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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."
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.
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
So it's a CO2 capture and release program ;D.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
No, I'm not involved in the project. This is the first time I hear about it.
As for the rest, I have no idea why you think that pure methane is not a wanted raw material in Europe. Availability of affordable natgas is one of the greatest geopolitical threats to European powers in next few decades, as many of European majors either have switched or are in process of switching their electricity generation to CCGTs. Guess what they overwhelmingly burn?
So yeah, if these things actually become cost effective, "who will buy the natgas" is going to be literally the last of the relevant questions on the list, because there will be a long queue of buyers, salivating at the potential of reliable source of methane sourced in Europe.
I think he means turning CO2 into methane and then releasing the methane.
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./
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?
They currently use renewable energy.
But the point you're making here is irrelevant; If this moves from the current experimental/proof-of-concept to commercial production, you'd still use renewable energy to run it 24/7 because the product itself has value as a fuel and chemical feedstock that displaces fossil fuel.
Pulling CO2 from the air is not a solution, but producing hydrocarbons that are carbon neutral and renewable is a very, very important piece of the puzzle.
=Smidge=