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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.
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.
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...
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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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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 was plenty of CO2 for plants to go around even before humans started burning coal at industrial scales.
This is basically just un-burning coal. And oil. And natural gas.
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.
There's surely a future in electric cars
The future for electric cars is closer than the future for synthetic fuel made from air.
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.
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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.
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.
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What, did you figure that Audi was just making diesel to pump back into the ground and forget about?
Obviously not. They're going to mix it with kerosine, gasoline and bitumen to make synthetic crude. And then they'll pump that back into the ground,
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.
We're pumping enough CO2 into the air to manufacture a year's worth of fuel every year. We've been doing it for centuries. Direct logic.
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Not in Germany where this "e-diesel" is being made. Water shortages are unheard of here.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
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
A better plan would be to develop a smart charging car that can adjust its charging rate depending on the amount of excess electricity generation. And when there's a shortage, the car can sell some charge back to the grid.
good luck getting an electric car with a 400+ mile range and recharging in a few minutes
Good luck scaling up the production from 160 liters to 160 million liters per day.
Even if we replaced 80% of every car with electric, there would still be uses for ICE engines. In the case of Diesel the vast majority of shipping uses it at some level, either trucks, trains or ships. It will be a while, maybe even needing a 10x increase in battery efficiency before it's economical to have an electric powered 18 wheeler that many times doesn't stop for 800-1000 Miles for refueling.
However, a diesel engine may not be standard type of engine of the future. Multiple companies are retrofitting fleet vehicles with hybrid systems powered by a turbine engine. All of the major over the road tractor manufacturers are testing new turbine powered hybrids too. Many of these hybrids will never plug into anything but the actual motors turning the wheels will be electric with the turbine just generating that electricity and feeding it to batteries/ultra capacitors.
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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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"
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"....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"?