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Canadian Company Gets $68M Investment To Turn CO2 Into Fuel (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the BBC:
British Columbia-based Carbon Engineering has shown that it can extract CO2 in a cost-effective way. It has now been boosted by $68m in new investment from Chevron, Occidental and coal giant BHP... With its new funding, the company plans to build its first commercial facilities. These industrial-scale direct air capture (DAC) plants could capture up to one million tonnes of CO2 from the air each year....
Carbon Engineering's process is all about sucking in air and exposing it to a chemical solution that concentrates the CO2. Further refinements mean the gas can be purified into a form that can be stored or utilised as a liquid fuel.... Carbon Engineering says the liquid can be used in a variety of engines without modification. "The fuel that we make has no sulphur in it, it has these nice linear chains which means it burns cleaner than traditional fuel," said Carbon Engineering's Dr Jenny McCahill. "It's nice and clear and ready to be used in a truck, car or jet."
CO2 can also be used to flush out the last remaining deposits of oil in wells that are past their prime. The oil industry in the US has been using the gas in this way for decades. It's estimated that using CO2 can deliver an extra 30% of crude from oilfields with the added benefit that the gas is then sequestered permanently in the ground... There is a big worry that with large investments from the fossil fuel industry, the focus of Carbon Engineering's efforts could be turned to producing more oil, not just tackling climate change. Carbon Engineering says that if governments want to invest in its process they are very welcome to do so. If they're not ready to stump up the cash, the company is happy to take funding from the energy industry as time is so short, and the need for the technology is so great.
Carbon Engineering's process is all about sucking in air and exposing it to a chemical solution that concentrates the CO2. Further refinements mean the gas can be purified into a form that can be stored or utilised as a liquid fuel.... Carbon Engineering says the liquid can be used in a variety of engines without modification. "The fuel that we make has no sulphur in it, it has these nice linear chains which means it burns cleaner than traditional fuel," said Carbon Engineering's Dr Jenny McCahill. "It's nice and clear and ready to be used in a truck, car or jet."
CO2 can also be used to flush out the last remaining deposits of oil in wells that are past their prime. The oil industry in the US has been using the gas in this way for decades. It's estimated that using CO2 can deliver an extra 30% of crude from oilfields with the added benefit that the gas is then sequestered permanently in the ground... There is a big worry that with large investments from the fossil fuel industry, the focus of Carbon Engineering's efforts could be turned to producing more oil, not just tackling climate change. Carbon Engineering says that if governments want to invest in its process they are very welcome to do so. If they're not ready to stump up the cash, the company is happy to take funding from the energy industry as time is so short, and the need for the technology is so great.
Then a quarter. Then worthless.
https://www.greenbiz.com/article/companies-watch-carbon-capture-and-storage
And a few weeks later, Dr. Jenny MacCahill dies in a mysterious carbonite accident.
Korea
https://economictimes.indiatim...
Audi
http://time.com/3837814/audi-e...
When was the ONR renamed NRL ?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com...
At least these schemes solve solars problem of storage. (maybe no idea how these schemes will deal with being operated intermittently)
$100 per ton would mean $200 per ton of coal, which sells for around $50. Nobody's going to pay a 5-fold premium on coal.
About 130,000 years at full tilt and we'll have solved our CO2 problem completely
Instead of selling the promise of endless energy to the stupid, sell the technobabble for promising endless energy because that promise enables the reckless to keep poisoning the stupid. Everybody with a working brain knows from basic principles that this is pointless but the idiots determining policy in a democracy don't have a working brain.
Capture CO2 to get more oil out of the ground? To burn said oil to produce CO2? How will that reduce the CO2 in the air?
why not just stop at carbonate formation?
This doesn't make much sense to me. So in the little flow chart between sequestration and pumping it back into a hey as fuel, there is a 'fuel synthesis step' that is going to be an energy intensive step since you can't really burn CO2 to get energy as it is the product is combustion. Thermodynamically you're going to need to put a shit ton of energy in to resynthesize the long chain carbon bonds so you can burn it as fuel. So unless your energy input is clean this will not work well at any scale.
"gas can be purified into a form that can be stored or utilised as a liquid fuel"
1) running engine MAKES CO2
2) hose from exhaust pipe to air intake
3)PROFIT!
I heard it requires magnets for that to work.
We need to hasten global warming to melt the glaciers so we can reach those reserves.
The article does not deign to actually explain the capture process completely or with reasonable accuracy, nor discuss whether the whole "fuel making" claim is really relevant to carbon capture.
There are two cycles involved in the capture process, potassium hydroxide dissolved in water (aka "hydroxide-based chemical solution") captures CO2 from air bubbled through it, forming potassium carbonate (chemistry labs everywhere use this reaction to scrub CO2 from air going to reactions where this is a problem). Then the K2CO3 solution is mixed with calcium hydroxide and it is cooked in a pellet reactor to convert the K2CO3 back to KOH, while converting the Ca(OH)2 to CaCO3 (calcium carbonate, aka chalk or limestone). The second cycle heats the CaCO3 in a furnace to convert it to calcium oxide (CaO), releasing CO2. This is also the first step in making cement.
Carbon Engineering then proposes they will make synthetic fuel with a whole bunch of other chemistry, requiring a cheap source of energy that produces hydrogen gas (Carbon Engineering's on-line papers suggest electrolysis using solar power, the BBC article just assumes it exists).
Here is the thing. The cement industry already produces huge amounts of CO2 from roasting limestone to make cement (8% of world CO2 release is from this source). These are large fixed plants, that already are concentrated sources of CO2, which is free - it is currently just dumped in the air. If you want to make synthetic fuel, why not just build the Fischer-Tropsch plant, and the hydrogen source, next to cement plants and avoid the extra cost and complexity and energy use of extracting it from the very dilute form of air?
Given the vast source of concentrated free CO2 being dumped from cement plants, this "carbon capture" scheme makes no sense at all, if we don't first capture that really easy to get concentrated CO2 from cement. I suggest that this is not really a serious project, aimed at doing anything useful, but a scheme to divert attention from stopping existing CO2 emissions ("We''ll just capture it later and make more fuel! Win, win!").
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
You're right! Sorry...
1) running engine MAKES CO2
2) hose from exhaust pipe to air intake
3) attach Magnets (but only these super-duper special ones that I have for sale ...oh and you will need my instruction book too, only five easy payments of 49.95 billed monthly to your debit card or direct from your savins account (enter account number, SSN and mother's maiden name here_______________, _______________,__________________)
3)PROFIT!
Oops! We already do. It's basically free but the market for compressed co2 isn't very big.
Gas is a nice dense portable fuel. We need to use renewable energy to turn the CO2 back into fuel. Then the gas becomes "green".
While a rapid increase in the level of CO2 is not good, because there is a problem with the ability of animals to adapt, using atmospheric CO2 derived fuel means a real disaster.
CO2 is not in itself, bad. In fact, we alomst certainly wouldn't be here without it, as the earth would be a very cold place.
So given that a fair number of people don't believe it has a heating effect, the same folks, might very well decide that removing it wouldn't cool the planet.
And using it as fuel means that once we start, there will be a lot of money spent lobbying to continue. If we were to somehow lower the CO2 to some agreed upon level, there will be powerful interests demanding to continue extraction.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
That technology has been around a few billion years longer than man....
If you want to make synthetic fuel, why not just build the Fischer-Tropsch plant, and the hydrogen source, next to cement plants and avoid the extra cost and complexity and energy use of extracting it from the very dilute form of air?
This seems like an opportunity for cement manufacturers to make some extra money, along with great PR for their eco-friendly carbon capture. So why aren't they doing it yet? If Carbon Engineering claims they can produce fuel at a cost that's comparable to US gasoline, then it would almost certainly be a lot cheaper with a concentrated source of CO2.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
I suggest that this is not really a serious project, aimed at doing anything useful,
Of course it's a serious project, aimed at getting millions of dollars from investors (while delivering nothing of value).
Just like Theranos and lots of other startups.
If it were cheap then that would indeed seem to be an opportunity. What looked more interesting is they produce calcium carbonate and then heat it in exactly the same way as cement production to release the CO2. If this is a viable process then you can use it to produce both fuel and cement and get even more value out of it, which I'm sure they have thought about.
I absolutely think we need technology like this developed and it needs to be developed now so that it could be ready when we need it, but their claims about the price of the produced fuel seem ridiculously optimistic. But once easier emissions reductions from electricity, land transportation and industry have been largely addressed, this is the sort of technology that is needed for reducing emissions from long-haul aviation and shipping where electrification is unlikely to be possible (The other alternative may be hydrogen, but particularly for aviation that would require significantly different aircraft designs) and cement production which needs something else entirely.
Of course this is a very long-term project and in terms of abating CO2, there are far more effective ways at the moment, particularly in electricity - the value in this is at least 10 years away and probably longer and that's if it works out to be practical, but we need to spend the money to develop this and if oil companies are happy to make that investment now in the technology to produce CO2 where they need it for extracting more oil from oilfields then that's OK with me because it helps get the technology developed for when it is needed.
Does this mean that the fossil fuel industry has stopped pretending that they're not one of the main causes of climate change? Do they now accept that their current practice of digging up hydrocarbons out of the ground and turning them into pollution at an ecocidal rate should stop?
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
More energy is required to recapture CO2 than was produced by the original burning of fossil fuels. You know this if you understand entropy and thermodynamics and also if you calculate it empirically using the available data. This is pure green washing and manipulation of the public. You might say: "but what if we used renewable energy to power the CO2 capture process?". There is no free lunch. For every unit of renewable energy used for this inefficient CO2 "carbon capture process", a fossil fuel that would have been displaced by using that renewable energy is used more, resulting in an increase in the rate of CO2 entering the atmosphere. To put it another way: every unit of renewable or "clean" energy that is used for carbon capture before the grid is 100% renewable will *increase* the rate of CO2 entering the atmosphere. Of course in this fact-free logic-free society filled with sock puppets of powerful oil and gas interests from around the world, I'm sure they will defame me and attack this obvious basic logic and the facts.
Maybe what they're trying to do is make a 'battery' of sorts to store excess wind or solar energy. If the wind is blowing at night when nobody needs the electricity, use it to capture some CO2 and make fuel. Then you sell the fuel, or burn it to generate electricity when demand is higher than your wind output.
I can imagine cement plants would also be able to make use of the technology, possibly powered by some sort of co-gen that uses waste heat from the kilns to generate electricity for running the process.
dom
You capture CO2 intorno fuel. Then you burn the fuel releasing the CO2 back.
The solution isn't to capture it but it's all about not releasing it. Idiots!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
If you really want to get rid of CO2, just burn silane (a/k/a "Martian Coal") in it:
SiH4 + 2CO2 --> SiO2 + 2C + 2H2O
or, put another way... burn silane in a carbon dioxide atmosphere, and end up with quartz, carbon, and water.
Of course, getting the silane itself might create more CO2 than it actually locks up...