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CO2 To Fuel, Closing the "Carbon Loop"

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the squeeze-as-much-as-you-can dept.

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.'"

16 of 316 comments (clear)

  1. Vaporware alert by clang_jangle · · Score: 5, Informative
    FTFA:

    The key to our CO2-to-Fuel approach lies in a proprietary multi-step biocatalytic process.

    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
    1. Re:Vaporware alert by master5o1 · · Score: 5, Funny

      I know the proprietary process:

      Get a Snake,
      Get some CO2,
      Suffecate the Snake,
      Extract Snake Oil.

      --
      signature is pants
    2. Re:Vaporware alert by hobbit · · Score: 5, Funny

      Exception at line ("Then keep chopping it down every two years"): Attempt to chop down an already chopped-down tree.

      --
      "Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
    3. Re:Vaporware alert by B30-7A · · Score: 5, Funny

      Dude, put the mouse down and back away from the compiler.

    4. Re:Vaporware alert by MrNaz · · Score: 5, Funny

      Either that or they convinced the USPTO to grant them a patent on photosynthesis.

      --
      I hate printers.
  2. uh by niteice · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Photosynthesis?

    --
    ROMANES EUNT DOMUS
  3. New Porcess? by houstonbofh · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?

  4. Just Basic Organic Chemistry... by Zymergy · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Just Basic Organic Chemistry... by el_chupanegre · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Funnily enough there was a program on TV here in the UK last night about producing electricity from CO2 and water.

      Two guys in the New Mexico desert had a huge mirror array the focussed the sun into a really intense beam (they could melt steel with it) and directed it into a giant furnace, which I think got to 2400 degrees C, but could have been 4200. This heated the air inside to separate the CO2 which they could then use to create hydrocarbons.

      This all worked on a huge scale of course, but they also had a smaller version that could produce 2-3 gallons of fuel a day that was about the size of a pretty young small tree.

      So I agree that the energy has to come from somewhere in order to separate the CO2, but who says that energy can't come from solar power eventually? Of course this is more expensive now, but it'll be getting cheaper all the time as oil gets more expensive.

    2. Re:Just Basic Organic Chemistry... by Gilmoure · · Score: 5, Informative

      Yup, it's one of the things they're working on here. I'm still hoping they get a decent fusion setup going but the solar work is still pretty cool.

      --
      I drank what? -- Socrates
    3. Re:Just Basic Organic Chemistry... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      You cannot hide from the chemistry.
      The energy to do this MUST come from *SOMEWHERE*.

      Well, duh. That's not the point. The attractiveness of such a process is that we have a world built around hydrocarbons, we're running out of fuel, the climate is taking offense at all the CO2 in the atmosphere and there is a giant fission reactor 1AU from here which constantly delivers a huge amount of energy to us (but we haven't yet found a way to store that energy). If you could use the energy from the sun to turn CO2 back into usable fuel, that would solve quite a lot of problems in one go.

  5. In this house... by Oscaro · · Score: 5, Funny

    In this house we observe the laws of thermodynamics.

  6. SCAM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.)

  7. New section by LSD-OBS · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  8. Los Alamos' Green Freedom by jmichaelg · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  9. what we need by justleavealonemmmkay · · Score: 5, Funny

    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