Hacker News Reader

Comment by ThrustVectoring | Hacker News Reader

I strongly suspect that manufacturing hydrocarbon fuel out of air, water, and electricity is going to be a pretty significant part of the fight against climate change.

The reason is fundamentally political. Newly industrialized countries have a lot of vital economic activity dependent on internal combustion engines, and cannot afford the luxury of replacing them with alternatives. The West does not have the political will and power to worsen starvation in India in order to lower the CO2 emissions caused by engines manufactured and used in India. It's a lot more feasible to subsidize carbon-neutral fuel generation schemes until it's cost competitive for Indian consumers.

In other words, this kind of scheme can be used to essentially ship CO2 emission reductions from one country to another. It replaces a wicked problem with complex political and social components to a mere application of staggering sums of money and resources.

View on HN

>I strongly suspect that manufacturing hydrocarbon fuel out of air, water, and electricity

If you already have electricity, that is all the energy you need. There is no need to use it to produce a toxic, polluting fuel that is used in highly inefficient internal combustion engines. Simply use electric motors, which are way more efficient.

> If you already have electricity, that is all the energy you need

If you can store and transport it better than gasoline can be stored and transported, which ... so far you can’t.

Why not just build electric trains?

Which of the issues do you think that addresses?

That is problematic in areas, including much of North America.

http://energyskeptic.com/2016/electrification-of-freight-rai...

The grid is a thing...

Electric motors are efficient, but current battery tech is not. Hydrocarbon fuels will probably always win for weight to energy efficiency.

>Electric motors are efficient, but current battery tech is not. Hydrocarbon fuels will probably always win for weight to energy efficiency.

You are misinformed, or focusing on the wrong metric. There's a detailed rundown of efficiency for different technologies here:

https://me222.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/twentyfirstcentury...

How would someone in China charge their electric car with clean electricity generated in the United States?

Whoosh...

Nobody suggested what you are asking about.

But it seems you are suggesting that rather than generating electricity locally by sustainable means, it would be a better idea to create synthetic gasoline in the US, then ship that to China for them to burn?

It costs only 1% of the energy capacity of liquid hydrocarbon fuel to ship it literally around the globe. A penny per dollar of delivered value.

The chemical potential energy stored is proved stable for literally hundreds of millions of years. Few electrical energy storage options are useful for more than a few weeks, most operate in the range of seconds to hours.

The fuel and its combustion products are remarkably non-toxic (though excess accumulation at the scale of the globe over decades to centuries can be quite problematic). They don't attack or degrade most materials used in the construction of storage, transfer, processing, or utilisation.

The source elements are abundant and relatively easily obtained.

There is a vast infrastructure and 1-2 centuries' experience in working with and applying the materials.

The energy densities by both weight and volume are all but wholly unmatched by nonnuclear energy sources. Only hydrogen, by mass, is higher, and it presents numerous other challenges.

Fossil fuels have proved exceedingly problematic. We must stop using them for combustion.

Liquid and gaseous hydocarbons are amazingly useful and flexible. While they may be substituted for in some applications, it's likely that a base-level need will remain.

Electricity is an amazing power transmission and transformation technology, and is exceedingly useful in informatiin technologies. It does exceeding poor at storage, though, and likely always will, for reasons of basic physics and chemistry.

>Nobody suggested what you are asking about.

That is exactly what I was talking about it my original post. No matter how many cars in the US get replaced with electric ones, China is still going to be building and driving gas-powered ones, and we have limited influence on their domestic policy.

>But it seems you are suggesting that rather than generating electricity locally by sustainable means, it would be a better idea to create synthetic gasoline in the US, then ship that to China for them to burn?

Not at all. In fact, the very first prerequisite for what I'm talking about is that the US has switched entirely to nuclear, wind, solar, hydroelectric, and other non-CO2 emitting power. At that point, there's little the US can do further reduce global CO2 emissions, at which point generating extra electrical capacity and using it to synthesize ICE fuel starts to look really attractive.

And again, this isn't something that is necessary or even viable in the short term. Over the long run, however, it seems like an important way that more industrialized nations can lower the CO2 emissions generated by internal activity of less industrialized ones.

Sea and air transport, as well as remote-location generation, and several industrial processes, rely on or benefit greatly from fuel or hydrocarbon-based inputs.

Forgive me for pointing out the obvious, but we already have an existing supply of hydrocarbon based fuels which are relatively cheap compared to the proposed "quest."

They are destroying the environment on which we depend. They are also finite.

To further point out the obvious.

https://www.ipcc.ch

They are finite but the finite total is over five times the amount needed to utterly destroy the environment... so we need to refrain from using up that finite total.

Whch alone is a sufficient response to your earlier question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19794993

It also creates a useful product to offset the development of carbon capture.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com