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Company That Sucks CO2 From Air Announces a New Methane-Producing Plant (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Swiss company Climeworks has announced the opening of a new plant in Italy that will collect carbon dioxide (CO2) from ambient air and pair it with renewably-made hydrogen (H2) to make methane fuel that would add little or no CO2 to the atmosphere. The plant in Troia, Italy, was completed in July and went into operation this week as part of a research program funded by the European Union. The new Italian plant will be run for more than 4,000 hours over the next 17 months (that's just under eight hours a day) in order to demonstrate the viability of fuel production as a potential revenue source for carbon capture. Gebald said that pure, captured CO2 could even be processed into jet fuel. When that fuel is burned, he said, it would again create CO2 that could be captured at an arbitrary Direct Air Capture plant and turned back into jet fuel.
The plant consists of three air collectors that are more energy efficient than Climeworks' first ambient air collector. "The plant will filter up to 150 tons of CO2 from ambient air per year," Climeworks said in a press statement. "Simultaneously, an alkaline electrolyser (1.2 MW) locally generates 240 cubic meters of renewable hydrogen per hour by making use of excess on-site photovoltaic energy." A catalyst then combines the CO2 and the hydrogen into methane gas in a reactor built by a French company called Atmostat. The methane "is then liquified and used to fuel natural gas lorries," Climeworks says. As Ars notes, Climeworks' previous carbon-capture plant "captured carbon out of ambient air using a filter of base amines that would bind with more acidic CO2." The carbon that was captured was then sent to a greenhouse to speed plant growth.
"The second was based in Iceland at a geothermal plant that released some volcanic CO2," reports Ars. "Climeworks' small plant captures that carbon and injects it back into the ground, where mineral reactions help the CO2 bind with basalt, essentially storing the gas as a rock."
The plant consists of three air collectors that are more energy efficient than Climeworks' first ambient air collector. "The plant will filter up to 150 tons of CO2 from ambient air per year," Climeworks said in a press statement. "Simultaneously, an alkaline electrolyser (1.2 MW) locally generates 240 cubic meters of renewable hydrogen per hour by making use of excess on-site photovoltaic energy." A catalyst then combines the CO2 and the hydrogen into methane gas in a reactor built by a French company called Atmostat. The methane "is then liquified and used to fuel natural gas lorries," Climeworks says. As Ars notes, Climeworks' previous carbon-capture plant "captured carbon out of ambient air using a filter of base amines that would bind with more acidic CO2." The carbon that was captured was then sent to a greenhouse to speed plant growth.
"The second was based in Iceland at a geothermal plant that released some volcanic CO2," reports Ars. "Climeworks' small plant captures that carbon and injects it back into the ground, where mineral reactions help the CO2 bind with basalt, essentially storing the gas as a rock."
That's my methane-producing plant!
Would it not be more efficient to put the excess electricity into the grid, or even use the hydrogen in a fuel cell to power EVs? Burning fuel in an ICE is very inefficient.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Just "pulling CO2" from air does not mean there won't be other GHG emissions at various elevations.
Additionally, how much energy does it take to do this? Did we get this energy from solar panel or wind turbine excess energy, where we turn on the devices only when the price of energy craters due to oversupply, or is this intended to run 24/7/365? Or do they (as many processes do) use electricity generated from fossil fuels to run the machines?
Is that energy shipped long distances, with power loss, or are we literally storing this in the exact same place we're running the machines?
In most energy and emissions scenarios, we find the correct answer to a problem is not "store CO2", but instead is "build more renewable energy faster" and use the excess energy to manufacture more renewable energy generation, distribution, and energy storage. Exceptions tend to be on islands and in places disconnected from energy grids. In planning, we can easily achieve quantities of scale in solar and wind to run at 120 percent power supply, since the curves of both sources tend to complement in a way that actually fits consumer, commercial, and industrial power usage.
It's like the areas of China and parts of the US where they seed clouds, but then have negative consequences from altering the weather patterns, which creates unintended negative externalities that destroy crops, create more deserts, or damage hydro facilities. Sometimes the solution is more expensive than other available methods.
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Okay, that's a start.
All we need are about 15 million more of these plants and we'd be fine, right?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Usual bad reporting from a zealot.
No answers about what the process costs. Who is the target market for the methane. Why aren't they going forward with their prior project to convert steel plant waste gas to fuel.
If they then make methane out of the carbon, which is burned...
CO2 capture is taking carbon permanently out of the air - unburning the carbon that was burned in the first place. This scheme should be called RECYCLING carbon - which isn't nearly as bad as digging up coal, but it isn't "cleaning" the air if it is sold as methane. It should be buried as rock or coal to be environmentally friendly instead of environmentally neutral.
This is a research project. You shouldn't nitpick irrelevant details.
The point is to make CH4 from captured CO2. What they do with the CH4 after that is immaterial.
I think they mean for airplanes. Jet fuel can't be substituted for electricity yet, energy density and conversion rates are too low. You'd spend most of the energy lugging around the spent batteries anyway. Airplanes get more efficient as they run out of fuel, since it makes them lighter.
Fun fact: very large airplanes can not land once they take off, because the take off weight plus fuel exceeds max landing weight. If there is an emergency, airplanes have essentially carte Blanche authority to dump fuel to get to landing weight. This is also one reason why many flights don't fill tanks to the brim. If you made it to your destination having not burned enough fuel, not only have you spent extra lugging that fuel you didn't need, you'd also have to dump it before landing, since that is too much stress for landing gear.
is as far as I see this going.
Efficiency.
Kerosene is the current oil supply chain bottleneck. Doesn't matter if we cut down use of other oil distillates. Planes need the kerosene, and you get a very specific amount of kerosene from oil that doesn't vary to a significant degree between various oils.
That means that even if we were to say cut our use of gasolene, we can't afford to refine less oil, because growing civil aviation needs more kerosene. If we can actually generate kerosene from this process with any kind of meaningful cost effectiveness, we stand to benefit tremendously from less need to refine oil.
Unless they put it back into the atmosphere.
In which case it's worse than literally doing nothing.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
In which case it's worse than literally doing nothing.
If it reduces the need to use oil for fuel then it's good. The future is going to need plastics too.
You have to store methane at cryogenic temperatures to keep it liquid, we need electricity to liquids at room temperature, not electricity to gas.
Interesting point. I suspect there is a fair bit of flexibility in the system - stuff that we could turn into kerosene with a bit more processing, but currently don't because there is a market for it in it current form; also possibilities that we could fuel jets with alternative hydrocarbons - I think the turbines could easily take anything which is liquid, low viscosity, and burns easily.
There is serious money from serious airplane companies going into researching electric (battery) aircraft, but in the foreseeable future this might be your 50 seater commuter plane doing a one hour hop, it won't be a long haul flight.
Responding to grandparent post: I don't think the prospect of fuel dumping has any significant effect on the fuel loading decisions. They load enough fuel to reach the destination plus extra for contingencies (I think typically enough for 90 minutes of holding plus time to fly to alternate landing airport, sometimes more if weather delays seem likely.)
So safety sets a lower limit, and economics discourages you from loading any more than that limit. If you have too much fuel, you need to use more fuel to keep it in the air. A number I remember (not reliable) is about 3% per hour. So if two jets identical except in fuel load fly for 10 hours, the plane which started with 1000kg more fuel will end up with only 700kg more fuel. (Yes, there are circumstance where you might load extra fuel, especially for short haul flights.)
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So it's a CO2 capture and release program ;D.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
And then the CO2 returns to the air, in an endless cycle.
Why do you think airlines (e.g. Virgin), aircraft manufacturers (e.g. Boeing) and others (US military for example) are spending big bucks to look for more sustainable replacements for jet fuels?
A number of jet flights have taken place using either 100% biofuels or biofuel blends and a lot more work is being done.
Can they suck the CO2 directly out of the asses of Democrat Party hacks?
The "serious money going into researching electric battery" is pointless on aircraft. The only thing we theoretically know of that could potentially, maybe, perhaps, in ideal scenario meet the energy density needs of commercial aircraft is lithium air.
Lithium air batteries are like fusion power, except that where fusion power is perpetually "50 years away", lithium air batteries are perpetually "20 years away". This hasn't changed in last 30 years or so, and it's unlikely to change for foreseeable future, as just like with fusion power, every breakthrough brings understanding of significant additional problems. Modern electric aircraft prototyping is overwhelmingly done with various lithium ion battery variants, which cannot meet the requirements even in theory. Energy density is simply far too low.
Taking carbon from the atmosphere, turning it into fuel and burning it is better in terms of climate change than taking carbon trapped in the ground, turning it into fuel and burning it. Especially if the energy used to produce the fuel from the atmospheric carbon came from a renewable source.
Problem being, ethanol in engines doesn't really work all that well. Engine wear and tear goes to hell, and energy density of ethanol is significantly lower than that of kerosene so flights become much shorter and fuel expenditure patterns go through the roof. The efforts you mention are basically initial preparatory movements for the "oil is several hundred USD a barrel" scenario, where ethanol blends basically will be "emergency replacement" for kerosene when it's so exorbitantly expensive, something has to be done for shorter flights where range is not of significant concern.
Consider that the major revolutionary factor that pushed the industry in recent decades is the proliferation of "point to point" long haul flying on twin engine aircraft. Fuel economy of modern twin engine models is absolutely critical for this model. Biofuels crash it.
There is an opinion that hydrogen is very volatile and difficult to store, thus making hydrogen fuel cells impractical. This might explain why they never came to be, despite Bush Jr administration pushing for their development.
> Would it not be more efficient to put the excess electricity into the grid
The demand on the electric grid peaks in the evening, after work (and when everyone turns on lights). Solar-electric produces virtually no electricity in the evening. So no, direct to the grid solar electric doesn't work at scale. It can work of 1% of your electricity comes from solar, and you're using other sources for when you need a lot of electricity. It can "work" for one company if the taxpayers are paying them to produce and waste electricity at noon. It doesn't work for powering a city, because a city needs electricity at times other than noon-ish, and on cloudy days too.
I did a project on hydrogen fuel cells back in fifth grade because the basic concept seems so cool. Unfortunately, once you get past 5th-grade level, you find out that actual HFC cars have a range of less than 100 miles, and since the hydrogen is at 10,000 PSI refueling is a BITCH. It's a significant service process that as to be done every 100 miles. Also figuring 800 square inches of tank surface, that's 8 million pounds of explosive pressure in your car, waiting to divide you and the car into tiny pieces when there is a failure. You do NOT want to get into a major accident with a hydrogen tank in your car! Fortunately there is a really good solution to all of the problems.
Most of the problems with hydrogen go away with a little carbonation. Just mix in some CO2 and suddenly things work a LOT better. LPG vehicles have been proven in real commercial use for a long time. This company is making carbon-neutral LPG by capturing CO2 from the air and re-using it. If they can do that with noon-time solar electric (which would otherwise go to waste) and be within two orders of magnitude of reasonable efficiency, that's a huge win.
I think he means turning CO2 into methane and then releasing the methane.
I thought Methane was a 1000x more of a greenhouse gas than CO2? Nothing is leakproof. Over time little gaps in seals are going to go unnoticed. Is the small leaks in methane > than the bulk of the total CO2 removed in terms of greenhouse impact?
hurry up nano-assemblers..... pure carbon would make great diamond structures or graphite/graphine stuctures.
Hydrogen = 1.75 kWh/liter
240 cubic meter/h = 240,000 liter/h or ~20T of hydrogen/h
Electrolyser = 1.2 MWh
That means they produce 420 MW of energy for 1.2 MW of input.
They are generating 'free' energy from 150T of CO2 in the air? Something sounds really wrong.
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Carte blanc---unless the problem that's causing you to land also prevents your from dumping fuel. I got the not-recommended experience of cutting donuts in the sky in a military (i.e., no windows to even sight-see out of) plane for 8+ hours getting down to a weight we could land at. Oh, and the problem also affected the brakes. Thankfully we had a very, very long runway to land on. Landing was uneventful thankfully. That was almost as bad as getting stuck in a middle seat in the middle section on a packed flight from Chicago to Hawaii. Nah, not even close.
You should nitpick the details. 240 cubic meters = 240,000 L. You're producing more energy than you're putting in.
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FC Cars are nothing like you describe. Range is 300+ miles. Fueling is under 5 minutes from empty and generally un-eventful. The H2 supply chain breaks down far more often than the cars or the fueling stations (and the supply chain is getting better).
H2 tanks are extensively tested including such items as shooting them with 50 cal bullets. It takes two bullets to the same location to pierce the tank, and then it is a leak and the H2 gas that goes straight up. If it ignites, all the flame goes straight up as well. It is very hard to create an explosive mixture, and even then the explosive over-pressure is not really an explosion (a refinery in Wilmington, CA had a very large H2 tank explode a number of years ago. I felt the pressure wave 15 miles away. Even though many people were on site, no one was even injured.) I always wondered if H2 was a greenhouse gas. The answer is no as it actually escapes into space and literally leaves the planet (Helium does this as well). There are design differences, but generally H2 is far safer than gasoline car. Even a BEV car has real safety issues. Did you know the fire department needs to "saw" two spots on a Tesla Model 3 to break the high voltage "loop".
Reliability is also very good with 100K miles warranty and almost no required maintenance. Even the breaks last forever. I drive my FC car every day and it is an excellent car that gets me where I want to go in safety and comfort. My closest H2 station is about 4 miles away with 2 others within 15 miles. I see other FC cars on the road most days. 5100+ in California. http://www.cafcp.org./
Why not extract CO2 from the exhaust pipe of a regular coal/gas power plant. Surely the CO2 concentration there is hundreds of times higher than in ambient air?
240m^3 of hydrogen gas, presumably at standard conditions is roughly 24l of gasoline equivalent, or roughly 210kWh equivalen. 1.2MW in -> 0.2MW out. Pretty miserable use of energy.
It's coning out of the melting tundra. Just collect that.
You know, maybe we should learn how to produce energy without having to burn shit. It's so damn primitive. The air is full of electricity.
You're producing more energy than you're putting in.
No they are not.
It takes energy to capture the CO2 from the atmosphere.
It takes more energy to generate the hydrogen. The hydrogen generator consumes 1.2Mw of power and produces 240 cubic meters of H2. A cubic meter of H2 has a mass of 90 grams, and has about 12.5 Mj of energy.
(240 m^3 * 12.5 Mj/m^3 / 3600) / 1.2 Mw = 70% efficiency for electricity to H2
There is no way this process is net energy positive.
You shouldn't nitpick details, you're citing units of volume and then going on about energy.
This is a personal "you" rather than the generic.
So it's a CO2 capture and release program ;D.
Yes, funny, but probably quite A C C U R A T E!
Presumably the volume to energy coversions assume an oxidation reaction. A certain volume of hydrogen H_2 at room temperature and atmospheric pressure will release some deterministic amount of energy when oxidized. E.g. 1m^3 and 210kWh respectively.
How so? How is it worse than doing nothing?
They pull 100T of carbon out of the air.. They burn it.. 100T goes back..
Do nothing.... 100T just sits there in the air..
How is doing nothing better? Do you think that if they pull 100T out and burn it, there will be more than 100T in the air?
We can't create elements with chemical processes..
Doh.... Yeah, I misunderstood that myself.. Although I have to wonder why anyone would pull carbon out of the air to turn it into methane and then.. what? release the methane into the air? Why would anyone do that?
Energy is, for practical purposes, a non-finite supply..
If you can use 10,000MW of solar to create 100MW of chemical energy, with a carbon-neutral footprint, why shouldn't you?
It's waaaaaaay easier to store chemical energy than solar. You can't pour solar into your gas tank and you can take all the chemical energy you need, in a couple of jerry cans, to drive all the way across the United States.. You can't do that with solar..
A battery is just as heavy full as empty.. But when you zip around burning chemical energy, your car gets a few pounds lighter for every gallon you burn.. You use less and less and less energy to travel the same distance.. This does not happen with batteries..
Seems like you should've flown where you were going
Burning fuel in an ICE is very inefficient.
Agreed. They should just pipe the methane into peoples homes, and make more of that H2 for fuel cell cars. As long as they can do all of that with renewable power we're good to go.
J
You won't be flying across the Atlantic on an electric airplane any time soon. But much like EVs vs ICEs there's a lot of ~1 hour short hop routes that could possibly - if jet fuel prices and emission regulations demand it - be done electrically.
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You can't pour solar into your gas tank
You can pour it into your battery, and run your EV. That's good enough.
You use less and less and less energy to travel the same distance.. This does not happen with batteries..
Batteries, on the other hand, can use regenerative braking. Also, an EV is much more energy efficient.
Planes need the kerosene, and you get a very specific amount of kerosene from oil that doesn't vary to a significant degree between various oils.
Not true. You can convert heaver fractions to lighter ones using cracking. And you can convert lighter to heavier using catalysts.
I think he doesn't mean burning it. He means if they release it as Methane. Methane is a very strong greenhouse gas and one of the likely causes of a runaway greenhouse effect if the arctic melts totally. The best thing to do with methane is to leave it in the ground or burn it if it's already released.
No, but it's using energy that would otherwise have gone to waste and is being captured in a form that is stable and, easily stored in a compact way. Yes you could use the solar to charge batteries with greater efficiency/less loss but to store the equivalent amount of energy you'd need batteries weighing at least an order of magnitude more and probably an order of magnitude more space too.
The problem with electric stuff right now is we don't have a good way of storing it; Cars are a great example; Compare the fuel tank with a a battery - The fuel and fuel tank in an ICE are negligible in terms of size and weight and car manufacturers will happily shrink them down to make more space in the car because they know the range won't be affected significantly.
In an EV, well, there hasn't been a single small EV that has anything more than toy car range, because a battery with range even near a small ICE car would take up more space and weight than the rest of the car.
This is why all EVs with near-ICE range are massive american-sized cars or crossover/SUV's, and small EVs are marketed as city cars for short commutes and shopping trips but they gloss over the fact you'd need another car to go visit a mid+ distance friend/relative or spend extra journey hours charging.
I actually want an electric car because electric motors are awesome, but I had a small diesel car which no EV has even gotten close to the size of and it can go 600 miles on 35 litres of diesel!
I want an electric car even more now since legislation forcing me to get rid of my diesel car or pay ~£4000 a year to live and drive in this shithole city has forced me to buy an equivalent petrol car, which is gutless and not enjoyable to drive, can barely do 350 miles on the same fuel and is chucking out 30% more CO2, cost 20% more to insure and costs 200% more in fuel!
Sorry, went on a bit of a rant, still bitter about being suckered by the bait-and-switch going on with cars here at the moment ("Hey buy a diesel! They're good for the environment and have low CO2! They're cheaper to run, super efficient on fuel and we give huge tax breaks! Doeeeit! You know it makes sense!" -> "Get rid of your diesel right now! You're single-handedly poisoning the WHOLE planet! Penalties penalties penalties for you dirty diesel driver!"
Methane is roughly 70 times worse than CO2 in terms of the greenhouse effect. Not only is the gas itself about 30 times better than absorbing heat, but it decomposes into CO2 in the upper atmosphere which is worse for trapping heat than CO2 released at ground level.
So if they pull CO2 out of the air, make it into methane, then just vent it.. that's significantly worse than doing nothing.
Luckily that's not what they're doing.
=Smidge=
That's bunk; That's like saying nuclear waste is safe because the containers can survive a train crash.
Of all fueling technologies I'd say all diesel is the safest fuel technology by far since it doesn't burn readily. Its main danger is if it gets out, it is slippery and doesn't evaporate and can be a major road hazard if emergency services don't clean it up properly. Diesel fires can be damned fierce if they get started, but since starting one is so difficult I'll leave it. Left on its own, diesel is pretty inert.
Lithium batteries are the next safest; They are generally safe if treated nicely and left to their own devices are pretty safe and inert - Their main danger is from puncture or overheat which can trigger fairly horrific combustion events that are basically impossible to put out; You have to just let them burn out - This means some safety has to be engineered in - Armoured battery cases, cooling and monitoring systems. Done well, these are very safe.
Petrol for me is next; It's so volatile that a spark in the wrong place can set it off which is why petrol stations yell at you for using mobile phones; Even the static on your car could set it off if you run your tank quite empty and go to refuel and all the vapours came out at once, but fortunately most tanks are designed to stop this happening, Left to its own devices, it will readily evaporate into a combustible layer just waiting for something to set it off or be blown away by the wind.
H2 for me is the most dangerous - It's volatile as heck and will diffuse through almost anything. It attacks almost all metals, making them brittle, and has to be stored under high pressure to hold any useful amount.
That is why the tanks are so safe - They have to be over-engineered to heck because if they start leaking it's far more dangerous than any of the above 3.
With liquid fuels, they have to be transformed into a gas first, which slows down their burn at least a little; Hydrogen is already a gas so it'll just go up all in one go if ignited.
It can be safe when handled properly, but given that humans have proven time and time again that we're fucking idiots, I find the idea of normal fuckwit humans using hydrogen in their cars on a mass scale slightly terrifying.
Planes need the kerosene, and you get a very specific amount of kerosene from oil that doesn't vary to a significant degree between various oils.
That is wrong on so many levels and ignores the fact that refineries have been doing more than simply distilling fuel for the best part of 20 years. The vast majority of jet fuel these days is created from heavier fractions through hydrocracking. The pre-treating requirements to protect the catalysts in this process results in a cleaner nicer kero than you would get from straight run distilliation anyway.
You can create jet fuel from pretty much every cracking process though some processes result in a fuel that needs to be further treated ... just as plain old distillation does.
Until and unless they tell us what it costs to make a liter of Jet-A from CO2 pulled out of the air, this is an article about a parlor trick.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It means that fossil fuels can be made it a 100% sustainable, renewable, recycled, green process. (Not actually fossil then, buy you get what I mean.)
Which is what I always said should be done.
With fuel cells of course, so the waste products are clean. And ideally collecting that waste right away, without letting it go to the atmosphere.
Since the energy density is so insanely much higher than any batteries we have, let alone rechargeable ones, while being about the same in terms of safety/toxicity. (Lithium is very harmful, both in mining and in terms of risks. It isn't a strong psychiatric medication for nothing either.)
If we can fly robots to freaking Mars, and cure cancer using modified HIV, we should get out of our asses and be able to handle this!
Isn't this the Sabatier process that will hopefully be used on Mars to produce Methane fuel there?
That’s the whole "plant": https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/puglia_27settembre2018_120-768x512.jpg
Building, management rooms, attached research facility, everything.
I have lived in houses bigger than that!
You think you made a joke, but if we'd put full-sized plants around the globe the way we put power plants everywhere, we'll probably end up with way more than 15 million of this. Hell, given the advantages of scaling, I can imagine a *single* large plant doing 15 million times the work of this one.
Doesn't make sense combined with the fact that aircraft must carry extra fuel to reach an alternate destination or taxi for an hour. Not all flights spiral in the air all the time.
But how will we hector the common folk into stone age living (well, except for their ipads, electric cars, and other trendy stuff) if we can recapture carbon??
Unless they put it back into the atmosphere.
In which case it's worse than literally doing nothing.
No. It is a frigging RESEARCH PROJECT! It is not about "doing anything" it is about exploring possibilities.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Forests are dying rapidly as too much CO2 is taken out of atmosphere.
Actually, batteries weigh less discharged than charged; and the difference in mileage between a full and empty tank is minimal, such that a 25mpg car can travel 300 meters further on an empty tank than a full tank (if it can magically burn the same amount of fuel as a full tank along the way, without carrying the tank of fuel itself).
Our grid isn't 100% clean energy, so there's always load to offset at the moment. You can put the solar energy right on the grid.
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The only net-energy-positive process I've yet found is a differential thermal generator--a heat pump connected to a heat engine, using adiabatic recuperation and taking advantage of the fact that atmosphere isn't one uniform temperature (you belch cold air out the exhaust, and you're sucking warmer air into the intake).
The engineers don't like it. They tell me it'll work, but you'll never get much energy density: it's going to look fancy running itself while producing maybe enough excess energy to also light up an LED bulb. This is because of the heat differential: the hot side is not that much hotter than the cold side, and it takes energy to make it hot.
I have suggested that a machine which sucks in atmosphere and compresses it is a heat pump because the thermal energy in 100L of atmosphere still exists when that mass is reduced to 1L--hence why it gets frigging hot--and so you can create relatively large temperature differentials. Nobody's buying it, although they maintain it does work--in the same way one of those spinning radiometers, in that it works but it's totally useless.
Of course, the earth would be a frozen black rock without the sun pouring energy into it all the time: it's just a fancy solar generator.
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That was actually one of Dr.Evil's plans (global warming... ``that too, has already happened'').
I think he means turning CO2 into methane and then releasing the methane.
The release lever is finger-shaped, and you have to pull it.
Efficiency? Nonsense.
Just have a room full of people and have them eat Taco Bell.
We don't have a great way to make electricity portable, storing it as heat is pretty easy.
the methan is like a little charged battery. ...
under nirmal pressure it is a gas and if you add some pressure it is liquid.
these batteries can be filled into a tank rather faster then brewing and drinking a cup of coffee.
next the depleted batteries can be ejected to the general athmosphere from which they find their way back to a climatech recharging facility
That's only true if the energy used to go from CO2 to CH4 is carbon neutral (which it probably is not). If the energy source isn't carbon neutral, than you're adding more carbon to the atmosphere than you started with.
Essentially "make jet fuel, or make golden jet fuel. That you burn".
You can even make it out of sea water if you wanted to. Not just kerosene, you can make gold out of sea water.
Still doesn't make it viable.
You won't be flying anywhere with a meaningful payload. Atlantic is not even close to the ranges being the problem. You can't even fly a couple of hundred kilometres with a meaningful payload, and no one is even thinking of thousands kilometres outside the hyper slow semi-gliders like Solar Impulse.
That is 100% correct.
Without a great deal of additional infrastructure, you can't pull the 100T out of the air without expending energy in ways that will increase the amount of carbon in the air. People gotta drive to work to build and operate the plant, and so forth.
Now, if you do build out the clean infrastructure required, you can do a one-time pollution event (think, for example, of creating solar panels - it's not a pollution free process, but over the lifetime of the panels energy is returned with less pollution than any other available method) instead of an ongoing one.
So someday we may have problems with irresponsible countries greedily pulling too much CO2 out of the atmosphere?
Your comparison with nuclear waste is as off-point as the rest of your post. If anything, a hydrogen leak is the least destructive event of any fuel leak. Gas and diesel are famous for pollution. Your example of nuclear waste is obvious. BEV battery fires produce all sorts of toxic gasses and hazardous left overs. A hydrogen fire/explosion produces water. If it does not burn, it heads into space. There is zero environmental impact.
Your analysis of hydrogen safety ignores a lot of research. The most important point is that at STP, hydrogen while flammable and even explosive if mixed with air, has a very low energy content. The energy content is low because because the gas is so light. 1/16 the weight of oxygen. About 78 W/hours per cu feet (not kw/hours).
The second point you miss is that hydrogen aggressively goes straight up when there is a leak. Gasoline and diesel pool. Even worse for gasoline, the vapors can pool and ignite. Hydrogen just heads for the sky. There is an on-line video of a two cars, one hydrogen and one gasoline. Both are set on fire with a fuel leak. The gasoline car is melted down. The hydrogen car is basically intact and can even roll on it's own tires at the end.
If you look at hydrogen fueling stations, they either do not have roofs, or they are designed to vent up. Air Products had a leak from about 30 kg of hydrogen tanks on a delivery truck. The damage was minor. The over-reaction was the biggest issue. Even the truck drove away. Also, the other 170 kg of hydrogen, on the same truck, never burned. The accident itself was caused by a pressure release "burst disk", in this case the wrong pressure disk was installed.
Issues about metal embrittlement are interesting, but not on point. A hydrogen leak will not "attack metals". If you build a tank out of the wrong stuff, it will fail. Don't build the tank out of the wrong stuff. Gasoline attacks a lot of different rubber seals. It is the same for diesel. You have to build the hardware with appropriate materials. In the case of automobile hydrogen tanks, this is fiberglass, plastic, and Kevlar. Hydrogen cars, and hydrogen filling stations are a lot safer than gasoline. A purely compression explosion is an interesting thought experiment, but even in a major crash, it is not that much energy (compared to the crash). In such a case, the hydrogen will only make it a few feet sideways before heading skyward.
And you never withdrew your 100 mile range and fueling a BITCH comment. There are issues of cost, available supply, and round trip energy efficiency. Then again, for some applications, hydrogen FC vehicles work really well. Long haul trains where caternary wires are too expensive. Long haul trucks. For passenger cars, Toyota believes that FC tech will be cheaper to build than batteries. Not sure if they are right or not, but they have a lot of experience, so betting against them is dubious. And I would much rather have a FC car in Lake Tahoe in the winter at -10F that a BEV Bolt or Tesla.
The future is a plug-in hybrid. Hydrogen and a FC for range, and a small-ish battery. With 50 miles of BEV range and 300+ miles of FC range, you have a Chevy Volt that does not pollute at all. Hydrogen cost and round trip efficiency are not all that important as the plug-in battery does most of the miles for most people. This also mitigates the hydrogen round trip efficiency and cost. With a bigger battery, the FC can be smaller, so this combo costs less to build. The battery is still small enough to not need a "super charger", so the grid is not impacted as much. Mercedes has one of these in tests now. The reason they are not building this is that there needs to be demand for H2 stations first. This hybrid design is no more complicated that the stock FC design, it just has a bigger regen battery and the charging electronics. Plug in FCs is what will win for all but NEV applications (Neighborhood Electric Vehicle).
There are other ways of producing electricity. I think the real benefit of this project is that it *does* make fuel that can be burned in an ICE and can be used to fuel aircraft. The alternative would be to give up air flight, which nobody seems to be keen to do.
Considering that the average 1st world person is responsible for 10 - 20 tons of emissions per year.
They would need to *MASSIVELY* scale that system up, by many orders of magnitude, to make it a useful endeavor.
Cement factories, i.e. cement kilns are the CO2 emitters that are typically proposed as sources for CO2 to methane schemes. I have a problem with the word "kiln", it's a defiantly not Latin/Greek word so I always have to check that I should talk about "kilns" :)
These kilns are useful even if we get rid of all coal and gas, and are what allow millions tons of concrete produced yearly (the total world number is probably something big I can't comprehend). It is probably a lot cleaner that coal smokestacks.
On a gas power plant? Maybe it's very workable. It just would sound insane to burn all that natural gas for energy and then simultaneously use a ton of energy to make it into gas again. There's the exact same problem if you put the CO2 to gas plant a hundred mile away, but it is less obvious in your face. If the number work out though, why not. e.g. if gas power plant really is a peaker and storing CO2 while waiting for cheap energy for the conversion plant is not a problem.
Likely, the numbers don't work out because it's so energy intensive. It's the problems of the hydrogen economy minus asking your customers to store hydrogen.
But I'm all for it in specific places, or the far future, or if we can manage to live less energy intensive lives except for spending energy on this..
If we manage to get amazingly cheap solar and other energy, and amazingly cheap stationary storage but transportation is not solved in the same manner, this technology could work somewhat.
So, that's like the Matrix. If the machines wanted power they could have eaten the food they were feeding to the humans. I figure Morpheus didn't know what the fuck he was talking about and the machines for some reason didn't want to exterminate the humans.
This is not new. The US Navy has been working on this technology for what I'm guessing is at least a decade. What I'm guessing are the most notable differences are that they intend to get power from nuclear reactors, and perform this process at sea.
But we can't celebrate the US Navy working on this because to many in the "save the planet" group they see nuclear power as worse than global warming. Such people also tend to overlap with those that believe that no nation should have a military.
This gets a big yawn from me as it shows nothing that hasn't already been done. It does nothing to solve the real problems on where this energy comes from. Wind and solar power are inherently expensive and unreliable, nuclear power is not. Powering this process with any kind of carbon based fuel is simply nonsensical. Powering this with hydroelectric means we simply run out of hydro capacity more quickly, assuming that we haven't crossed that line decades ago. Thinking we can power this process with fusion reactors or some other not yet developed energy is just wishful thinking.
This process must get it's power from nuclear fission or it will not be successful any time soon.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
The terms "biofuel" and "sustainable" are contradictory. There are no biofuels that are sustainable now and the laws of physics prevent biofuels from ever being sustainable.
The reason that airlines are interested in biofuels is "greenwashing", they can advertise being "green" even if they know as a fact that such efforts are futile. Aircraft manufacturers and the military are interested in biofuels because in a fight for our lives against a suitably determined and capable adversary we might have to resort to means of self defense that under any other situation might be considered self destructive. Fueling airliners with biofuels would require so much land area, water, and so on, to produce that it could threaten the food supply of any nation that tried it. In a war the number of planes would be far smaller, and hopefully for such a short duration, that it would be of a greater threat to not turn cropland to producing fuel.
There's "big bucks" in research for defense because not investing in defense of the riches we have means the possibility of losing such riches to war. If you seek peace then prepare for war. Showing one is unable or unwilling to fight means being a big target for someone to come along and take over. We need this research done before it might be needed or risk losing everything.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Actually, batteries weigh less discharged than charged
I knew someone was going to say this.. And yeah, technically you are correct (E=mc2), but the difference is what? Billionths/Trillionths of a gram? For practical purposes there is no difference. We aren't talking quantum physics here.
and the difference in mileage between a full and empty tank is minimal, such that a 25mpg car can travel 300 meters further on an empty tank than a full tank
I'll accept that, but 300 meters is 300 meters.. The weight difference is significant though. We aren't talking billionths of a gram. 30 gallons of gasoline weighs about 6 pounds per gallon... That's a 180 pound difference, approximately the weight of the average human male. Assuming 20mpg, every 20 minutes (at 60mph) your car is 6 pounds lighter...
Our grid isn't 100% clean energy, so there's always load to offset at the moment. You can put the solar energy right on the grid.
If you are tied to the grid.. Lots of solar facilities aren't..
Besides, as I pointed out, nobody (that I am aware of) makes an EV that will traverse the entire United States. I can, with my current gasoline vehicle, drive all the way across this continent without ever pulling into a gas station, if I so desire. I can take enough gasoline with me. Be it in jerry cans or a secondary fuel tank. You can't do that with batteries.. They'd weight too much.
Best I could find is that Tesla's 85kw battery pack weighs about 450kg. (roughly 1,000 lbs). Tesla claims 285 miles (we'll round up to 300) for the 85kw battery pack.. That's 10 battery packs.. 10,000 pounds... 5 TONS to cross the US.
The equivalent gasoline would weigh 900 pounds.. and we'll toss in 200 pounds for the tank. 1,100 pounds total.. just 100 pounds more than the tesla's single battery pack.
I never said solar wasn't more efficient or greener. I'm just saying that chemical storage of energy is going to be with us a while longer..
Why do you think it's dirty energy that will power this system? Nuclear, Solar, Hydro, Geothermal, Wind... all are viable sources.. I'd be surprised if this company would develop this... green technology (after all, it's way cheaper to just pump methane out of the ground) and then power it with fossil fuels. What would be the point?
I wouldn't be surprised that if this is ever built, they power it directly with solar. If for nothing else, it would be great PR.
Ah. I misunderstood the first time around.. Gotcha.
Kerosene is the current oil supply chain bottleneck. Doesn't matter if we cut down use of other oil distillates. Planes need the kerosene, and you get a very specific amount of kerosene from oil that doesn't vary to a significant degree between various oils.
That means that even if we were to say cut our use of gasolene, we can't afford to refine less oil, because growing civil aviation needs more kerosene. If we can actually generate kerosene from this process with any kind of meaningful cost effectiveness, we stand to benefit tremendously from less need to refine oil.
The amount of kerosene produced does not rely only on the kerosene fraction from the crude petroleum. For instance if we needed less gasoline, then the processing would be changed from fluid catalytic cracking to hydrocracking to produce more kerosene at the expense of gasoline. Other process changes would also be made to favor kerosene.
I wonder if fuel cells or flow batteries could be suitable for long distance air travel. I have difficulty imaging a 75 million watt nominal fuel cell or flow battery light enough for an aircraft but apparently some do exist at least as prototypes.
The "golden kerosene" does indeed exist as an option. USN has a process that extracts it from salt water for example.
As for "but we can just extract different amounts of kerosene from same oil", I keep hearing this myth, and asked about it from old friends I used to study with in university who went into hydrocarbon field several times. The answer has been universally the same across last two decades: "hypothetically possible, not realistically workable".
300 meters is 300 meters
It's 1/135 of the car's normal mileage; and the total change is between 0 and 1/135. It also matters less on continuous driving, since it mainly only impacts stop-and-go traffic.
I can, with my current gasoline vehicle, drive all the way across this continent without ever pulling into a gas station, if I so desire. I can take enough gasoline with me. Be it in jerry cans or a secondary fuel tank. You can't do that with batteries.. They'd weight too much.
You can stop and pour some of your (heavy) gasoline into the fuel tank, or you can pull into the gas station next to which you've stopped and use their gasoline.
There are 160kW charge stations; nobody has put more than 60kW charge circuitry in a car yet. 160kW can fill an 85kWh battery pack in half an hour. That's 4.75 hours of driving at 60mph, and 4 at 70mph--and that's without things like recuperative cooling (using a thin panel heat engine between the hot coolant loop and the radiator to generate electricity). A 30% gain in mileage would mean 5.3 hours at 70mph or 6.2 at 60mph on a half-hour charge at 160kW.
You're supposed to take a 40-minute rest every 4 hours.
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You're still missing the point. The energy density of gasoline is such that a person _could_ (not would) carry enough energy, in the form of gasoline, to cross the entire continent in one go. Total weight = about 1,100 lbs.
Total weight to cross the USA using batteries would weight at least 5x that under the best scenarios and, under published data, a lot closer to 10x.
If you're gonna keep up with the strawmen..... Rest stops are irrelevant to the discussion.
There are places in the United States where you are NOT going to find a recharge station.
CHEMICAL ENERGY will be with us for a while longer because, for the moment, the range it provides is superior and the "recharge" time is also superior.
You're still missing the point. The energy density of gasoline is such that a person _could_ (not would) carry enough energy, in the form of gasoline, to cross the entire continent in one go. Total weight = about 1,100 lbs.
Yes, and it would be stupid. A person would get slightly-better mileage, have greater cargo capacity, and face less of a logistics burden simply fueling up now and then.
Total weight to cross the USA using batteries would weight at least 5x that under the best scenarios
Which is also stupid. High-power charging stations will eventually roll out, just like gas stations did for petrol cars.
If you're gonna keep up with the strawmen
Who in the hell would carry gasoline around, instead of fueling up?
There are places in the United States where you are NOT going to find a recharge station.
Not right now. There was a time when cars ran on peanut oil because you generally didn't find gasoline stations. Farmers mostly pressed some of their crop for oil, used the dry mass for feed, and ran their little cars and farm trucks locally. Cross-country driving was a thing you did with horses, since there were stables and feed everywhere and not a lot of diesel or gasoline.
Charging stations require less infrastructure than gasoline stations (which get refilled by trucks coming with fuel, not by some kind of pipeline or other transmission system). If you have power, you can put up a charging station. If you don't have high-capacity power, you might put up a 40kW charging station, and folks coming that way may need to take an hour-long break or so to recharge.
It's also not unreasonable to supply a free (i.e. tax-funded) charging station along those stretch-of-nowhere places where there is no gasoline (somebody built road), but that's a whole different level of politics, philosophy, and logistics.
CHEMICAL ENERGY will be with us for a while longer because, for the moment, the range it provides is superior and the "recharge" time is also superior.
Not for unusually long. The time to refill is negligible, and we can route around all of these issues with little trouble--even for long-distance trucking (individual, parallel charging of battery packs at normal current across the batteries and the multiple chargers so they don't get super super hot, but your truck stop has a frigging substation in the back to handle the load).
The great majority of driving doesn't have these concerns, even at 10kW charging. You can charge your car overnight--you come home and plug in at all times, pulling 30 miles of range per hour of charging. With the 300-mile EVs (e.g. Chevy Bolt), the 200-mile trip from Baltimore to New York City amounts to three hours of charging during the round trip. That means if you drive to New York and intend to stay longer than a couple hours, you're good.
Note the Chevy Bolt, at 10kW, takes 6 hours to recharge from empty. At its capacity of 40kW, it's 1.5 hours. 600VDC level-3 charging at 120kW you're talking about half an hour to fully charge a 300-mile-range battery--but your vehicle has to support that.
Now: think of any car out there. Most have 250-300 mile range on a tank. How frequently does a person need to refuel? Once a day? Once a week? That's your normal electric vehicle usage case. Since you can refuel multiple times each day, it stands to reason most people won't have any trouble keeping the battery topped up.
Will we still have gasoline and diesel? Yes. Not in the everyday driver; people will have motorcycles from 1950 or 2018, and jet planes are going to suck fuel because you're not running that on battery. Will chemical cars be more than a fraction of new sales a decade from now? Potentially not--even as-is, most people can charge on the slow 3.3kW charger at home each night, never mind having a $2,000 Chargepoint insta
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Will we still have gasoline and diesel? Yes.
Jesus Christ.. All that b.s. to come to the exact conclusion I laid out... I said WE WILL HAVE CHEMICAL ENERGY FOR A WHILE LONGER.
A WHILE.. Not forever.. Not for a long time.. A WHILE..
Plus, you're delusional... Battery packs are HEAVY... For fuck's sake, the Tesla has a thousand pounds of batteries.. To go 300 miles... The same range in gasoline is 90 pounds... Pure EV vehicles, RIGHT NOW TODAY, are impractical where I live. Most people have a hybrid, if they have a green vehicle, because 300 miles might not cut it, and it's still A WHOLE LOT FASTER to fill the fuel tank up. Under your best scenario you laid out 30 minute recharge time.. FUCK THAT. Less than 5 mins to fuel up my truck and go..
Come back and talk to me when the weight is the same, the recharge times are the same.. And your whole "most people drive" blah blah blah.. Here in CA we drive A LOT. It's a big state.. ah fuck it.. I've already made my point.. You're just gonna keep up with the bullshit.. I give up..
All that b.s. to come to the exact conclusion I laid out... I said WE WILL HAVE CHEMICAL ENERGY FOR A WHILE LONGER.
Then you made a meaningless statement. We will have horse-drawn carts for a while longer; petrol cars are obviously inferior, for the moment, and gasoline isn't ready.
Gasoline will go the way of the horse-drawn carriage soon.
And your whole "most people drive" blah blah blah.. Here in CA we drive A LOT. It's a big state.
Yes, yes, I'm sure lots of people make 400-mile round trips for at least a third of their driving and they fill up the tank 2-3 times a day.
Current-generation all-electric vehicles can go as far on one full battery charge as a current-generation car can go on one full tank of gas. If you're not spending $40/day on gasoline, an EV will handle your daily driving, so long as you can plug it in for 5 hours at the end of the day.
Current-generation EVs can full-charge in under 2 hours from a high-power charge station, but that's not something you're going to have at your house; and those charge stations can put out enough power through one charger to charge the battery in under 30 minutes, just the cars don't have a charge circuit sized for that. On the plus side, you generally don't have to refill the car to make a round trip--that's what that trip to New York was about: you might need a 20-minute rest stop to top up.
The cars themselves really are ready to replace daily driving, unless California belches out more pollution itself in car exhaust fumes than China does with all its industry. What, do you people just wake up and drive for 5 hours straight, then drive another 5 hours ten minutes later? Tell your city council to approve a grocery store in your town.
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Tell your city council to approve a grocery store in your town.
aaaand, now you can go fuck yourself, hippy.