Comment by apo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by apo | Hacker News Reader

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I'm skeptical, but fascinated by what you're doing.

It sounds like all of the steps of your process are known, except:

1. CO2 fixation uses only electricity - no natural gas or other fossil fuels. It works at room temperature.

2. Distillation of the immediate products (alcohols) is not necessary. A carbon nanotube membrane solves the problem at room temperature through reverse osmosis.

Correct?

If so, then why target fuels rather than alcohol production directly? Burning gasoline puts the CO2 right back into the atmosphere, which seems like a half measure.

Why not focus on delivering CO2-negative organic feedstocks instead and possibly tap into the carbon credits market?

Edit: another question. How much flexibility/control does your process give over the kinds of alcohols you produce? For example, can you select for long chain alcohols over short? Saturated vs. unsaturated? Cyclic vs acyclic? Aromatic? Mono- vs oligohydroxylated hydrocarbons. Primary, secondary, tertiary? etc.

We could use the alcohols as fuels directly (in flex fuel vehicles), but this wouldn't address the much larger market for gasoline. It's a simple and inexpensive upgrade, so makes sense to do it. We will definitely take advantage of carbon credits, tax incentives, etc too!

If the alcohol upgrade to gasoline makes sense technically and economically for you, why is it not commonly done with (presumably much cheaper and extant in great volume) industrial alcohol today?

Actors are not necessarily as rational as Econ 101 would have us believe. Incomplete information, misinformation and advertisement distort the market. As well as monopolistic practices.

A lot of conspiracy theories are paranoid, but the propaganda machine of the oil industry is very real and managed to incite a lot of economically counter-productive policies.

He said "inexpensive", not "economical". The whole process isn't economical yet. Perhaps conversion is more economical with their particlar sorts of alcohol though.

Understood, although eventually it has to become "economical" or it doesn't fly.

My point was, you can view the alcohols as a feedstock for the gasoline production, and given that, you might just stream in large quantities of already-produced and cheap grain ethanol etc. from Indiana.

It is more likely that polluting methods (net non-zero) will be forced to become uneconomical.

Ethanol mixed fuel is common in a lot of places.

I might have misunderstood your point, but I believe alcohol is commonly used as a fuel in Brazil, where most cars are capable of using it directly.

Organic feedstocks (non-fuel), although smaller isn't exactly a tiny market. Depending on how much control you have over the fixation process you might be able to tap into some high-value alcohol markets. That's the main reason I added the follow-up to the original questions.

In other words, the flow of material would look like:

CO2 -> polymers, drugs, and other useful solid materials

There would be no [product] -> CO2 step at the end. It cuts out the re-release of CO2 and eliminates a dependence on petroleum.

I believe that as long as we have a huge worldwide oil / diesel / gasoline infrastructure in place, from transport to refining to distribution to combustion, it makes a lot of sense to build reasonably-efficient carbon-neutral mechanisms to plug into that infrastructure.

In other words, for the next handful of decades, the worldwide fleet of cars, trucks, generators, boats, etc. are going to be burning carbon that comes from somewhere. Products like this provide a carbon-neutral means of supplying that demand.

It's like working on a huge existing codebase, but at much larger scale, and with geopolitics. People are working on rebuilding it all from scratch, but iterating within the existing infrastructure could also deliver huge wins.

And, if we somehow found ourselves in a world in which carbon-neutral petrochemicals were the norm, well, we can always generate a surplus and sequester that surplus, right?

If I am allowed to daydream freely, a huge fusion reactor with a gasoline pipeline flowing from it, is (in my mind) a beautiful thing.

Ultimately anything we make now with petroleum feedstocks could be made from CO2 mined from the air instead. Gasoline and other transportation fuels is a logical first step, but we don't need to stop there. Agreed!

I think one has to look at this from a business minded point of view. One way of doing that is going for what could be an immense market.

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