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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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...