r/IsaacArthur • u/Opcn • Aug 06 '20
Turning carbon dioxide into liquid fuel. Scientists have discovered a new electrocatalyst that converts carbon dioxide (CO2) and water into ethanol with very high energy efficiency, high selectivity for the desired final product and low cost.
https://www.anl.gov/article/turning-carbon-dioxide-into-liquid-fuel7
u/Smewroo Aug 06 '20 edited Aug 07 '20
When can I buy a bottle of Highland Dewshine, the scotch taken from the air's water and CO2? Single malt 202X please.
Edit: I guess I should have said vodka.
4
u/Opcn Aug 06 '20
I don’t understand what single “malt” means in the context of alcohol made with no grain. Were you to age it in a barrel I think the closest equivalent would be an Irish whisky not a scotch. I too would be down to purchase such a beverage though.
3
u/mellow_yellow_sub Aug 07 '20
Fine Scottish Single Catalyst Hooch, aka single-cat Scooch
3
u/conventionistG First Rule Of Warfare Aug 07 '20
We never wash our catalyst beds for that aged flavour.
5
u/C_Arthur FTL Optimist Aug 07 '20
I notice there is no actual numbers listed which worry's me but I am going to be optimistic.
Someone made a post here last week that I was very critical of about synthetically making hydrocarbons If this turns out to be reasonably close to the claim I may need to eat my hat.
4
u/Doveen Aug 07 '20
Meanwhile at ExxonMobil:
"...And then we buy the patent, and shove all the data on it in to some corner, than Jeremy sets fire to the warehouse."
2
u/synocrat Aug 07 '20
Let's say we don't use the fuel to combust and return the CO2 to the atmosphere.... Would this be able to produce the fuel and then simply store or sequester it to keep it from going back into the atmosphere? Could this be a sort of carbon storing scheme? Could we store the fuel for like 100 years and then still be able to use it as a fuel feedstock?
3
u/Opcn Aug 07 '20
Storing hot CO2 exhaust from a car is hard to do. Recapturing carbon from the atmosphere is also hard to do.
2
u/synocrat Aug 07 '20
This technology sounds like it might be able to pull carbon out of the air and store it.
3
u/Opcn Aug 07 '20
You have to pull the carbon out with a compressor to have a high enough concentration to do anything.
1
u/MiloBem Aug 13 '20
You don't sequester carbon by compressing and liquifying/distilling it from the atmosphere. The most likely industrial process in my opinion is Mineral carbonation.
You blow air through a solution that reacts with CO2, like Calcium Oxide, the resulting Calcium Carbonate is insoluble so you can remove it from the tank by simply letting it drop down, or maybe some cheap filter/centrifuge. It is then heated in a different chamber to release pure Carbon Dioxide and return Calcium Oxide powder into the tank where it is dissolved and ready to absorb.
The cycle uses some energy in blowing air into the tank, and a lot of energy in heating Calcium Carbonate. Then of course there is the energy of transporting Carbon Dioxide through some pipe into the other reactor that produces the fuel out of it.
The whole process is quite well developed, but like all reversible reactions it will cause losses of energy at different stages. So it only makes sense to use really green energy in it, like nuclear or maybe space solar.
1
u/Opcn Aug 13 '20
That’s all well and good, but the device you use to blow the air through the solution is a compressor. So is the device that pulls the CO2 from the oven where you are reforming the CaO (which is the same step if you are relying on granules of Calcium Oxide passively gathering CO2). There are lots of options but none of them are going to be super energy efficient.
1
u/MiloBem Aug 13 '20
I think we are talking different grades of compressors.
Yes, you obviously need to apply some pressure/force to move gases and liquids around, but you don't need very high pressure differential at any stage of the mineral carbonation process, as opposed to high pressure required in liquefaction and fractional distillation of air.
And yes, they all are inefficient. That's why they only make industrial sense when we have a cheap and abundant source of green energy, like modern fission, or ideally fusion plans.
1
u/Talzon70 Aug 07 '20
Yes, you can make fuel out of CO2 from the air.
Unfortunately, it takes more energy than is stored in the fuel when you burn it the next time. This would be fine, if you used solar or something and the fuel was a battery, but right now most of that energy comes from fossil fuels anyways.
You'd basically be burning 20 L of fuel to get 19 L of fuel.
1
1
u/StigmontKerman Aug 08 '20
This is great and all, synthetic fuels are nothing new. In fact I think the Germans had to resort to that in WW2 to keep their armor and air forces running.
Thing is it's pointless if you're using hydrocarbons to power your carbon sequestration machines.
I'm a massive advocate for synthetic hydrocarbon fuels. But the thing that needs to happen to make them viable is space based solar (maybe ground based), fission, or fusion
It's not enough to meet our current power demands with these asinine "renewables" we need to multiply the supply.
2
u/Opcn Aug 08 '20
There are non-energy related sources of CO2 emissions like agricultural manure, metallurgy, coke production (for metallurgy) and the production of portland cement. If we could capture that CO2 to create alcohol fuel that would let us double dip on that carbon.
1
u/StigmontKerman Aug 08 '20
Still takes power to do the double dip, and if you're using hydrocarbons to fuel the process you're kinda defeating the point.
Again I'm a massive advocate of synthetic fuel production and carbon sequestration.
We just need a substantially better power supply. Like fission, fusion, and or space based solar.
7
u/adam__nicholas Aug 06 '20
Venus’ cloud cities would like to know your location