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
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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.

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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.

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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.