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Audi Creates "Fuel of the Future" Using Just Carbon Dioxide and Water
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."
...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?
The real question is how much ENERGY does it take to take water, CO2 and make a hydrocarbon.
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If they could capture the water from the tailpipe, gather the CO2 from the air, and use a windmill on the roof of the car to generate the power to make the fuel, they could DRIVE FOREVER!!!
It's spelled "LAWN".
It would be even smarter to stop before hydrogen and store the electricity directly in a battery.
There isn't enough CO2 in the atmosphere to make this work. We would risk starvation by reducing CO2 levels below the level plants need. People forget that CO2 is plant food.
Star Trek, there maybe hope.
But does this stuff require clean, fresh, potable water? Lots of people are bent out of shape about fresh water shortages.
All well and good, but doesn't exactly solve the problem of greenhouse gas emissions.
The most interesting application of things like this is if they can take advantage of spikes of excess energy availability-- essentially making them a battery.
And Al Gore's great-great-great grandson will be selling holodiscs that talk about the impending ice age due to our excessive use of CO2.
TFA's infographic shows the plant being powered by "ecological power generation," but this thing requires, say, a 40 acre wind farm to produce 200 liters a day then there wouldn't be much benefit. The figure to beat is whether it costs less energy to generate this synthetic diesel as it would cost to charge a battery-powered (e.g. Tesla) car.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...
If something goes in something must come out. The question is what will it be? CO2+H2O = H2CO3 which I THINK is carbonic acid. Any chemists or chemically inclined wish to confirm this?
Hopefully, the exports will be off the charts. California needs the economic growth.
So, the have re-discovered syngas: brilliant!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Apart from the amusing name of the minister, no much to see here
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."
Try putting a battery in a diesel engine and see how well it runs. There's surely a future in electric cars, but that doesn't help the current fleet of diesel and gasoline vehicles. There needs to be more than solution to solve our myriad of energy problems.
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Is the production process automated, or is it a hand job?.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Maybe as a fuel it will use some of that atmosphere that surrounds it...
From the article:
The clear fuel is made form juts water, air and renewable energy
I wonder what "form juts water" is and how much does it cost. It's probably quite uncommon.
When 1person suffers from a delusion,it is called insanity.When many people suffer from a delusion,it is called religion
Not really. Plant metabolism is usually < 10% efficient at turning sunlight, CO2 and water into useful biomass. And the process for turning useful biomass into hydrocarbon fuels is < 100% efficient, so solar -> fuel is very low.
In their case, they're using intermittent power, from wind and solar, to do a modified Sabatier reaction and make methanol, which then goes into an integrated Fischer-Tropsch process to make longer-chain hydrocarbons.
The resulting solar -> fuel conversion efficiency is HIGHER than going through biomass production.
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There's surely a future in electric cars
The future for electric cars is closer than the future for synthetic fuel made from air.
Wow, then they've managed to scale up production to a whopping 0.00003% of the US consumption http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D....
Remember hydrogen cars? They even built a hydrogen gas station near where I live. Cool right?... not really... basically no cars use it, the station is not economical, and I believe they may have only built one of these fucking things on the entire planet.
There's a handful of them on the left coast, and they're putting in another handful on the right coast. Statistically nobody in the middle of the country buys interesting vehicles anyway. Toyota is about to start selling a FCV finally, and they're licensing their fuel cell to BMW and it will probably make it into an i5 in a year or two.
The real problem with hydrogen is that it is horribly annoying at best. It's just dumb on every level.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Nuke can run cogen with this as it's high temp electrolysis aka you can use the waste heat.
No sir I dont like it.
https://youtu.be/gpQWjvet9o4?t...
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Now, get off it.
I assumed based on the /. headline that this article was just a delayed April 1 joke. Breaking the two double bonds in a CO2 molecule (depending how you count) and one or two HO bonds in water to produce a single carbon atom oxygenated hydrocarbon like formaldehyde [H(CO)H] or methanol [H3COH], both of which have low energy densities, is going to take a lot of external energy. Doesn't seem practical to me.
Maybe I'll read the article.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Hydrogen is actually a terrible fuel. Because it is always a gas at any reasonable temperature, it is either extremely bulky, or expensive and dangerous to store (high pressure).
Shoot, now there will be a CO2 shortage and my soda will be flat.
Its more efficient than a plant derived fossil fuel, if that's the comparison your itching to make.
And how much energy does it take to create this fuel? How much does it cost?
Would a tank full of it allow the car to travel a comparable distance and speed as a similar-sized tank full of gasoline or diesel fuel?
Unless it is or can be economically comparable to CURRENT costs, its useless.
I recall reading the USN had also created fuel using seawater by extracting H2 and CO2 from seawater and turning it into fuel via a catalyst, is this the same thing?
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
is the inability of storing the energy when demand is low, but supply is high. using this energy to make fuel would be a good use.
would you?
Will you now be able to use a Sodastream to refuel your car?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Whatever, they're stupid. That's the point. And despite that they were cited as being the solution to everything for years. Years.
You say they're dumb on every level? Okay, but that's not what the media was saying about them.
Personally, I'm a fan of biofuels. They're carbon neutral. And not the stupid algae idea. You can biofuel from any combustible hydrocarbon. Basically you just cook whatever it is in an oxygen starved environment and it gives off fumes that are quite flammable. Those fumes can be cleaned and refined into several different fuel types. You get something like natural gas, you get something like tar, and you get varying quantities of everything in between including a gasoline analog.
And again, carbon neutral. You can make biofuels out of fucking garbage... grass clippings... saw dust... field dross of any kind. And the ash can be returned as an excellent non-toxic organic fertilizer.
So there you go. That is my green fuel solution.
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Because storing hydrogen is ass-impossible. Hydrogen is a terrible fuel requiring 4000-10000 PSI storage at liquid-helium-cooled temperatures. Storing and transporting hydrogen is energy-hungry. If the tank ruptures, it detonates like several dozen pounds of dynamite--assuming none of the hydrogen actually ignites (it shouldn't, until it mixes with the atmosphere sufficiently and becomes a fuel-air bomb capable of taking out an entire city district).
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Why doesn't she change her name?
If they can actually extract the CO2 from the air like they say then the system is carbon neutral. Zero pollution, it can be generated from renewable energy, it is a good solution to the variable output of wind energy - create a fuel and use when required.
It sounds too good to be true, what's the catch? Is CO2 extraction horribly expensive?
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It sounds like they're suggesting using excess electricity to produce a liquid fuel which can be burned later.
The real question is the energy density of the fuel versus a battery. A car burning biodiesel carrying about 100 lbs of fuel should have a range of over 400 miles and be refueled in a few minutes. It doesn't really matter if it takes more electricity to produce that fuel than an equivalent electric battery powered car since the electricity was excess generation and essentially wasted anyway (and good luck getting an electric car with a 400+ mile range and recharging in a few minutes) .
So why go to hydrocarbons rather use methanol (M100)? Granted, would need 2x bigger tanks (energy density). Is just compatibility with todays' cars or there are other technical reasons (corrosion, vapors, toxicity?).
4wdloop
Seriously, they are obviously nervous about what EVs are doing. Instead, they should all be focused on battery technology and lowering the price of EVs, rather than trying to keep ICE/Fossil fuels alive.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
in the uk at least audi is the car brand for wankers having recently taken over from bmw
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It's horribly inefficient energy-wise and makes no sense to do unless you're stuck in a very particular predicament: You're surrounded by seawater and on really bad terms with all the local jet fuel suppliers, but you happen to have a nuclear reactor handy.
Or, you've installed massive overcapacity of wind and solar and you don't know what to do with your massive overproduction of electricity on bright windy days.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Woah, you live in Vancouver? Sorry, dude. Go Flames!!!
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
You can get round these problems by sticking it to chains of carbon.
I've even heard rumors that some of this stuff is actually available by drilling into Earth's surface!
CO2 + Water + electrolysis = Methanol.
This has been known forever. It is clear and burns extremely cleanly. It is not diesel or clean diesel; however, getting a diesel engine running on it is probably child's play and a flex fuel car is also probably easy (but a poor choice since diesel engines are superior.)
Without a monopoly at the gas station, you'd have had these choices for a long time and they'd be undercutting gas for decades... Maybe we'd have cars that wouldn't fall apart if we converted them! That is what prevents me from converting because it will eat up parts in my car not designed for methanol... it's bad enough with the ethanol being forced into my car... it's harder to find real 100% gas than it is ethanol (but Methanol is nowhere to be found; propane is easier to find.)
Why are they avoiding words like methanol, electrolysis, etc?
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Seriously, WTF is an article about energy vectors doing on /. without even a hint of how these guys achieved radical breakthrough advances in energy efficiency for both hydrogen-from-water and CO2-from-air?
Seastead this.
Yes, it does use the water, and yes, you get it back later. The water is split into H2 and O, then 4H2 are used to make CH4. When CH4 is burned in 2O2, you get CO2 + 2H2O. The same applies when they take their "Blue Crude" (very likely methane) and turn it into a longer-chained hydrocarbon.
it would generate more energy that it used...Clearly that would cause the car to never be able to stop, and always continue increasing in velocity.
That is not a problem; you reverse the polarity to the regenerative braking system, and feed the excess power into that to stop. I call it the "degenerative braking system"
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When you burn this fuel, it's carbon goes back into the air to be re-used. If you were to scale things to the point where you would actually have a few trillion tons of fuel lying around unburned those numbers would make sense. I don't think that is a likely scenario, however.
Hrm, it seems I would be wrong.
The reaction product is a liquid made from longchain hydrocarbon compounds, known as blue crude.
So methane is out, although I imagine they get a whole mixture of variously chained hydrocarbons since the graphic talks about using a refinery to split out diesel.
These are always the questions when talking about new energy sources.
Gasoline currently has 114,000 BTUs per gallon, at about $2.33 a gallon at my local station. It's being produced from source materials that don't require farmland, or blocking sunlight to local ecologies. It's stable at room temperature and portable.
While biodiesel typically comes in at 118,300 BTUs per gallon, and may be cheap to make *today,* if we were to try and scale up to current industrial scale use, the price would climb remarkably (and quickly) and the resources needed to make it (i.e. farmland, water and sunlight) would soon push up food prices as more and more land was diverted to energy production.
Biofuels have a place in the energy picture. It's just never going to be a very big one. What we need are batteries that are worth a shit (i.e. cheap and with about 20x current energy densities) and a mix of solar/nuclear/low head hydro/wind and so on.
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Oxygen created from hydrogen, using solar power.
How do you know there isn't enough CO2 to make this work? Can you prove your claim? We have too much in the atmosphere at the present.
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There is plenty of CO2 in my soda stream.. though this may explain why my last batch of soda burst into flames. ;)
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Audi Creates Fuel of the Future using just Carbon Dioxide and Water and Incredible Amounts of Energy
" they dump it as heat into rivers as the storage infrastructure simply doesn't exist"
I'm pretty sure excess electricity from windmills and PV farms are not creating hot water that has to be released into rivers, but feel free to prove otherwise.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
This reminded me of some of the plowshares experiments (where they tried to come up with non-war uses for hydrogen bombs) Link
One of the ones I remember being interesting was the use of underground detonations to break up rock and free natural gas (think super-fracking), it was tested and worked with only one problem, it was horribly inefficient and not cost effective, oh and all the natural gas was radioactive. As with all the plowshares crazy ideas this one didn't quite pan out, but it amazed me that they actually tried it. Oh and just to be sure they did it 3 times.
A gallon of diesel holds about 50KWH of energy- at 12centKWH that is 6.00$ a gallon if you were getting 100% efficiency. Add in 50% efficiency for high temperature hydrolysis, 50% for fischer tropsch, heating losses, pressure, a non- energetically favored reduction of CO2 to CO you would be lucky to have 10% yield at the end. That is 60$ a gallon...
And no, the electricity is not free- nobody is going to spend capital on renewable electricity to do this if they could sell it on the market for much more.
love is just extroverted narcissism
What kind of arguments do you need here, this follows from common sense. Do you understand what "baseload" is? Hint: It's always there.
Another hint: There's a world outside mum's basement, and guess what? It's not always windy and sometimes it's (gasp) dark.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Got a hydrogen refueling station on my campus. It's expanding because of demand. We're even taking possession of a hydrogen fuel cell bus soon.
Everything related to hydrogen fuel cell tech is still in research mode. Rarity is to be expected.
It's ABSOLUTELY the opposite.
I disagree. of course. The reason is that these transactions all occur at France's convenience not Germany's. The Scandinavian countries with their high reliance on hydro are really the ones making a killing here.
Morons like yourself and the OP bleat on about how renewables can't be put in more than about 20% because (well, "because", really), but it's really nuclear that can't manage high fractional production.
We are already seeing the problems with Germany's system with huge arbitrary surpluses and deficits that have to be pushed into other countries and an electricity cost double that of France.
No, Germany doesn't export when they want to any more than France does.
They can always just turn off 2.5 GW of generating facilities or blackout 2 GW of their country's demand when they don't have enough to go around. So sure, they don't "need" to have a functioning country-wide grid.
And I see that you don't address why France's electricity costs less than Germany's electricity.
hmmm... good luck with that.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
In terms of energy required to produce it, that is. Those very high temperatures and pressures worry me; they won't come cheap.
Just make biodiesel from these crazy life forms that sequester carbon from the CO2 air using energy from the sun, I think they call them "plants". Or Audi could buy out the patent and make cars that just run off of vegetable oil. This seems like a really convoluted way to get diesel when you can just take hempseed oil and add methanol.
What are the by-products of this synthetic fuel? What comes out of the vehicle's tailpipe?
That's why you use algae farms in the desert irrigated using seawater. That way you're not displacing farmland.
I don't read AC A human right
"....they do not work well as a baseload". Mr.Nuke, please enlighten us with arguments iso fud. Thank you, Family Solar
I think a little phenomenon called the 24-hour day/night cycle of our little planet is all the argument he might need to counter your kindergarten-level rebuttal. Perhaps instead there's something magical about your 'Family Solar' that I've missed that you might like to share with the rest of us?
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Very mature! You not knowing about something doesn't make it not exist.
If you understand the pros and cons of hydrogen fuel versus hydrocarbon fuel... you know that hydrogen doesn't make any sense.
The issue with hydrocarbon fuel is that we're extracting them from sequestered carbon sources which is increasing atmospheric carbon. However, if we do not create the fuel from sequestered hydrocarbons then there is no net increase in atmospheric carbon.
Biofuels make FAR more sense than hydrogen.
For one thing, hydrocarbon fuels can be obtained from any biomass. You can create hydrocarbon fuel from garbage, saw dust, grass clippings, crop field dross, etc. There is no need for some sort of magical genetically engineered oil producing algae. That would be nice of course, but it is not required. We can make hydrocarbon fuel from ANYTHING that is already made of those compounds.
And if you don't like that for no fucking reason what so ever, then batteries make more sense then hydrogen as well. Tesla's "lets put laptop batteries in cars" idea is better than hydrogen.
My beef with the laptop battery idea is that it is just not as scalable as the biofuel systems. We can have micro refineries across the country. At every landfill, every agricultural area, possibly even small units for rural house holds. And then the fuel can be locally consumed saving transport costs and the differences between what is needed and what is produced needs to either be imported or exported.
It is vastly more efficient and scalable because you can store the fuel in vast fuel tanks just like we currently do for oil. We have vast fuel depots that could literally fill lakes with oil. And those tanks smooth out the distribution of oil throughout the world. It doesn't matter if some region produces a lot or stops producing for awhile because we have reserves in the tanks to handle all our needs for months if not a couple years.
And the point is that we can do the same thing with the biofuel. During the summer months we'll produce more than we need because of the production from agriculture. And in the winter we'll burn those reserves because during those months consumption will exceed production.
Its hard to do that with electric power since we still don't have good means of storing it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
There is actually a valid point there. If you took a cooperative rather than competitive approach solar could become a lot more economical and viable a lot faster.
I read a PHD disertation that calculated that a solar farm a mere hundred hectares in size in the Sahara could supply the energy needs for the entirety of the E.U.
The problem is- it would under current thinking have to be sold - expensively to countries that would much prefer not to pay for imports. But what if it wasn't.... what if instead of selling it, it just went into a global grid which everybody has access to, and when the sun sets in the Sahara the one in the Australian Outback is just about hitting peak production, with a Nevada one coming on as it starts to go down, and for the dips in between where no large plant has good sun - you can fill those in with supplies of other types from the rest of the countries (in return for sharing in this global grid).
Whatever your country has, you contribute, in return you get all the energy you need. Since no two timezones peak at the same time - staggered production is feasible if you spread it globally- because that gives you staggered consumption to go with it.
Sure this is blue-sky dreaming and it rather depends on politicians being able to think beyond the ends of their noses and Americans being able to figure out that sometimes things that look vaguely like socialism (to use their definition of "not trying to maximize individual profit for somebody") can actually be the best solution. Something they generally only accept when they've had the socialist idea for so long that they don't think about it anymore (in which case they will happily tolerate and even cheer for even genuine socialism - like they do with public libraries).
It would be expensive to build (not hugely - there is already a global grid - but restructuring the entire principle on which we switch the power around won't be cheap) and it would require international agreements on a scale we have very rarely seen - and investment of a lot of tax dollars, but it could be worth it, the challenges are not technical.
It's a space elevator - except that we actually DO have the technology to build it, today.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
How is it a "crucial contribution"? The idea is to stop burning stuff.
Because you centralise the difficult dangerous hot bit into a manufacturing facility and distribute the relatively easy to transport, control and use output.
Hydrogen isn't as easy to transport, control or use.
I think a little phenomenon called the 24-hour day/night cycle of our little planet is all the argument he might need to counter your kindergarten-level rebuttal. Perhaps instead there's something magical about your 'Family Solar' that I've missed that you might like to share with the rest of us?
Life is so hard, isn't it, just one insurmountable problem after another.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Life is so hard, isn't it, just one insurmountable problem after another.
Life is what we make it of course, your snark notwithstanding.
It is however made no easier when fools like the AC above insist that complex situations be childishly boiled down to simple black-and-white 'Mr. Nuke vs Mrs. Family Solar' false dichotomies.
The only 'insurmountable problem' I feel we have is the continuing riches we're taking from the bottomless mine of our own collective stupidity.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Good post. I'm not sure I understand the engineering challenges sufficiently to critique your proposal but we do need to be thinking along these lines.
Personally, I love nuclear power. I'm very, very fond of hydro, pleased as punch with wind generation and have a special place in my heart for geothermal power production.
Where we are right now we haven't the luxury of time to overlook any sustainable power generation technology. Each has its place and we need them all if we're going to successfully transition from fossil fuels.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
That's what the Martians said before they dried up their seas!
(Sent for humor purposes only. I have no concept of the physics involved.)
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BT
Only three big questions:
1) Is the process net positive? From acquisition of CO and Water, to whatever process is used to arrive at the end result.Otherwise pointless.
2) COST. If 160 liters cost 10000$ it is going to be pretty pointless.
3) Scale-ability. So far they are talking 1 barrel of oil a day. Consumption is in the Millions. Is that reasonable or even feasible? Otherwise of little impact.
There have been a number of alternatives to oil thrown out there over the last number of years. How efficient is only a small part of the problem. It can be the most efficient process in the world, but if it costs too much, or can't be replicated in any amount that matters, it just isn't that useful. (other than perhaps R&D which may lead somewhere that is)
For reference:
http://www.eia.gov/countries/i...
Germany consumes about 2.4 Million barrels of oil a day... The world is about 90 Million.
Battery storage?
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win. -Gandhi
Battery storage?
Of course, but unless I'm mistaken I don't think we yet have a working example of a gigawatt-class solar power plant with battery storage yet. Even for home use it's not just a simple matter of slapping up some panels, it's a significant investment that needs to be costed carefully.
TL;DR: solar isn't baseload and it's silly to oversimplify the situation as nuke vs solar. We need 'em both and more besides.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
You are still thinking wrong. Sure a line from Australia to the Sahara wouldn't work... but a line to Japan would who could add tidal energy or even nuclear in exhale for what they use, then a line from there to India which adds wind. Each country adding what their resources can provided for their neighbours and taking what they need. Some will have net negatives and some will add surpluses. It doesn't matter because it's not a trade. It's goal is to get power to everyone.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Volkswagen owns Audi. In fact in my Volkswagen Cabrio a lot of the parts have both a VW and an Audi logo on them.
Crazy talk. Next you'll be telling me it comes out of my butt!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."