r/science • u/Wagamaga • Aug 06 '20

Chemistry 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-fuel
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u/MaxObjFn Aug 06 '20

Nice comment. I scrolled a while before i came across a post that I thought captured the reality of our situation. There are inefficiencies when we burn CO2 and inefficiencies when we convert it back. This sounds like a good way to use much more energy. Also, the amount of energy it takes to complete the cycle is net zero before you consider losses. A catalyst doesnt help skirt the laws of thermo.

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u/bobskizzle Aug 06 '20

This is why engineers (who understand the confluence of both thermodynamics and economics) and the companies that employ them haven't touched this stuff. All of this work is done by scientists who don't care if the process they invented is economically worthless.

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u/mikamitcha Aug 06 '20

I would argue the converse of that, engineers are not usually the ones bothering with catalyst research because its not an optimization. Engineers are useful when minimizing costs and maximizing production, but those skills do not really translate greatly into groundbreaking research.

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u/Charlemagne42 Aug 06 '20

As an engineer whose master’s research involved catalysis, you’re wrong. Pure chemists rarely research catalysts, they’re more focused on discovering entirely new reactions. It’s the chemical engineers who research ways of making those reactions scalable and economical - like materials design for catalysis. Catalyst research is absolutely an optimization problem. Look up a “volcano plot” as one example.

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u/mikamitcha Aug 06 '20

And those are researchers by profession, not engineers. I am speaking of the position they are actually working, not what they trained to be.

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u/Charlemagne42 Aug 06 '20

I'm really not sure what you misunderstood from that. I am an engineer. I do research. Some of my engineer colleagues do research to develop new catalysts. Catalysis is an optimization problem for reaction engineering. I can't think of any simpler way to lay out the facts.

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u/mikamitcha Aug 06 '20

So when people ask you what you do, you answer "engineering"? Or do you answer "research"? Just because you were trained as an engineer does not mean that any job you hold gets that title. If I worked in sales, I cannot claim I am a physicist just because I have a physics degree, because physicist is a specific profession. Engineering is the same way.

That is not to gatekeep one side or the other, but engineer is a profession the same way salesman and physicist are.

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u/Charlemagne42 Aug 06 '20

Ah, now I see. You have preconceived for yourself definitions of what an "Engineer" is and what a "Researcher" is, and cannot allow those definitions to be blurred, edited, or "misused".

There'll be no convincing you that the work I do is simultaneously Engineering and Research, even using your own prescriptivist definitions which do not conform to the breadth of work carried out by the Engineering profession.

Good day.