r/RenewableEnergy • u/fchung Belgium • Aug 20 '20

Turning carbon dioxide into liquid fuel: « Because the process runs at low temperature and pressure, it can start and stop rapidly in response to the intermittent supply of the renewable electricity. »

https://www.anl.gov/article/turning-carbon-dioxide-into-liquid-fuel
30 Upvotes

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2

u/LibertyLizard Aug 20 '20

Very interesting. A little too late to make much of an impact in the car industry I think but for trucks it may have a part to play. Can ethanol be used as fuel for aviation?

1

u/okopchak Aug 20 '20

it would depend on the type of engine, but it is certainly an option. You are correct that at least for the traditional automotive industry air derived ethanol doesn't make sense vs batteries, but for industries where you need much higher energy density, like planes and shipping ethanol makes more sense in the nearer term. And at least for shipping they already use diesel engines that play nice with ethanol or other ways to store renewable energy at room temperatures.

1

u/RedArrow1251 Aug 20 '20

Anything mechanical will fail more frequently if it is started / stopped rapidly..

1

u/jamesee2 Aug 21 '20

What a fantastic discovery! If we are going to halt global warming, we will need to remove vast amounts of carbon dioxide from the air as well as ceasing our use of fossil fuels.

Ethanol can be used to drive specially designed motors and it also has the potential for further catalytic conversion to form gasoline or jet fuel as part of a circular carbon economy. See for example:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science//abs/pii/S1566736720301436?via%3Dihub

1

u/vasilenko93 Aug 20 '20 edited Aug 20 '20

Ethanol is a complete waste of resources and does nothing for the environment (might even add makes it worse). On top of that, it removes large swaths of farmland that could have been used to make people food or left alone and not developed.

Let’s not forget that it’s making fuel more expensive and the production of it is extremely environmentally destructive.

https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/111th-congress-2009-2010/reports/04-08-ethanol.pdf

Producing ethanol for use in motor fuels increases the demand for corn, which ultimately raises the prices that consumers pay for a wide variety of foods at the grocery store, ranging from corn syrup sweeteners found in soft drinks to meat, dairy, and poultry products. In addition, the demand for corn may help push up the prices of other commodities, such as soybeans.

Calculated on the basis of the volume of ethanol used in the United States last year, that percentage reduction is equivalent to about 14 million metric tons of carbon dioxide and equivalent gases, or CO2e.45 That amount is about 0.7 percent of the total greenhouse-gas emissions generated in the transportation sector during 2008.

A lot of negatives for tiny reductions in emissions.

1

u/thatguy314159 Aug 21 '20

I mean, sure, but this is talking about a new pathway. Just because this is also ethanol doesn’t mean that it is inherently worthless.

1

u/vasilenko93 Aug 21 '20 edited Aug 21 '20

It’s even worse. Here is the energy conversion process when turning captured CO2 into ethanol.

  1. The sun is the primary source of energy on this planet
  2. Plants turned sunlight into potential energy of atoms attached to each other
  3. This eventually died and go squeezed over millions of years to make the fossil fuels we have now
  4. We exact it and burn it, releasing all that stored energy
  5. CO2 emits into the atmosphere
  6. We than take sunlight and convert 30% of it into electricity
  7. Than we use electricity to suck CO2 from the air
  8. Than we use more electricity to take this CO2 and some other elements to make ethanol
  9. And now we can power the world using ethanol

That sounds so terrible that my mind hurts. If you want to make stupid ethanol than just grow the damn corn so you have e more direct sunlight to ethanol converter.