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Audi Creates "Fuel of the Future" Using Just Carbon Dioxide and Water

Posted by samzenpus on from the fiture-fill-up dept.

EwanPalmer writes: German car manufacturer Audi says it has created the "fuel of the future" made solely from water, carbon dioxide and renewable sources. The synthetic "e-diesel" was made following a commissioning phase of just four months at a plant in Dresden, Germany. Germany's federal minister of education and research, Dr Johanna Wanka, said she has already used the fuel in her Audi A8, and the company hopes to produce at least 160 liters of the crystal clear fuel every day in the coming months. "This synthetic diesel, made using CO2, is a huge success for our sustainability research," Wanka said. "If we can make widespread use of CO2 as a raw material, we will make a crucial contribution to climate protection and the efficient use of resources, and put the fundamentals of the 'green economy' in place."

13 of 486 comments (clear)

  1. With the best will in the world... by Viol8 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...renewables are going to have their work cut out for themselves just supplying a majority percentage of the power for national electricty grids. I'm not sure where they think the extra renewable power to do this will come from.

    Now if they plugged the process into a nuclear power plant OTOH...

    Of course the big question is how efficient is the process? Is it more efficient than just using the electricity to charge up batteries in an electric car for example?

    1. Re:With the best will in the world... by Eunuchswear · · Score: 2, Insightful

      .renewables are going to have their work cut out for themselves just supplying a majority percentage of the power for national electricty grids. I'm not sure where they think the extra renewable power to do this will come from.

      No, the biggest problem with wind in particular is that to get reasonable amounts of energy you have to install large overcapacity.

      Which leads to the problem of what you do with that energy on a windy day.

      Up till now Germany has been selling it to (among others) France, for almost nothing. This is bad for Germany (they get very little money) and bad for France (it makes the nuclear fleet less profitable).

      Making synthetic fuel when you have energy to spare could be a pretty smart storage mechanism.

      Wonder what the efficiency is like though.

      --
      Watch this Heartland Institute video
    2. Re:With the best will in the world... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      If H2O and CO2 are the only inputs, then I am not sure where your nitrogen is coming from.

    3. Re:With the best will in the world... by Immerman · · Score: 3, Insightful

      What does that have to do with anything? Unless you're actually producing your fuel in the core of the nuclear reactor (in which case it would become radioactive itself, and you'd have a real challenge selling it), you don't care about the reactor temperature. Normally it's going to be Reactor->Electricity->Fuel generating plant.

      Though admittedly, if you *could* use the heat from the reactor directly it would probably be considerably more efficient.

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
    4. Re:With the best will in the world... by LWATCDR · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "Is it more efficient than just using the electricity to charge up batteries in an electric car for example"
      Think of ships, planes, and remote locations where you must transport fuel like Alaska.

      "You're right that we don't have enough renewable energy yet to make this a useful technology. But hopefully that day is coming."
      No it will not.
      Nuclear is the key to low carbon power. Wind and Solar will help but they do not work well as baseload. Thorium based nuclear and possibly Fusion aka Lockheeds High Beta reactor is what is needed.

      --
      See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
    5. Re:With the best will in the world... by weilawei · · Score: 3, Insightful

      5: The Sabatier reaction is over 100 years old. The process itself at factory scale may be encumbered by patents.
      7: Nickel, ruthenium on alumina, ruthenium on titanium dioxide, and several others have been tried in the open literature.

    6. Re:With the best will in the world... by FlyHelicopters · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The perfect replacement is an EV with a better battery (or supercapacitor).

      Get me a battery with 400 miles of range that can be recharged in 5 minutes and I'm all ears.

      I just don't think we'll see that in our lifetime, but I'd be happy to be wrong. :)

    7. Re:With the best will in the world... by Urkki · · Score: 3, Insightful

      We still need nuclear for everything that isn't fungible in time, though.

      If we ever have a reasonably efficient way of producing hydrocarbons from CO2 with solar energy, we won't have any need for nuclear power for a long time (and by then we might have working fusion). Just burn the hydrocarbons. Using a fuel cell to directly produce electricity might take off, too, if we have process which makes clean hydrocarbons of desired type. We've got most of infrastructure from giant oil tankers and pipelines to distribution and final storage built up, all we need is a synthesizing technology to take place of drilling, pumping and fraking.

    8. Re:With the best will in the world... by tburkhol · · Score: 5, Insightful

      There will be another Chernobyl/Fukushima scale nuclear disaster.

      Fine by me. Industrial accidents are part of the price we pay for our life of ease. If I have to choose between a 3MI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima spread over 40 years, and a Kingston, Macondo, Valdez, Fergana Valley, Ixtoc, Chevron Richmond - you know, the list of fossil fuel accidents affecting tens of thousands of people is just too long to go through. Nevermind the occasional train derailment and fire.

      You design things as best you can against the problems you can think of, and you design mitigation plans against the ones you can't. Every time a new problem comes up, you improve the design. You can not live in a perfectly safe world. If you use electricity, you could shock yourself. If someone produces electricity, they could blow up. If you don't use electricity, a grue might eat you in the dark. Choose your risk, but try to be rational about it. There's nothing inherently worse about the nuclear boogeyman than the coal boogeyman, except that you've been living with the coal boogeyman for 2000 years.

  2. Re:Not enough resourcees by Amigan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Ethanol was going to save us. Then farmers / growers sold all their corn to ethanol producers, and the food chain suffered as feed for animals got more expensive, exports to 3rd world fell, and food riots started...

    --
    "Software is the difference between hardware and reality"
  3. Re:Not impressed - make food with water, CO2 & by Hognoxious · · Score: 4, Insightful

    why don't they stop at hydrogen? It's a great fuel

    It's not a great fuel. It leaks, because the molecules are so small. It causes some metals to go brittle.

    You can get round these problems by sticking it to chains of carbon. A convenient side effect of that is it makes it compatible with existing engines & distribution infrastructure .

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  4. Re:Not enough resourcees by Jeremi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There isn't enough CO2 in the atmosphere to make this work.

    That's okay, because they are unlikely to be taking the CO2 out of the atmosphere anyway. It would be much cheaper and easier to capture and reuse the outputs of an existing CO2 source (e.g. a coal plant) than it would be to suck CO2 out of the ambient air.

    --


    I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
  5. Re:What are the emissions? by Gaxx · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Efficient energy storage, though, is a massive barrier to using renewable energy sources. Creating energy from renewable sources is comparatively easy compared to the task of storing it and transporting it. You can have all of the wind farms and solar cells you like but you need storage to cope with those times where the weather isn't playing ball.

    If this yields, even in the long term, efficient storage then it's a gateway technology to the useful deployment of renewables. Of course - that efficiency will need to be both energy-in -> energy-out efficiency and storage density efficiency to really hit the nail on the head.

    --
    -- Gaxx