Climate protection: CO2 turned into methanol
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tuwien.at
However, wtf is this press release? Is this research? This is announcing a patent? This doesn't seem like science to me? Where's the publications, where is the methodology description? What about the constraints? Energy density of methanol is high, but what's the energy input necessary for the conversion process? Is this only effectively helpful if renewable powered? This press release is useless to anyone who actually cares about the work. It's mediocre marketing at best. God I hate academic press offices.
There also appears to be a patent but I don't trust my googlefu enough to try and search for that.
After a brief skim of the paper... the press release is (as typical) pretty out of touch with the research. Chemistry is nothing short of impressive! And I hope methodologies like these push towards viable carbon capture, mostly so we don't get idiots continuing to experiment with riskier techniques like iron fertilization etc. However, the paper leaves me with so many questions. Methane is shown to be an output of the chemical reaction leading to methanol, they claim the methane output is reduced by their modifications to the method but they make no attempt to quantify the amount of methane released in the reaction or how that compares to the CO2 capture.
Also also. I'm not a chemist, but it's pretty weird to be measuring energy in eV is it not? If this were truly climate-centric, they could very easily put the Wattage required per kg of carbon capture. Which, although probably extremely high given they haven't had time to optimize it, would give a very clear idea of the efficiency of the capture.
It looks like some of this might be quantified in the patent but I can only read French, not German :(
Process takes place at 21 bar and 300-500C. I do not see this being efficient unless powered by nukes. This is fine though, and more accessible than the gasoline production methods that use similar high pressure high temperature reactors.
I'll reiterate, I have no issue that it's inefficient, that's to be expected. It's not hard at all to give a net energy input for the entire process. In fact that would be the easiest part of the paper. If you're giving your research to your press office to make a statement about "climate protection" I damn well expect that number to be provided. Powered by nuclear as you propose is wonderful, btw. I personally would take nuclear waste over atmospheric CO2 every day of the week.
Maybe bond villains too. You have to do something with the money, right?
I want to see this movie.
Er, no. Just no. eV is just a unit, that doesn't make it more or less precise. eV had its origins in early accelerator physics work where it was a convenient unit to use, and it's use spread from there to other subfields of physics, including ones where the connection to the original processes measured in the early accelerator work is tenuous at best.
But surplus solar is by far the cheapest. It does not seem like operating this process intermittently, i.e. only when power is cheapest, would be impractical.
If the equipment was very expensive, it would need to be operated at near 100% to earn back its cost. But molybdenum disulfide is not expensive. Usually it is only when you need gold or platinum catalysts that capital cost dominates.
I was thinking of doing a Kickstarter and renting out a boat but I got told in no uncertain words not to do it by some scientists who contribute to those IPCC reports.
These days the research is more in this direction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_Shock_(novel)
but the short path to that is to spend about $1B developing a new airplane to inject SO2 into the stratosphere because no off-the-shelf airplane flies high enough. That's a little out of reach for a Kickstarter.
SO2 + OH· → HOSO2· HOSO2· + O2 → HO2· + SO3 SO3 (g) + H2O (l) → H2SO4 (aq)
Back in the 1970s and 1980s the effect of global warming was attenuated by SO2 emissions in the troposphere, one of the many reason deniers were able to deny as long as they did.
SO2 particles last a few days in the troposphere but last a few years in the stratosphere. So the cooling effect you get is hundreds or thousands of times more per unit mass so the amount of acid rain you get for the amount of cooling you get is much more favorable than in the bad old days.
What was the rationale?
I understand to not dump a million tons of iron in the ocean at once, but what's the harm in first dumping 100 kg, then seeing the results, drawing conclusions, and deciding to go to 1 ton, or to stop? If 100 kg is considered too much, then maybe 10 kg is ok, no?
"Renting a boat" is also a bit of a simplification of what is required. The first time people tried iron fertilization they were unlucky and had a current suck the iron deep into the ocean right away and it had no effect. To do an ocean fertilization experiment you need a whole flotilla because you need to track where the iron goes.
The amount that it takes get effects you can notice is in the 10 ton - 100 ton range
Seeding the deep ocean with iron occurs absolutely routinely in nature, via dust from the Sahara blown to the Atlantic Ocean. Thus, putting iron where dust does not reach could have at worst limited negative impact.
The hysterical reaction to experiments is peculiar at best. The worst anyone has said in public, that I have encountered, is that it would not help. But that does not come close to justifying the hysteria.
Academic here. I agree with you that there should be a link to the original paper, but I can kinda sorta explain this.
For one, unfortunately (very unfortunately), the papers are often behind paywalls or otherwise inaccessible. This one isn't, but it might explain the bad habit.
Also, and again unfortunately, scientists are often not in the habit of presenting their results to the general public. It's not really part of our training, or something we're expected to do.
My own interactions with my university's communication staff have been a little bit tense; faculty often have utilitarian web pages aimed mostly at students and colleagues in the discipline, whereas communication staff seem to mostly want to drive publicity for the university as a whole.
It can be worse. Here is a 2018 USC press release in my discipline:
https://news.usc.edu/144995/visiting-professor-solves-math-m...
The Lindelof Hypothesis was not proved, the paper was not peer reviewed, nobody prominent in the field ever endorsed the result, and the claim was later retracted. The press release remains up.
That is true. Here in Ōtepoti there is a university department of "Scientific Communication" trying to address that. Good luck to them, and hopefully this is changing.
In my opinion, a professional who can't explain the work they do to a normal human is not really a professional. I've heard so many scientists complain about the quality of science reporting but they might be partly to blame. I know not every scientist can be a Carl Sagan of course.
Sometimes it's a net benefit, but sometimes not. See: scientists beefing with flat earthers, who will never be convinced of anything.
What's harder is: attracting an audience in the first place; being able to entertain them in addition to explaining the science; understanding how the media works; making the right connections; knowing how to pitch a reporter; etc.
For example, let's say you found something interesting in Particle Physics. You figured out the mass of the W boson to another 3 decimal places or some such. To make that result at all interesting to a lay person, you need to pile on enough background information to establish context. What's a W boson? Well it's part of a symmetry group in the Standard Model -> Symmetry Groups? Quantum mechanics? -> etc etc.
Know what they call enough background information to be able to begin to appreciate the research in a given field? A bachelors degree.
This is what Aaron Swartz was suicided for (allegedly) (I have my own theory on why he died, but I would never share that on HN.
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Its a complex problem though - ESPECIALLY when said papers/research are fully funded by public tax payer dollars, then de-facto those papers should be public... but it IS also a matter of national security...
If [ENEMY STATE] can just harvest all the academic research of the US, then why do it themselves. So there is that.
Though, one could take a CIA route, and change aspects of the papers which are public such that the gist comes across, but methodologies are either tampered with or omitted such that one would still have to do the remaining work to succeed.
This was what was really interesting to me about DUQU/StuxNet.
But yeah, Swartz was not killed for JSTOR access/theft... (or maybe he was to prevent enemy states getting all these papers?)
Published research already is de facto public, the question is just about whether we want to make those people who access it criminals, to oversimplify a bit.
I'm a bit worried by your semi-nationalist attitude, but I suppose that is besides the point of this comment.
Paywalls keep out all kinds of people, but I find it hard to believe they keep out foreign agents.
An electron-volt is a very small unit of energy. Since atoms and molecules are also very small, the eV is a common unit of measurement for chemical phenomena described at this scale.
See for example this table of molecular bond dissociation energies, where eV is one of the units offered:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond-dissociation_energy#Repre...
CO2 to methanol is energetically uphill. This is going to take energy to do. A lot of energy.
It's likely to be insanely wasteful of energy, like using solar power to make electricity to crack water into hydrogen so the hydrogen can be burned to make electricity. That's about 40% efficient, nobody does it, but it's used as a talking point.
Producing energy without generating CO2 is now both easier and cheaper than trying to do something with the CO2 from burning fuels.
[1] - One of the many articles refuting [0]
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[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2RC9DgbJtM
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-fossil-fuel-rockef...
This pulls CO2 out of "where carbon dioxide occurs in maximum concentration - for example directly in the exhaust gas stream of large industrial plants". One example would be fossil fuel power plants...
It's an interesting technology but is bound to be co-opted by those who will pretend it is a reason to allow fossil fuel extraction to continue without limit. Eg [1]
Also, many uses for methanol, such as as a fuel additive, release the carbon back into the atmosphere. Once the fossil fuel is extracted and burned, the carbon has moved from the slow cycle to the fast cycle - and it'll stay there.[2]
[1] https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/ccs-will-not-sol... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle#:~:text=Fast%20an....
That's a little simplistic. The biological systems on the earth are a carbon sink. Not adding CO2 causes a reduction in CO2, many orders of magnitude more than humans could hope to accomplish by pulling it out of the air with non-biological contraptions.
Now that HN get far fewer "random university student's silly CAD design project treated as a real, upcoming invention" submissions this last decade or so, they're one of my least-favorite types of submissions to HN.
Here's an example startup https://terraformindustries.com/
The downside of this process seems to be that it doesn't extract atmospheric CO2 to make methanol, it converts CO2 from concentrated industrial waste streams. It's perhaps "better than nothing" but the methanol will probably end up as CO2 again later (if it's used as fuel, for example) so it really isn't as great as it might sound.
The only thing that does make a difference is if you succeed in getting the carbon back into the ground.
Outside of classic/antique cars, why would we want to keep existing ICE vehicles long term? After a couple decades, the few remaining ICE vehicle niches will probably still be served by petroleum-derived fuels or bio-methanol, not synthetic hydrocarbons.
Switching long haul trucking to renewable hydrogen would make much more sense, since weight is an issue. Air travel is tougher. In the near term we will start blending waste oil based sustainable aviation fuel. Longer term people have suggested directly burning liquid hydrogen.
The biggest near term CO2 reductions will come from switching to renewables for electricity. We have the tech to make major strides on that front now.
1. https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201208/backpage.cfm
It mean 70% of the energy spent to produce this fuel is going to be lost. Meanwhile batteries range is improving every year, and electric engine easily reach 90% efficiency.
Your rant also neglected that storing electricity directly is hardly a solved problem at scale. Whereas transporting and storing methan has a huge existing infrastructure.
There are processes in which you can take some fuel, and add in some low-quality (i.e. low temperature) heat that would otherwise be wasted, and some CO2, and get more energy in the form of fuel out.
Some of these things actually look like they have potential if you can get the catalyst.
What if we use "free" solar energy for this. This could also be a carbon sequestration technique. It might not make sense now, but 20 years down the line - when most power generation is green except jet fuels, ships and reserve gasoline to electric generators.
Bottomline, it could accelerate the shuttering down of oil wells 20 years from now.
Which is what makes it nearly-useless. The solution to energy generation that emits CO2 is not trying to recover it from the chimney. The solution is eliminating it. This can solve the problem of concentrated CO2 emitted as an industrial byproduct of non-energy-generating chemical processes, but that is not a major contributor [1] to our carbon emissions.
[1] Cement manufacturing is often pointed to as a major CO2 emitter... Yet it is responsible for ~1.5% of emissions in the US (~8% in China). So, you could make a bit of a dent in a small fraction of our emissions, but it doesn't come remotely close to solving the overall emissions problem.
I wrote this other comment a couple of days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31850610
I don't see us succeeding in reducing our dependency on fossil fuels in the near future. We can achieve some reductions at national level. But these fossil fuels are simply going to find a customer somewhere else. It would be better if the West can provide cheap sustainable fuels or export/sponsor CO2 capturing solutions for foreign countries.
If this is meant as a handy way to reduce some CO2 output while making a side business of methanol (or other) production then it might be good. If it's meant to be industrial scale CO2 elimination then probably not.
Even if you do it cheaply with solar energy, the energy might be better used directly.
1. Power cars with batteries charged from the grid or use
2. "Green" hydrogen, i.e. from cracking H2O with solar, or use
3. Synfuel derived from CO2 and green hydrogen, i.e. using the synfuel as a "battery", the output being CO2 and H20 again.
This likely isn't a viable CO2 reduction method. It would be if there was a massive overbuildout of green energy collection. A more likely use is a green way to make a portable power source.
It's possible to produce gasoline from CO2+extra+H and extreme heat and pressure. This seems more achievable. Such designs were, I think, using nuclear heat almost directly.
That's my reading of the paper, yes.
> It gives a value in eV, that can be extrapolated outwards though I am not exactly sure how.
It gives values in eV, yes, and 1 eV ~= 96 kJ/mol, if you're more familiar with those units. However, what they're looking at is peaks in the x-ray diffraction spectra, indicating presence of compounds with various specific binding energies. That doesn't really tell anything about the energy efficiency of the process as a whole.
> It's possible to produce gasoline from CO2+extra+H and extreme heat and pressure. This seems more achievable. Such designs were, I think, using nuclear heat almost directly.
There's a whole raft of different processes to produce hydrocarbons given CO2, H2, and some energy input. Fischer-Tropsch is perhaps the most famous. This could be yet another one, if they can make it work out. If it can be more cost effective than existing approaches, it's really really awesome, but won't "save the world" by itself of course.
"Methanol serves many uses: it comprises gasoline and fuel, facilitates energy generation and forms many chemicals and chemical products, including plastics, paint, resin film, windshield washer fluid and numerous pigments and dyes. Methanol ranks among the most valuable substances due to its wide range of uses in various industries. It classifies as a basic alcohol, making it a cost-effective choice for producing gasoline and synthetic fuels."[0]
Seems pretty useful to me
[0]https://www.reference.com/science/methanol-used-eedca1b7f9f2...
If we could use the Fischer-Tropsch processes to process atmospheric CO2 and methan on a really large scale we could recycle burnt fuel and create a global equilibrium. Fuel would then be used as energy storage instead of energy source. Fuel is an attractive energy storage, because it is simple, has high energy density and we have LOTS of experience and legacy hardware powered by fuel.
From the view point of a simearth/civilization/4x/colonization/strategy game player that is a technology I would like to unlock.
Obviously simplistic view, because it is not that easy... Like the article states: "However, they have the major disadvantage that they are not robust. If there are certain other substances in the exhaust gas stream besides carbon dioxide, for example sulfur, the catalyst quickly loses its activity. It is said that the catalyst is poisoned."
Good to see them make progress in that area!
Ammonia and hydrogen will be practical: ammonia stored at low pressure, and hydrogen underground.
Fossil fuels are an issue because we're pulling up carbon that's been sequestered for eons and putting it back in the air.
In principle, yes. Though everybody except the agriculture lobby has realized that there isn't near enough arable land on the planet for replacing anything close to current fossil fuel usage.
There is nowhere near enough spare farmland for it to do any good, but it could do unlimited harm.
We need to be returning farmland to forest, jungle, and wetland, instead.
If we could convert all of the excess CO2 in the atmosphere into carbon and oxygen that would be great (maybe a little messy but great)
That is, if you take the energy required to turn CO2 into methanol, why not just use that energy directly in the things that need it? I'm not saying this is entirely useless, because obviously with renewables the biggest problem is energy storage, but too often I feel announcements like this lead with the "we can turn atmospheric CO2 in gasoline" while glossing over the crux of the problem, which is where does that energy come from in the first place.
That's a very important point.
However, sometimes you can't use the energy - like we can't eat CO2 + sunlight, but plants can turn that into something usable. Methanol is useful for chemical processes. The US Navy was looking into fuel production in aircraft carriers, which involved CO2 sequestration. That's useful since they have the spare power. And so on.
It may also indirectly avoid more emissions - the CO2 being used has to be transported from somewhere, be it coal, oil, or other sources.
Good progress is being made on the clean electricity generation front. But distribution and storage are huge challenges. CO2 utilization processes solve distribution and storage challenges.
Many CO2 capture processes need heat, not necessarily electricity. That really changed the landscape of effective energy sources (e.g. nuclear looks ~3x cheaper per thermal kWh vs. per electric kWh according to a researcher I spoke to). Solar thermal also starts to look practical (and for many processes the energy intensive sorbent regeneration step, unlike the air contractors, is not capex constrained so you don’t really care that it only runs when the sun is shining.
If so, I think the purpose of this research is to process the exhaust streams of industrial processes that create lots of CO2 for reasons other than energy. For example, steel production produces a lot of CO2 due to chemical reactions used to remove impurities from iron, even if the blast furnace runs entirely on renewable energy. This process would, hypothetically, allow us to input more renewable energy to capture the exhaust CO2 and make steelmaking more carbon neutral.
It has an inequality problem.
This is why the cost of energy is so important. Carbon sequestration is a relatively simple process but it makes no sense to burn hydrocarbons to do it. But if energy is sufficiently cheap then you can produce hydrocarbon fuels from the atmosphere, which at least is carbon neutral.
There are a lot of use cases for this beyond economics too. For example, solar gets used a lot in a lot of cold remote regions. It's nowhere near as efficient as, say, ecuatorial solar power but the alternatives are much more expensive. Getting fuel to remote locations can be really expensive. Economics matter but so do circumstances.
Solar is particularly good because it has no moving parts and is particularly efficient because it's about the only mass form of energy production that directly produces power (rather than, say, heating water to turn a generator, which adds a lot of expense, maintenance and failure modes).
This article is kinda vague about what's going on but some form of carbon sequestration for practical purposes is going to be important IMHO.
It seems we can already do the Methanol to Ethanol step with a catalyst!
Their focus is on creating high margin low volume products while the process is scaling to stay afloat.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/16/air-company-makes-vodka-out-...
For starters I guess they're focusing on the "Heavy Fuel".
> Reaction conditions were 1 mbar reaction mixture (CO2:H2 = 1:3) at 200 ◦C and 300 ◦C.
So, for this to work, you'd need a decent temperature and a supply of H2. I'm also guessing the CO2 needs to be somewhat pure, so you'd need Cryogenic distillation to pull out the pure CO2 [1].
Seems like it'd be pretty energy intensive (Not that I'd think it'd be otherwise. Conservation of energy and all)
Which is unfortunate since the vast majority of our hydrogen is manufactured from fossil fuels.
It's really almost laughable how many "solutions" to emissions are ultimately accounting tricks.
People keep arguing there are solutions but atmospheric CO2 continues to rise and an increasing rate. Planet doesn't care how clever your argument is for using "less" co2.
As solar electricity continues getting cheaper and catalysts improve improve, H2 production will shift to electrolysis from water.
And this is true of every hand-wavy "we'll just replace it with solar!" answer.
If our only usage of fossil fuels was to create hydrogen for industrial usage, you would be correct, this would be no concern. But we're no where near seeing this happen at the scales it needs to happen.
We do not need to increase our H2 production, but there will be increasing value in doing so as its cost falls.
All we are really lacking at this time is enough PV generating capacity to match demand, and enough electrolysis equipment to match demand. We just need to keep building out.
Time would be on our side if global climate catastrophe and civilization collapse did not loom. We need to spend fast enough for the switchover to happen first.
Pulling H2 off of water takes input energy. Pulling H2 off of methane ultimately releases energy.
That doesn't mean that electrolysis couldn't eventually become cheaper, but rather that processing natural gas to create H2 can require less energy since there is already energy in that carbon-hydrogen bond that gets released through processing.
What is meaningful is that H2 from NG consumes opex, where H2 from renewables does not consume opex.
I don't think we actually disagree here. I do think solar will be cheaper. I'm simply pointing out it burns more energy (as in, it requires more input energy, not capital). I'm sorry if that wasn't clear from my reply.