_and_heavy_oil)#Upgraders . These reactions to reduce CO2 into "fuel" will be VERY endothermic (absorb heat energy) and must take place at higher temps without Oxygen present.. All that energy must come from somewhere! It is just sooooo much cheaper to use hydrocarbons from the ground.
CO2 is just an acidic oxide of Carbon.
To create 'fuel' from it you must change it to something completely different by adding significant energy and removing the Oxygen... The energy is stored in the formed carbon bonds and hydrogen bonds (Why we call these type of fuels Hydro-carbons).
CO2 is a significantly lower energy state carbon oxide compound.
This process is not different than the incorrect view that H2O (water) is a as fuel. (Sure after you add massive amounts of electricity and electrolytically separate (reduce) the hydrogen from the oxygen from the hydrogen into hydrogen gas and Oxygen.
This is really the same thing using some "Biocatayltic Reactor" to add energy to CO2 to separate the carbon from the oxygen (reduction of the carbon to a non-oxidized form such as CO2 or CO)
You cannot hide from the chemistry.
The energy to do this MUST come from *SOMEWHERE*. Considering that 99% of the massive amounts of energy stored in the molecular bonds of all fossil fuels do not have to be added to these fuels in their extraction, refinement, delivery to end-users, what this "new" technology is doing is just adding the "Creation" part of the hydrocarbon fuel and that takes about 99% more energy to do because you still have the remaining three steps.
I will bet that this process is more expensive than letting mother nature create starches/sugars that we then modify into hydrocarbon "fuels".
It is VERY hard to beat the efficiency of mother nature on this one:
6CO2 + 6H2O + Light = C6H12O6 (Glucose) + 6O2
I wonder what a gallon of this "fuel" costs. (Add enough energy to most substances and you can create "fuel" to them.) CO2 is a waste product because it (and CO and H2O) is the lowest energy product of hydrocarbon combustion (oxidation). This is Basic Chemistry.
Plants can also turn CO2 into fuel--but it all takes energy. For plants, the energy comes from the sun.
Where does the energy come from for the Carbon Sciences process? All I see are diagrams of a "biocatalyst" and an explanation that somehow it takes less energy for their process--but the amount of energy in to turn CO2 into a biofuel must necessarily be more than the amount of energy you'll get back out of that biofuel.
In this house we observe the laws of thermodynamics.
There's WAY too much in the way of unanswered questions here. Mainly: WHERE is the ENERGY coming from?
Bio-this-and-that doesn't change the thermodynamics of it.
The homepage of this company is VERY suspicious. Any company like this that focuses as much on 'investor relations' as on the tech itself (and has a penny stock to boot!) is likely bullshit.
The tech pages say NOTHING of where the energy is coming from. NOTHING about what kind of 'biocatalytic' processes are involved. And patent bullshit like
"Of greatest significance, our process occurs at low temperature and low pressure, thereby requiring far less energy than other approaches."
Um, no.. The VAST BULK of the energy you spend on making hydrocarbons out of CO2 will ALWAYS be on the energy required for the reaction itself. (Unless the process was created by a total incompetent.)
Can we please have a new Crackpot (or maybe Quackpot, or Snakepot, shit, I dunno) section on slashdot, specifically for these half-baked bullshit stories? Would make a nice replacement for Idle, methinks.
I mean, unless this was just meant to remind us of high school science & biology. Heck, that'd also make a nice Idle section substitute.
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
No, really, I'm serious! They use snake oil. The oil excreted by snakes as they burrow from their underground lairs is what actually creates oil. However, it takes combinations of snake oil from both venomous and non-venomous snakes to make oil that is combustable -- That's why there are MULTIPLE PHASES of the transformation from CO2 to the necessary compounds.
The real secret here is finding snakes capable of slithering over blocks of dry ice without freezing to death. The way they do that is they pour piping hot McDonald's coffee on the snakes before having them slither over the dry ice to create the oil sludges required. Hence, they use snake oil.
That, or this is a crock of shit and shouldn't get the time of day.
"somebody has CO2, and made it into fuel! no details!"
there's a million ways to do that
all of which require energy. there is no way to convert CO2 into any kind of usable fuel that does also include putting energy in at some point
whereever that energy comes from is the real story. since that isn't even hinted at, there's no story here. or, alternatively, some idiot thinks you can turn CO2 into fuel without an energy input. which beggars the low end of the iq curve in terms of understanding the subject matter here
if i took random spam from my inbox about growing my penis size and posted it here, that would be more informative and useful than this crap nonstory
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
New word derivation: pork, porcine, porcess. Obviously the word is related to the missing #5 step Profit. No doubt he concludes its a method of getting government subsidies and tax break investments in order to make a "silk purse out of a sow's ear". As has been very obvious a corporation does not need to show a profit on the books for it to be profitable to its founders and officers, too obviously of late.
Last February, Los Alamos announced they had a process that converts CO2 to gasoline. The associated white paper proposed using a nuclear reactor to provide the requisite energy to drive the process. They went as far as to estimate the costs of their process and pegged the cost of gasoline at $4.30 gallon at the pump. A significant fraction of their cost estimate was credit costs to finance the plant. They figured 50 cents for every dollar sales given the billions they'd need to start the process. Without factoring the credit costs (which they could do if they could convince enough investors to take an equity position instead of borrowing the capital) they estimated their process produced gasoline at $1.40 per gallon.
Poop to food, closing the world hunger loop.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
Where the f**k do people find these brain-impaired investors? Why can't I find them? I can make snake oil, po sweat. I can tell people everything they want to hear. I can make up ridiculous unbelievable stories with no problem at all! Hell, I can do even better. You want infinite energy??? I can give you infinite energy * 2! That's twice as good even our best conmen competitors! Surely if the whole of Slashdot were to team together we could make a fortune with these wacky ideas!
What is it that makes it possible for these kind of people to have investors fawn at their feet whilst the rest of us have problems getting investors to believe in the basic laws of physics?
What we need is a fill-in form in the series of the
.)
Your post advocates a
( ) physical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) chemical
approach to global warming. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws
form. This is slashdot. We don't need no stinking optimism here.
I'll compile it, contributions are welcome. Here are mine.
( ) it violates the First Law of Thermodynamics
( ) it violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) the energy needed to accomplish your simple tranformation
In the process called burning, hydrocarbons combine with oxygen and release energy.
To reverse the process (which is what they're saying) you have to put an equal amount of energy back in ... if it's 100% efficient, which it won't be.
The only way to get a net gain is to add some free energy from somewhere. The only plausible source is sunlight, but there's no mention of that on their web site.
Fact is, there's no science at all on their web site, just plenty of links for "investors", "investor FAQs", NASDAQ stock quotes, etc.
For credibility they have a link to a Popular Mechanics article but it's for a completely different C02 treatment process.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/earth/4274541.html
No sig today...
There are two issues here.
The first - energy. It cant be avoided. To make fuel from CO2 you need energy. Nuclear, wind, solar. It doesn't matter what really, but you will need some input and this technology cannot address that.
The second - why do this. Actually, it makes sense to have a liquid fuel base. Transportation runs on liquid fuel as a store of energy. If we make liquid fuels from solar, for example, we can store solar energy in a useful form for when it is dark.
So without commenting on this particular technology - which everyone has quite rightly stated won't work without considering energy inputs - the general concept of creating a liquid fuel energy store has some merit.
Having said this, I've spent quite a bit of time looking at a rather different liquid fuel store which I think has more promise than hydrocarbons.
That fuel is ammonia.
Whilst its only half as energy dense as diesel, its not that hard to make from electricity. In fact, it can be made by electrolysis fairly easily, and this has been done for nearly 100 years. so its not exactly new technology.
Nor is the ability to use it in a standard internal combustion engine. In fact, it was being used as a fuel for buses over 60 years ago and it works in a standard engine with little modification.
Because its less energy dense than diesel, its a lot easier to make synthetically, but has enough energy per litre to be worthwhile. Whilst having half the range per litre of fuel is an inconvenience, I am sure that we could live pretty much as we do today with vehicle technology that is available today.
We either accept half the range, or build the fuel tanks twice as big, or maybe even make the cars twice as efficient. All of these are easy options really.
I think that we have all gotten so fixated on fossil fuels that we have ignored a really low technology solution here.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
Carbon Sciences has developed plans for a CO2-Fuel transformation plant that takes CO2 from a large emitter, such as a power plant, and produces usable fuels as the output.
In case you missed it, that would be when you know this is nonsense.
(By the laws of nature, getting the carbon out of the CO2 will take at least as much energy as you got by burning the carbon in the first place. So attaching the "transformation plant" to a carbon fueled power plant means you have a process turning hydrocarbons into hydrocarbons, and spending energy doing it.)
That is the ones with the lipstick?
Not necessarily; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
Converting CO2 into vehicle fuels will require MASSIVE amounts of energy. The source of this energy is mysteriously missing from the vendor's website. That would be the FIRST item that they would list on their todo list and their technology announcement if it were legitimate. This "announcement" ranks right up there with those devices to add to your car to burn water so that you can get 200 mpg. Maybe Slashdot can do a story on one of those next week...
The process, which used to be considered too energy inefficient, uses a multi-step, low pressure, and low temperature biocatalyst to break the CO2 into 'basic hydrocarbon building blocks.
Yeah. I got those processes, too. They're called photosynthesis followed by another called fermentation and then (an optional) one called distillation. It turns out tasty by-products, too.
That is all.
"...a multi-step, low pressure, and low temperature biocatalyst to break the CO2 into 'basic hydrocarbon building blocks..." We've already got hundreds of units on our 13 acre lot. We're using the beta-name of "tree"s. A big improvment over the previous installments of "straw" and "brush". What's more, we can feed the by-product into a ferrous holding center where they are oxidized, producing infrared radiation with which one can heat a living unit. -Frank
Storage and transport.
Let's say your 20 units of energy come from a nuclear power plant. I can't strap one of those onto my car. Battery technology doesn't currently provide enough energy density, and there's a significant amount of energy lost as heat over the power grid.
OTOH, we make a liquid hydrocarbon out of the energy, we get very little "line loss" during transport of the energy to my vehicle. And the energy density is high enough to be practical in a car without sacrificing range.
I stopped reading when I got to the part that said that catalysts "transform CO2 into basic hydrocarbon building blocks".
CO2 + catalysts + other stuff, maybe, but not CO2 alone.
I knew what they meant, but before I take them seriously they need to learn how to put it in proper English.
I saw the Green Freedom developer, Dr. Jeffrey Martin, give a talk at Georgetown. His process is already really efficient. As I recall the GF process to convert CO2 into fuel was within a factor of 7 of the theoretical minimum energy required which compares well even to biological processes. I'm skeptical that the magic proprietary "Biocatalytic Reactors" Inhabitat has developed could be significantly more efficient, especially since no numbers whatsoever are provided. Yellow Flag: Inhabit doesn't even claim to have a patent pending on their "breakthrough" process. Green Freedom has at least a few real patents in the works.
16(CO2) + 18(H2O) -> 2(C8H18) + 25(O2)
Just add water.
<sig> </sig>
It's obvious really. By the use of hydrino catalysts you can force the CO2 into a lower energy state allowing it to convert the two oxygen atoms into hydrogen. Just ask Dr. Mills.
I don't know if this is related, but there was a similar Google tech talk recently:
Carbon Neutral Synthetic Hydrocarbon Fuels
They discuss creating liquid fuels from carbon dioxide and (here's what the article linked from slashdot is missing) hydrogen (from electrolysis or natural gas).
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