Catching CO2 from trucks and reducing their emissions by 90%
nuadox.com
nuadox.com
They don't use the collected CO2 to make diesel fuel, they make methane. Some trucks may use methane as fuel.
IIUC they don't expect every gas station to have a converted from CO2 to fuel, but to have the conversion in the operational bases of the trucks, or collect it and send it to a specialized facility.
They use the heat from the exhaust gases to power the device, the calculations are in the paper.
They say that in other projects, they use the same heat of the exhaust gases to improve the efficiency of the fuel in a 10%. So this is not totally "free".
How does this compare to releasing the CO2 (and getting a 10% of efficiency) and collecting the CO2 from the air in a central location?
How does this compare to using Hydrogen as fuel? I guess the difference is that most of this technology is buildable now, but Hydrogen storage is too difficult for now.
How does this compare with a electric truck? I guess this system gives more autonomy, but all the chemical reactions to convert the CO2 to methane are less efficient that good batteries.
That said, my money is on the higher concentration of CO2 winning by far.
Wouldn't this effect the efficiency of catalytic converters? As I understand it, those need to be hot to work well. Or is the heat taken out of the exhaust after it passes through the cat? Skimming through the paper, I don't see mention of this.
Maybe it would make sense to shrink the engine's radiator and use some of the engine heat instead of exhaust heat.
Building an electric car emits a ton of CO2 as well. The figure that is often used is that building your car generates just as much CO2 that what it will generate during its lifetime of driving.
So even if your truck runs 100% on renewable energy (and that's a big if, not to mention that creating this system also generates pollution before becoming green), retrofitting existing vehicles with technologies such as this one should be studied seriously.
https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2015/11/Cl...
So how long your car lasts isn't really a question of how long you personally own it, it's a question of whether you maintain it well so that it stays on the road for the next guy and don't get into a wreck.
If you can afford to do it, it would actually help to buy a new electric car, keep it for only a short period of time and then sell it and buy another new one. Because then you're the one buying new cars and you're choosing a BEV, and every one you sell into the used market is someone who then doesn't have to buy a new car that might have been ICE.
If everybody did that then it wouldn't work -- nobody would be buying the used cars. But there are more than enough people who would never do that anyway because they can't afford it, that it's a gain for all the people who can afford it to do it.
And, of course, the substitution isn't perfect, so if 95% of new cars were already electric then this might not be worth it. The benefit comes from you choosing a new BEV when someone else might have chosen a new ICE. But when existing new sales are much less than half BEV, making the better choice can easily outweigh the imperfect substitution.
> Under the average U.S. electricity grid mix, we found that producing a midsize, midrange (84 miles per charge) BEV typically adds a little over 1 ton of emissions to the total manufacturing emissions, resulting in 15 percent greater emissions than in manufacturing a similar gasoline vehicle. However, replacing gasoline use with electricity re-duces overall emissions by 51 percent over the life of the car.
This has steam coming out of my ears, and I agree with the goal they set for themselves. I haaaAAAAaaate when scientists pull tone-deaf shit like this. It's why I ran away from theory into applied as fast as my legs could carry me. Nobody is gonna drive an 84 mile range vehicle. The market has shouted this from the rooftop and if Concerned Scientist have not heard this, then they're nowhere near as smart as they want everyone to think they are. Use real numbers and spare us your white tower bullshit. A competitive car will have 2.5x times that range. That probably lowers that lifetime number into the high 3X%'s which is not as compelling but also not lying.
Lying to prove a point is the worst kind of lying, because when your detractors catch you in it then the unconvinced have confirmation bias against your original premise. Cut that shit out. For everybody's sake.
35% lifetime emissions reduction is not a slam dunk. Many more additional efforts (read: lifestyle changes) will have to go along with that improvement. And that's nearly as hard a pill to swallow as a car that only gets 84 miles per charge brand new.
1. The phrase "265-mile-range BEV" appears 9 times in the document. That's not 2.5x times that range. It's more than 3.1 times the range of the small BEV.
2. The document never mentions a 35% emissions reduction. On page 21 (or 31) you can see a chart showing a 51% CO2 reduction for the 84 mile BEV and a 53% reduction for the 265 mile BEV.
The fact that the Tesla retains the same emission reduction is because it’s a much larger vehicle. The same sedan would burn much more gas. So what I’d want to know is what’s the footprint of the 2019 extended range Leaf? 2 tons? Five? What’s the lifetime efficiency profile there?
(Also I didn’t realize that power in the Midwest was quite that dirty. That’s nuts and it drags the profile down for everyone else. Apparently EVs in the West are a slam dunk, and also on parts of the eastern seaboard. Iowa? Not much of an improvement)
I would suggest reading the report a little more closely.. It also has numbers for a 265mi Model S... so you don't need to make up estimates for such an EV.. it's in the report.
The Leaf was the best selling EV from 2011-2014 and in 2016. It lost out to the Model S in 2015 by 10%. 400k Leafs sold (bestselling EV of all time)... Tesla is just now starting to surpass that number.
Obviously a report from 2015 wouldn't include Leafs from the future.
And building a regular fuel car doesn't? (Assuming we need to build some kind of car anyway?)
"Electric cars are bad for environment because of building them and producing batteries" is plainly just a myth.
Why do you assume that, given the parent comment explicitly talks about retrofits?
I haven't claimed that electric cars are bad for the environment, just that replacing a perfectly working vehicle by another one is not necessarily a win.
Cars don't appear out of thin air and that manufacturing process ? it pollutes a ton.
To be fair, once it is captured, I am guessing (e.g. no data) that using it as fuel would release CO2 as well, so we would be somewhere below these 90%.
Still, the new vehicle won't appear out of thin air, and the electricity it uses won't either (hopefully it is nuclear or renewable).
Either way, I don't see why such a tech gets rejected outright. I hate gas cars as much as everybody and can't wait to see them replaced by good public transit systems, LMV and yes electric cars.
In the meantime, we have an enormous pool of gas car in circulation, anything that can help reduce their environmental impact is a win in my book.
As others have pointed out we're not just burning the Amazon, we are burning all the Amazons back through geological time.
I agree 100% and it disturbs me very deeply, along with the hundreds of other insane things going on these days, climate grief is definitely a good way to describe how many people feel about the magnitude of these issues.
>but the thing is all the CO2 eventually gets emitted, just more slowly
Not necessarily, we could (and should) sequester CO2.
I am not claiming that this makes it automatically true, but some data to back why it is false would help.
Ideally you'd do that slowly to maximize the utility of the emissions from building the diesel truck in the first place, so add-on technology to make them more environmentally friendly is a very good thing.
Having the conversion option available would be a great addition to synthetic carbon neutral diesel compatible fuels.
"What is the current regulation on SOx in ships emissions and by how much is that going to be improved?
We are going to see a substantial cut: to 0.50% m/m (mass by mass) from 3.50% m/m."
[1] http://www.imo.org/en/MediaCentre/HotTopics/Pages/Sulphur-20...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption
It's a cool student project though, and could possibly work on a large scale if we actually had a solution for the fundamental energy problem.
Global warming is fundamentally a problem of sourcing enough energy in a different way than we used to. And the world/technology is nowhere near ready.
That’s a nice idea but I haven’t seen a reaction that reduces CO2 anywhere, I’m not a professional chemist though so maybe I’m missing something?
EDIT: lol, yes I am [1]. I should just stick to software since I only mildly suck at that.
Also all that crazy tech sounds a bit like overkill; alkali hydroxides absorb CO2 and are pretty cheap to produce.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrochemical_reduction_of...
If converting CO2 to methane made sense in any form[1], it would happen first at point sources (e.g. breweries) long before this Rube Goldberg-esque inanity.
[0] No really, it's awful. Might as well try and collect the water cars emit to try and reduce our dependence on bottled water.
[1]It, as a rule, doesn't per thermodynamics and Coloumb's constant.
To make CH4 from CO2 takes 8 electrons at (near enough) 2V, giving 1 / (96450 * 8) moles CH4 per amp second. Per tonne, that works out to roughly 1000$/tonne CH4 or 2900$/tonne CO2. Assm 4c/kwh.
So with an exceptionally efficient process requiring negligible capital expense or labor it is possible to convert 3000$ and one tonne of CO2 into 200$ of natural gas. Short of making rocket fuel on Mars, I'm not smelling even the slightest whiff of an application: which is why I am so derisive of the article's proposal - charitably it is at best proposing the equivalent of solar roadways.
[0] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180611133412.h...
This and technologies like it sound like something that could literally save the planet. If this sort of thing could be used for trucks, it could be used for trains, ships and stationary engines.
As far as I can tell, the approach involves recycling the CO2 into other fuels and I assume eventually burning everything in a fashion that creates other pollutants but I assume much less CO2. I assume that at greater cost, you could just sequester the CO2 also.
So what's stopping this?
In US? Climate denialism.
In EU. Not much, this is after all something reasearch in Switzerland that has already done other CO2 extraction research, despite scorn and cynicism by misguided ecologists.
I think the time for this tech has finally come. There used to be an argument that if we talk too much about these, emissions habits may never change. Now it is clear that simply cutting down emissions will bring us to +2C degrees at best. Every additional tech we can have to cut down emissions or extract CO2 from atmosphere is welcomed.
Hm, not sure.
"The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing."
-- Albert Einstein
The planet itself will be fine, it's the humans that are at risk from global warming.
However I don't think this is good enough, we need to go carbon negative which means electrification, clean energy sources and CO2 capture/storage (CCS) at large scale, and a whole lot of other changes. Unfortunately there are a couple of countries in the world that will piss in the well for the rest of us in this respect so I don't have much hope of actually fixing the problem.
Edit: Assuming you can fuel the trucks with the product of the CO2 to fuel conversion, is it still better than electric?
One example: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/24/5-major-trump-climate-rollba...
Just one example from there:
> The new rules make it easier to take out protections for threatened animals and plants and allow federal agencies to conduct economic assessments when deciding whether to protect a species from things like construction projects in a critical habitat. The rules also remove tools used by scientists to predict future harm to species from climate change.
As you can see, as with previous actions, he makes changes to benefit business because it's too difficult for businesses to thrive when they need to worry about the environment (paraphrasing of what he's actually said in the past).
Because the will of the people is in the other direction. At this point, its a matter of convincing the greater public of the evidence.
People are stubborn and difficult to convince. And you need to convince roughly half of the voting population (maybe ~50-million people) before things happen in the USA. That's how democracy works.
There's also a power-imbalance that gets somewhat political: how smaller states have 2 senators and therefore control the vote despite having a very small population. Convincing those people is more important, because their vote matters more than most people.
200,000 Wyoming residents have the voting power of 700,000 California residents, due to how Senators work.
Not with gerrymandering, you'll effectively need much more. And then there's the fact that people are consistently voted in on a set of plans/promises that either are never followed through with or they do they opposite because they were just saying the things that get votes rather than what they actually intend to do. The system is broken, plain and simple, and it's not going to change because it benefits those with the ability to change it.
The biggest "problem" is that neither party is predicted to control the House, Senate and Presidency all at once any time soon, so it almost inherently has to be bipartisan. But the prevailing spirit is not exactly cooperation and good faith, on either side.
It’s almost as if the majority disagrees with you that it’s a good idea. Welcome to democracy.
While there is legislative deadlock nothing will happen, and that won't change for at least a year.
Don't give up hope :) keep bringing up carbon price whenever relevant. The tide of public opinion will turn. Late, as always, but it will turn. People didn't think a black man could ever be president but lo and behold you did it. You just need to keep telling people that there is a solution, and that it is carbon price. Keep beating the drum.
What you do with that money is irrelevant. Turn it into a big paper boat and float it down the Hudson. The effect is in the levying of the tax, not in what is done with it.
See for example Canada, who directly deposits the revenue back to its residents.
The "augmenting cars" bit comes from people who don't want to pay the (now high) price of fossil fuels anymore, and instead want to avoid that tax by going green. That's how pigovian taxes work. See the UK who introduced a carbon tax, and promptly saw a huge shift in energy production to green energy and lower CO₂ emitting fuels.
This is why many well known economists are for a carbon tax: