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CO2 To Ethanol In One Step With Cheap Catalyst (sciencedaily.com)
Reader networkBoy writes: Boffins at ORNL (Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory) have discovered a simple and cheap catalyst that can take CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) dissolved in solution with water and at room temperature convert it to ethanol with 60%+ yields. They envision it as a way to store surplus power from green energy plants and then burning it to fill in lulls in supply.From the report:The team used a catalyst made of carbon, copper and nitrogen and applied voltage to trigger a complicated chemical reaction that essentially reverses the combustion process. With the help of the nanotechnology-based catalyst which contains multiple reaction sites, the solution of carbon dioxide dissolved in water turned into ethanol with a yield of 63 percent. Typically, this type of electrochemical reaction results in a mix of several different products in small amounts. "We're taking carbon dioxide, a waste product of combustion, and we're pushing that combustion reaction backwards with very high selectivity to a useful fuel," Rondinone said. "Ethanol was a surprise -- it's extremely difficult to go straight from carbon dioxide to ethanol with a single catalyst."
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What is the cost in the catalyst materials? And its efficiency?
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Northeast of what? Assuming you mean Northeast US, why? There's not a whole ton of sunlight; you'd probably be better pumping the solar electricity into the grid during the day. Run this type of application where there's less cloud cover and that doesn't need electricity (like deserts) and ship ethanol to where it'd be most useful (aka. fuel production plants).
-SaNo
Jesus was a time traveler from Oak Ridge.
to store extra electricity huh. Like from unpredictable wind and solar farms? Storing CO2 emissions from fossil fuel plants? Seems like a big penalty (both efficiency and the cost of the farm) just to smooth out the farms.
Or it could be used to absorb a higher base load production from nuclear. Oh. Eh. Nevermind. Nobody seems to want nuclear powered carbon reduction. Sole purpose of renewable seems to be to replace nuclear.
Here's a link to the actual paper.
(Since the editors won't do it.)
The catalyst looks pretty good. I'd be interested to see how long it lasts - some catalysts become poisoned by impurities in the source gasses, and lose effectiveness over time.
The paper mentions copper oxide forming on the copper nanoparticles due to transport in the air to the test equipment. That probably means that the catalyst might lose effectiveness due to dissolved oxygen in the water.
Any actual chemists care to comment?
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So what happens to the other 37 procent? If you keep adding CO2 to the water, re-saturating it, doesn't the reaction just keep going?
That's faradic efficiency. The remaining 37% go to heat, and perhaps other by-products.
The paper points out that CO, H2, and CH4 are made at various other voltages, maybe some of the remaining 37% is in useful by-products.
(I've only skimmed the paper - need more time to read and digest.)
https://science.slashdot.org/s... Sounds like Slashdot is telling us Venus' is the future of energy.
How much energy is consumed in the process? Is this just mix two chemicals and stir or do you have to add power to make the process work? My concern is that this is another thing like corn ethanol, the production of which consumes as much or more energy than in produces with a net result of a negative benefit. It says "consume extra electricity when available" which is a rather screwy way of saying produce more power than is actually needed and then turn it into ethanol. This sounds like a movie I've already seen once before...
For this reaction, you need BOTH CO2 (from burning fossil fuels) AND "free energy" (noon solar on cloudless days).
The otherwise wasted energy from the unreliable renewable sources is used to convert CO2 into fuel.
The price of a catalyst is irrelevant since catalysts by definition remain unchanged by the chemical reaction. The price of the electricity to convert the CO2 into ethanol, however... Catalysts do not violate the laws of thermodynamics. If you do the math you'll find that the energy you put it will be significantly greater than what you'd get from burning all that ethanol back into CO2.
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Hey folks, I'm looking for a simplified, explain-it-like-I'm-five version of this. You make this cheap catalytic sheet, expose it to CO2, give it a x watts of electricity, and it produces x*.63 watts of ethanol? Is that right? Does the CO2 have to be concentrated like from a power plant or vehicle exhaust or is atmospheric CO2 enough?
That probably depends mostly on how you get your electricity. Wind or Solar are likely carbon negative, Coal is almost certainly carbon positive.
I read the internet for the articles.
pretty dang difficult to capture CO2 only and then highly compress it so you can dissolve it in H2O and run this process.
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Hmm, it seems the laws of thermodynamics are being overlooked here...
It would be more efficient just to run an electric heater.
Converting electricity into fuel is only interesting if you have a surplus of electricity that's otherwise going to waste.
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They should fund a startup ("carbonol.io") and Kickstarter a giant oceangoing ethanol mining drone, then lobby world governments to prevent further carbon emission cuts so as to protect their business model.
These... these scimentizzes have krunk their own droolaid. Iz a CATALISH! Jush put that shizzle in my gazztank... I like the boss knockin' rythym m'whip getsess on the fleaway. C'mere, silly plant. I wants ya fur your car-bone see-quest-rashun habits. [Hic!]
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When I looked up "ethanol fuel cell" it seems Nissan is working on those. So now I have this vision of rural people with lots of solar, an ethanol reformer and a Nissan.
catalytic chemistry doesn't overlook the laws of thermodynamics (I assume you meant the second law), it just dances around them in innovative ways.
It might make sense when you have a variable rate for electricity. Especially if you have a base load generation plant that's doesn't like to be turned up and down (think nuclear).
With Mars having a 96% Co2 atmosphere, it seems like this technology would be a dream come true for the first human explorers to Mars.
Elon Musk said that the first visitors would have to build a propellant plant and it would take many months to make their own fuel for the return journey. I wonder how significantly this technology and the abundance of Martian CO2 would speed that up?
It would be more efficient to simply convert the electricity.directly to room heat, unless you have periods during warm weather when electricity is very cheap and stock piling would make sense.
Well, that's why I ask questions like this one. ;-)
;-)
It's all well and good to get excited over something like this, but if it's going to do more harm than good then what's the point? For all we know it may take so much electricity to make this practical that trying to supply it all with so-called 'renewable' sources just isn't practical in itself.
Oh and by the way, is solar, wind, and what-not actually carbon-negative, once you figure in everything that has to be done to produce and implement solar panels, wind turbine generators, and so on? Never seem to hear anyone talking about that, either.
Or, need a way to transport large sums of energy from where bulk generation is possible to where demand for that energy is high, and do so with minimal losses.
This looks like the latter.
It solves the problem of " how do you intend to get all that power from that coastal windfarm to the city where it is needed?"
The answer? "In a big assed fuel tanker."
That's the point.
The electric grid has to maintain a fine balance between supply and demand. It is very useful to be able to store electricity from oversupply (most large power plants can't easily adjust their output). People have proposed batteries and pumped water storage to soak up excess electricity. This might be an alternative.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
thinking a pre-Mars shot fuel maker for the red planet, plenty of C02, just need an alcohol based rocket for return lift....
What language is "American" ? Perhaps you meant to login as "FuckingIdiot' rather than "RightWingNutJob"
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No. Wind and solar are NOT carbon-negative.
And it is REALLY simple to prove:
1. They don't consume CO2 to produce energy
2. End
And if you use coal/petrol to produce any part of the turbines/panels in any stage of the production they will be carbon positive.
But what really matters here is not that they are carbon positive, it is that they produce so little carbon when compared to all other sources that it doesn't really matters...In the end, they are displacing something hugely worse so they are a net positive.
It's a flavor of an obscure Germanic language spoken by a large portion of the civilized people in this place called 'America.' You may have heard of it. We're renowned for our trucks and our elevators, as well for as our scientists and engineers. No boffins though.
..okay, how come you're not factoring in the energy that those technologies produce that doesn't have to be produced by burning fossil fuels? I'm not convinced that solar and wind are ever going to be 100% of the solution (I'd rather have nuclear power in one form or another) but those are not completely dead-end technologies either.
Using the electricity generated by Wind or Solar to sequester carbon from the atmosphere is very likely to be carbon negative. That's what the grandparent was asking.
I read the internet for the articles.
Bad analogy since HVDC is already going in all over the place and will beat that tanker hands down.
Consider instead how handy liquid fuel is to power stuff that moves.
The problem is that the efficiency is going to be significantly lower than the other two solutions you mentioned. Battery storage is extremely efficient and pumped storage also isn't too bad. Converting to ethanol is just the first half of the equation. Converting it back also needs to happen and there are significant losses there. The article also doesn't make any mention of efficiency, only of yields so my guess is that it isn't all that efficient.
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No. There is electrolysis going on (an electric current is applied from outside) so there is your energy input to drive the reaction.
Yes, I agree that efficiency could be problematic. Probably lose at least 50% going each way.
H2 energy storage has the same problem. By the time you make H2 from electricity (electrolysis), compress it, transport it then convert it back to electricity (fuel cell), you only get about 20% of the energy back.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
No. Those we import. Tricky business, too. Have to find ones that never learned who won the Revolutionary War.
> Resistance heating is not efficient by any definition
Resistance heating is nearly 100% efficient
This conversion is 60% efficient. Likely the waste energy is heat, so running it in a house needing heat would likely get to 100%, but I doubt you would get 100% efficiency when burning that ethanol for heat.
It may make sense to do this to get CO2 out of a house (if the ethanol is burned externally.) So I could see running this in a house that used a vent-less Natural gas fireplace, to clean the internal air of CO2, then put the resulting ethanol into your hybrid car. This could be much more efficient than even charging a battery in a electric car, at least when heating was also needed in the house.
So would I, apparently.
Actually, TFA gives no clue as to efficiency. The stated figure is for yield, i.e. the amount of ethanol out versus the theoretical ethanol out if every carbon atom in the CO2 input were incorporated into ethanol. Whether the remainder is unconverted or converted into something other than ethanol is also unstated.
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This is getting very strange. Surely the point here is to get ethanol when you want ethanol instead of whatever strangeness you are thinking of?
Why do that?
Not just strange - incredibly fucking dangerous to the point of insanity. I'm not just guessing I've worked in a place where carbon monoxide killed a few people.
The rest of us are thinking of it as another industrial process to make ethanol in possibly a more convenient way than currently and not thinking of "cleaning the air" like trying to stop an incoming tide with a spoon.
Resistance heating is very energy efficient (when measured at the point of use; there are plenty of losses in generation and transfer), it just usually isn't very cost efficient compared to other available options. However, using electricity to ultimately produce heat in the manor being discussed here will never be as energy OR cost efficient as resistance heating, unless it allows you to take advantage of a *significant* rate reduction.
As you mention, a heat pump would provide well beyond 100% (closer to 300%) effective efficiency in moderately cold weather.
No. There is electrolysis going on (an electric current is applied from outside) so there is your energy input to drive the reaction.
Yes. See other posts about relative efficiency. The parent seemed to be ignoring the fact that energy is required to produce the ethanol.
The point is to maximize benefits. Correct, you would make ethanol to have ethanol, but you would ideally make ethanol where you can use the waste heat, and also want to remove CO2.
They are very popular, can buy them most home improvement stores in the US. It is all I use to heat my house in winter. It has a built in O2 sensor, I have a CO detector a few feet away, that has never activated. When burning correctly, it produces no CO if you see any soot at all, then it is producing CO. I live in the south, where it is warm enough that heat is only needed at night, and rarely stay closed up during the day. Garages and supplemental heat only up north. I love it, because it dumps a ton of moisture into the air, and I live where that is needed.
You have missed the current focus, can we do CO2 capture at power plants is a big question today, likely why this has funding.
Also producing ethanol at location, from solar or natural gas would be a ideal solution. Because A) ethanol doesn't transport long distance as well as other fuels. B) I would much rather come home each night to a gallon of ethanol produced from solar panels, than a charged battery that I would have to either move into the car I was using, or take the time and inefficiencies to charge the electric car, and have to carry extra weight of batteries also.
It would be more efficient just to run an electric heater.
Unless you're concerned about power outages, so you would like to store some electricity is Ethanol, which you could then burn later to power a generator or fuel-based heating system.
Battery storage is extremely efficient and pumped storage also isn't too bad.
Each battery is efficient in its operation, BUT Batteries are extremely capital-intensive to purchase, to manufacture, and require precious metals such as Copper to build.
On the other hand.... in order to store Ethanol, you just need some metal tanks which are cheaper by orders of magnitude.....
... is the BATF defecating bricks.
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With respect such measures are nothing but cynical public relations measures meant to distract from combustion producing a lot of carbon dioxide in the first place. They are not intended to be taken seriously by anyone other than the naive. I'm no greenie, my wages come from coal and oil, so I'm not saying this due to political motivations.
As for writing about how efficient resistance heating is, that's after fuel has been burned, steam has gone through turbines, magnets have spun and losses have happened in transmission - so no - not efficient at all and demonstrates that you just put a gut feeling idea down without thinking. Your deadly in a sealed room furnace or those kerosene heaters that kill lots of people in the third world is better at warming a room - add proper ventilation and far better again.
This weird shit of scavenging carbon dioxide as if you are in a space capsule makes it very hard to take you seriously on top of all that especially since it's not the carbon dioxide that is going to kill you.
You appear to have jumped to a long list of conclusions yourself. "Much better to do ..." when you don't know what input is required and if it is less than or more than the alternative you give.
All a bit silly when the thing that really matters is if this is a better way to get ethanol than some other ones in use.
I suppose it is silly, but it's in response to another poster. This may be a great way to produce ethanol, but it's almost certainly a very bad way to produce room heat from wall electricity. If you think that's a "long list of conclusions" that are in some way questionable, then by all means, let's see the questions.
If the process is 60% efficient, there is instantly 40% loss even before you load the product onto a truck - let alone drive it anywhere.
If used in a heat engine then it's likely to only be about 40% efficient in the energy use there so if used to power cars, there's a total energy efficiency of 24%, and that's if you filled up your car right at the point where the stuff is made without having to deliver the fuel anywhere in a truck - compared to storing the power in a battery where the powerpoint to wheel efficiency for say, a Tesla is about 70%https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/wells-to-wheels-electric-car-efficiency/
Still a worthwhile technology pursuing though - especially if efficiency can be improved further - and congrats to the team for such a breakthrough.
Indeed - so bad that it looks like grasping at straws trying to find something wrong and settling on a ridiculous application.
It makes me suspect that you have some sort of motive to go to the trouble of tying things in knots in such a ridiculous way.
The other product of the reaction is oxygen. You can't get energy out of ethanol without "burning" it, which would require an oxidizer (probably oxygen), however, you could make ethanol, discard it, and the people could breathe the oxygen generated.
If it's a pretty efficient process, the oxygen might be the "killer app" for Mars purposes, not the ethanol.
--PM
The price of batteries is quickly dropping and there are other battery types that show promise for grid storage such as liquid metal batteries. It sounds like the main bottleneck now is the seals to keep air out, otherwise the batteries should be fairly inexpensive and use common materials. This article describes where things are at with liquid metal batteries.
Tesla has said that their grid batteries use NMC, nickel, manganese, cobalt and lithium. Lithium ion batteries typically contain only 3% lithium. The cells should support 5000 charge/discharge cycles, or over 13 years with full daily cycling.. Of course the cells won't be fully cycled every day so they should have a very long life.
Lithium typically is less than 1% the cost of the batteries.
Ethanol for energy storage will be extremely inefficient, especially when one takes into account the costs and energy to:
1. Extract CO2
2. Filter the water to remove contaminants
3. Generate the ethanol
4. separate ethanol from water (which tends to be energy intensive since ethanol loves water)
5. convert the ethanol back into electricity
Liquid metal batteries and pumped storage are currently around 70% efficient. Lithium ion batteries are over 90% efficient. Using ethanol will be significantly lower. Batteries will also require a lot less maintenance.
The efficiency increase from using batteries would more than pay for itself long-term since this option also will likely require a lot more maintenance.
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Similar to using over production of solar to pump water to a higher elevation and then release it through a turbine to generate electricity at night. Obviously this requires there to be more wind and solar plants in use. But it is an interesting idea.
So the goal here is to take a low carbon footprint technology and turn it into a high one by burning ethanol at least part of the time. That doesn't sound like an amazing plan to me.
Live in a State that mandates a silly low alcohol content for your beer? Drop in the catalyst, hook it to a battery and voila! Problem solved.
So combine this with the easier part (combustion) for an at least semi-closed system?
This is a nice shortcut on the path to synthesis of glucose. A lot of agricultural can be ended going forward. https://slashdot.org/journal/2...
As a way to make ethanol it sounds very interesting. Lot's of places with too much CO2/power and not enough Rum (nuclear submarines, power plants, Mars). As a way to increase "efficiency" in the power grid not so much.
As others have pointed out, there's nothing in the article about the energy efficiency of this process.
The 63% called out in TFA refers to the percentage of carbon dioxide converted.
Certainly sounds cheap and easy to ramp into commercial production!
convert the ethanol back into electricity
OK..... Fair enough.... let's consider another scenario though. Suppose you just want Ethanol to drink.
For some reason, Ethanol made from Corn, Barley, or Wheat is ridiculously and terribly expensive.
A pint can cost $20 easily.
Perhaps the energy efficiency isn't all that matters.... if this can reduce the cost of drinkable ethanol to say $0.10 a gallon, and
make it widely available --- cheaper than milk at the grocery store.
The fuel product produced is not just energy; Ethanol has the special property that it is consumable by biological life forms.
The ethanol solution could then be cultured with bacteria to consume the ethanol to produce things with nutritional value.
This means we could potentially convert all the world's farmland into solar power plants, stop growing crops --- store our energy in batteries;
use the excess Electricity with a catalyst to produce Ethanol.
And have the entire human population survive by drinking Ethanol and ethanol-products for the calories, instead of farmed crops.
The ability to convert Electricity into food with a re-usable catalyst could also make sure there's never a food shortage again.
*GASP* We can't do this! How will Soros, DiCaprio, Gore, and the rest of the Davos elites control the world with tech like this available?!?
For some reason, Ethanol made from Corn, Barley, or Wheat is ridiculously and terribly expensive.
A pint can cost $20 easily.
Perhaps the energy efficiency isn't all that matters.... if this can reduce the cost of drinkable ethanol to say $0.10 a gallon, and make it widely available --- cheaper than milk at the grocery store.
Grain alcohol in bulk is in the $1-2 per gallon range already - better than milk prices in my region at least. Most people don't drink it pure. The $20/pint price buys you something reportedly much different than pure ethanol. Also there are the taxes for beverages of course.
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You've got a three-digit UID here and you're calling me a 'grandparent'? Screw you!
As I read it, TFA _does_ give a clue as to efficiency.
60% of the electrons are used for producing ethanol.
Equilibrium potential for the ethanol reaction is 84 mV.
The total voltage that is used is 1.2V, which is 14 times as high.
That means that only 7% of the voltage is used effectively.
This gives a total energy of a little over 4%.
In the conclusion, this is mentioned as "The overpotential (which might be lowered with the proper electrolyte, and by separating the hydrogen production to another catalyst) probably precludes economic viability for this catalyst"
So, they don't (dare to) mention efficiency directly, but data is presented by which it can be calculated.
... I meant "this gives a total efficiency of a little over 4%"
Need to proofread better...
HVDC going all over the place is only in a few select places - and only crosses shallow water.
Even using HVDC, the oft-proposed "fill the Sahara with solar plants" would need the largest engineering project ever devised by mankind to get the electricity to europe (plus there's that pesky bit of water in the way, most of which is far too deep for power cables)
CO2 to Ethanol to heavier hydrocarbon is also useful in itself, because you can't run transport aircraft on batteries (they don't have sufficient energy density). This is the kind of "thing" where lowish conversion efficiency is tolerated because the overall benefit is worthwhile.
It's impossible for anything to be either carbon neutral or negative as you would have created a perpetuum mobile. You convert carbonated water in ethanol - you first have to carbonate the water, then convert it into ethanol by supplying power. If it were neutral, you could use the ethanol to power the device, if negative the carbonated water would act as a fuel.
The only way a thing is carbon neutral is if you prevent all carbon sinks from being destroyed and plant a significant amount of trees per cubic meter of CO2 produced.
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I'm astonished that the discussion has gone on so long without the original paper in Wiley's "Chemistry Select being linked to. Even more astonishing (or depressing, if you like to think of Slashdotters averaging one or two more braincells than the average) is that no-one has commented on the fact that the paper is available without having to go through Wiley's paywall.
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