Climate Change Can Be Stopped by Turning Air into Gasoline
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
That really makes this whole process a way of converting energy stored in hydrogen to energy stored in hydrocarbons. This is pretty desirable - hydrocarbon fuels are much easier to work with, fit in with our existing transport - but not really a new source of energy.
The problem with sequestering CO2 as hydrocarbons is that you need to put a whole load of energy (embodied in the hydrogen you're combining it with) into the ground and leave it there. Fortunately renewables (especially solar) are heading in the right direction. On a sunny day in an area with lots of solar panels, electricity is essentially free. We're still some way from having enough free energy available to be able to put large amounts of it back into the ground though.
If sequestering CO2, combining it with CaO to make CaCO3 (calcium carbonate) makes more sense, and is even exothermic. It's also biologically harmless and can be safely dumped, used in building materials, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration#Mineral_c... (last paragraph of section)
So I would guess the reason for producing synthetic CaO from CaCO3 is that extracting natural CaO is uneconomical.
This article is about using carbon dioxide to produce usable fuel, that you would burn. Scaled up it would provide a carbon-neutral solution to long-term energy storage.
Why would you be putting energy into the ground? If you're producing hydrocarbons, those will presumably be burned or used for something else (e.g. plastics).
In that case, it's like you're using hydrocarbons as a storage and transport mechanism for renewables. Also lets you have nearly net-zero carbon emissions from the billions of hydrocarbon-burning engines in the world.
Quoting from the paper:
> An industrial process for large-scale capture of atmospheric CO2 (DAC) serves two roles. First, as a source of CO2 for making carbon-neutral hydrocarbon fuels, enabling carbon-free energy to be converted into high-energy-density fuels. Solar fuels, for example, may be produced at high-insolation low-cost locations from DAC-CO2 and electrolytic hydrogen using gas-to-liquids technology enabling decarbonization of difficult-to-electrify sectors such as aviation. And second, DAC with CO2 sequestration allows carbon removal.
So, to summarize their first role, they would produce hydrogen from water, combine it with CO2 extracted from the atmosphere, and then burn it. Thus no net carbon added to the atmosphere.
Essentially, instead of moving carbon from fossil fuels to the atmosphere, you would borrow carbon from the atmosphere, turn it into fuels, burn it, and return it to where you borrowed it from.
Carbon sequestration is a real thing, we just lack either economic or political will to prioritize it.
Energy wise this process might still be favorable to producing biofuels from plants or algae, so I hope they're successful.
[1] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30225-3
But my big question is why would you want to convert it into hydrocarbons for transport then? Direct air capture (DAC) is a maybe-way-out-in-the-2050s technology, but even assuming it were readily and cheaply available in large scale today, doing DAC straight to storage and then just using oil and gas like we've always done would be a much cheaper and more efficient method than going what you propose. Basically:
air->CO2->storage AND (CH3)n->burn
versus
air->CO2[a] AND (CH3)n->CO2[b] + H2[b] AND CO2[a] + H2[b] -> (CH3)n->burn AND CO2[b]->storage
(Obviously not taken to be real well-defined balanced chemical reactions).
95% of hydrogen is produced by splitting hydrocarbons, not by splitting water. Clearly, the assumption is the hydrogen comes from some miracle carbon-neutral source...but it doesn’t.
The hydrogen production, FT reactors, post-treating refinery will cost a lot more.
If you want hydrogen from water, you need electricity. A lot of it. Nuclear reactors will be the most viable way to do that.
That sounds like a problem into you translate it into "leave rice straw on the fields".
Ironically enough, our renewable electrification process is like a turbo coming up to speed. There is simply so much energy hitting the Earth from the Sun (if I recall off hand, about an hour of sunlight can power humanity for a year, or thereabouts) that if we continue to rapidly deploy solar and wind, we'll have orders of magnitude more energy than humanity currently requires for a first world lifestyle while also having enough energy to sequestor all of the original carbon burned through fossil fuel based industrialization.
"A long way around the block" if you will.
https://www.iea.org/publications/renewables2017/
https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/4-charts-show-renewable...
I myself am working on transitioning out of security engineering into renewable energy/utility storage deployment.
It goes without saying, if you’re in the industry and hiring, I’m interested! (Wink wink nudge nudge Tesla Puerto Rico)
Solar panels take huge amounts of energy to produce, which may not be recovered in the life of the panel.
Its only sustainable if it's possible to have a solar panel factory powered by solar panels... Which seems unlikely
- Nwabudike Morgan
> Also, did you just use technical debt as a metaphor for regular old debt?
Hahahaha, good catch. I just might have.
If those numbers are true, that's actually a pretty achievable cost to absorb that could be added directly as a tax on gasoline.
That's going to be..not cheap.
http://www.innovationconcepts.eu/res/literatuurSchuiling/oli...
Rock weathering is a natural process, so there is no need to mess with transporting hydrogen or limestone to make some complicated chemical reaction. We just need to dig up olivine, crush it and spread it out over the ocean which will also fix ocean acidification. If we're going to geoengineer, weathering still seems like the least expensive option.
The new science that Climate Engineering did has nothing to do with making gasoline from CO2. There is technology to do that and a number of companies working on it, its in the $10/gallon range. Some have estimated as low as $4, if they can get their process to scale up, which they haven't been able to do.
There is already plenty of CO2 available for much less than $100/ton, this is not a barrier to making products out of CO2.
In fact, there was coverage the other day of a new gas-fired power plant that throws off CO2 for storage in oil wells. Why not use that CO2?
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/6/1/17416444...
This article tries to make a point about how if the gasoline is made from CO2 from the air, it makes burning it carbon neutral. This is true but it misses the point. You want to get the most CO2 reduction for your money, so do the cheapest carbon capture first. Its cheaper to collect it from large point sources, so do that first. Once those emissions are being captured or simply ended from the plant retiring then move on to more expensive DAC.
In any case, around here petrol is once again over 7 USD/gal. It's certainly a bit inconvenient, but not the end of the world.
The article is trash, go read the actual science article it links to and it will be clear what they are referring to.
The reaction between CO2 and H2 to form hydrocarbons is actually energetically favorable (thermodynamically spontaneous). It doesn't require outside energy inputs to force the reaction forward.
See e.g. "CO2 valorisation via Reverse Water-Gas Shift reaction"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221298201...
and "Turning carbon dioxide into fuel"
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/roypta/368/19...
The key issue is, as you note later, producing large quantities of hydrogen without relying on fossil sources.
8 CO2 + 25 H2 -> C8H18 + 16 H2O
Energy of products minus energy of reactants:
(-208.7 + 16 * -241.83) - (8 * -393.52 + 25 * 0) = -923
Experimental values are from NIST WebBook.
The hydrogenation of CO2 to CO and water is endothermic and kinetically hindered. The hydrogenation of CO2 to saturated hydrocarbons and water is exothermic (though still kinetically hindered).
There are also hydrocarbon synthesis paths that involve less reforming and purification of high-boiling products than F-T, e.g. methanol synthesis starting from CO2 and H2 followed by Mobil methanol-to-gasoline.
As we know wind power (like most? all? renewable sources) have this undesirable property of not being constant. And I mean undesirable in the sense of the base load of an electrical grid.
So the idea is to store excess power. Obviously rechargeable batteries are one way to do this. But another is artificially creating gasoline as a means of energy storage. This could have pretty desirable properties at places where gasoline might otherwise be expensive to ship in and wind power might be in abundance.
Anyway I can't find the paper but at that time with that process it was looking at still over $5/gallon (which in remote places is still totally fine).
So if this new process is real and scalable to an industrial level, that would be great. As much as EVs are a rapidly growing market, I think we're going to be stuck with ICEs for a long time yet.
Maybe it’s time we consider the opportunity to allow people to convert their private property into dense carbon sinks that support plant and terrestrial arthropod diversity.
http://www.elegantcoding.com/2018/03/reimagining-suburban-ya...
Maybe we should be considering every option we have to promote a healthy reduced CO2 environment.
It's hard to compete with liquid hydrocarbons for energy density (and therefore efficient of transporting energy to where you need it).
Are you just going to buy everyone new cars? Or replace all existing vehicles?
I mean I'm all for electric cars and other modes of transport, but the problem is that we have an existing infrastructure that will take a long time to replace. As an example, the vehicle I drive is from '97. I still see people driving cars from the early 90's (or even 80's) as their daily driver. (And it is more common for poorer people to drive older cars).
So do we need a new gasoline? Yes, unless you want to either replace 30+ years of vehicles, or wait that long.
I think it will depend on how the prices for batteries and electricity evolve as well as advancements in electrolysis.
There are also other advantages to electric vehicles, such as no particulate and NOX exhaust, which may encourage taxation / regulation of combustion vehicles.
There is Teaming with Microbes, Teaming with Nutrients and Teaming with Fungi.
"Convert Grass Lawns to Gravel to Reduce Insect Suffering" http://reducing-suffering.org/convert-grass-lawns-to-gravel-...
This technology is more trying to make it feasible to have a carbon neutral form of transportation. Most people do not have the money to buy an electric vehicle. I for one drive a vehicle made in '97.
People who already own ICE gas vehicles and don't drive them very much might still come out ahead buying $10/gallon fuel vs. acquiring an EV. (I put maybe 1500 miles/year on my car.)
My estimate is based on adjustments to the LANL Green Freedom concept for synthetic gasoline from 2007:
http://bioage.typepad.com/greencarcongress/docs/greenfreedom...
The authors claim that for profitable operation "the price of gasoline at the pump must be about $4.60/gal." This number incorporated the authors' unrealistically optimistic expectations of low-cost Generation III nuclear reactor construction. It rises to $5.69/gallon, adjusting for inflation[1]. The rest of the cost increase comes from my estimate of using renewable electricity sources instead of cheap nuclear power. (It would be even more expensive if I used nuclear power at actually-observed costs of currently-in-progress American reactor construction.)
[1] Yes, I used CPI, and I know it's not really appropriate for capital-intensive industrial projects. This is just a back-of-the-envelope estimate.
Making hydrocarbons from CO2 will require hydrogen and energy. Where does that energy come from? Maybe solar, or wind, which would actually be a good use assuming this process can stop and start as sun/wind is available, but the amount of solar panels or windmills needed to replace current amount of energy sourced from petroleum would seem to me to be staggering (I haven't done the math).
If you really want to accomplish something on a large scale, you need something like this. People have been talking about overpopulation dangers for centuries, and human population growth remained high. Cheap, effective birth control gets releases, and population growth is stabilizing.
In general, tech solutions are easier than large scale social solutions.
There's also the algae in the ocean which generate a significant amount of the world's oxygen -- reduce pollution of the oceans and maintain a healthy food chain, and perhaps this will restore itself as well.
The Amazon rain forest alone is responsible for a huge chunk of CO2-to-O2 work, and they're chopping it down at an alarming rate. Stop destroying the rain forest and restore as much of it as possible.
I think these policies would be far more effective long term than this hokey air-to-fuel thing, and without needing to crack water for the H2 that the plan requires.
That said, it sounds like cool technology and if it became competitive with fossil fuels, using (I suppose) solar energy to obtain the H2, it's a brilliant idea.
However, longer term we must still move away from burning fossil fuels even if we make them completely carbon neutral, because while its a slow effect they are not oxygen neutral...
If synthetic hydrocarbons get their hydrogen from water (electrolysis or high temperature thermochemical cycles), their life cycle is oxygen-neutral as well. The extraction of hydrogen from water simultaneously produces a matching quantity of oxygen.
However, our need for carbon sequestration is ultimately surpassed by the industry’s “output”, and we end up heading in the other direction.
Because regulators tend to be captured, we end up with one industry generating CO2 (for all the positive reasons we need CO2) so that the sequestration industry doesn’t kill off all the plants, etc.
> We have over 100 years' worth of artificially introduced atmospheric carbon since the beginning of the industrial revolution to work through before this will ever be a problem. Please educate yourself on the actual quantities involved.
Is "100 years' worth" a unit of measure of CO2 I'm unfamiliar with? Are you saying that the industrial revolution was only 100 years ago? Is this the "actual quantities involved" you were referring to?
https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions
https://www.earth-syst-sci-data.net/7/349/2015/essd-7-349-20...
"The total cumulative emissions for 1870–2014 are 545 ± 55 GtC. These emissions were partitioned among the atmosphere (230 ± 5 GtC based on atmospheric measurements in ice cores of 288 ppm (Sect. “Global atmospheric CO2 growth rate estimates”; Joos and Spahni, 2008) and recent direct measurements of 397.2 ppm; Dlugokencky and Tans, 2014), ocean (155 ± 20 GtC using Khatiwala et al., 2013, prior to 1959 and Table 8 otherwise), and land (160 ± 60 GtC by the difference)"
Estimates may vary on what to count as the start of the industrial revolution, but the internet indicates that it started in Britain around 1760. It did not spread much from there until 1840 or so. Here's a quantity emitted into the atmosphere since 1870: 230 gigatonnes of carbon (GtC). That's 230,000,000,000 tonnes. Not carbon dioxide, just the carbon itself. Multiply that by 3.67 for weight of CO2 gas: 844,100,000,000 tonnes CO2. Note that this is metric tonnes, so 2,204.6 pounds per tonne for us in metric-challenged countries. This is just legacy CO2 without counting other greenhouse gases, starting from a few decades after the industrial revolution went global to close to present day. We're adding around 10 GtC (36.7 GtC CO2) every year to that total recently.
I used this calculator, though I had to remove the commas from the number because there seems to be a character limit. https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calc...
So let's take one of the measures from there. It said that that much CO2 could be absorbed by 994,228,504,122 acres of U.S. forest in a year. Let's try that out. There are 57,308,738 square miles of land surface area on Earth (habitable and non-habitable). Multiply that by 640 to get 36,677,592,320 acres. Alright, subtract the entire land surface area of Earth, whether we could grow trees on it or not, from the number of acres of trees we'd need to capture that carbon in a year: 994,228,504,122 - 36,677,592,320 = 957,550,911,802. That's a lot left over. How many planet Earths' worth of land area would we need to clear that much CO2 with just trees in a year then? 27.10 Earths. Okay, well that's easy then. We just need to somehow blanket the entire Earth including mountains, deserts, etc. with trees for 27 years to remove the CO2 backlog! So easy, right? Except we're also adding to that number constantly.
So if we just assume for the sake of argument that this man-made carbon capture works as well as blanketing the entire land surface area in trees, and we somehow started at scale immediately, it would take 27 years to get back to baseline. (Let's put aside that there would be 27 * 3.9 = 105 GtC additional in the atmosphere to deal with if emissions were flat, and pray that the land and ocean would keep absorbing the rest) I guess if you're really worried about them overshooting that mark, you can go ahead and panic now about that, and not about the massive surplus of carbon we've got hanging around trapping the sun's heat.
Oh, and I didn't even get into methane or N2O, which are also heating things up.
I know it takes time and energy to google things (each search is about 0.2 grams of CO2 emitted equivalent) but I believe in your ability to do so.
Which we should do depends on which is cheaper and more scalable.
Even if they find a way to hypothetically enable a future for the internal combustion engine, why would we want it? Good riddance.
If can see this being useful to nations who want to reduce their dependency on other nations for energy.
Let's say a person swallows poisons. The poison is going to kill them if it stays inside them with the amount that they swallowed. They absolutely need to vomit or they are going to die. The way your comment is approaching this, you're basically saying that vomiting isn't worthwhile because it takes more energy than it gives back.
In this analogy, taking carbon out of the atmosphere is like vomiting up a poison. If we extend the metaphor a little bit, then using renewable is like eating normal food. So if we take the way your comment is approaching things in an analogous way, you're also implying that vomiting up poisons is pointless if the energy we used to vomit was acquired from healthy food.
The metaphor does start breaking down eventually, but its a lot more obvious why this matters when you realize it isn't whether a question of whether we need to vomit - its just a question of how we do it and what we gain from doing it. This method gives us a carbon-neutral fuel, which is valuable. It's also somewhat cheap. There are other ways to remove CO2 from the atmosphere that don't have those upsides.
Regardless of whether this technology works as promised, the last part (and possibly the first part too) does not show the right attitude to solving this issue, I think. It's not just technology that got us into this mess. It's also how we decided to apply that technology. Silver bullet or not, we need to change that.
It's one thing if the necessary changes don't have to be as drastic and doom and gloom as predicted until now, but if everyone thinks "oh it's fine, we fixed this!" we'll be hit by Jevon's Paradox[0] so hard that we somehow manage to destroy ourselves anyway.