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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Looks like more fossil-fuel promotion FUD.

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.

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The theory is that you make "electro fuels" compatible with existing ICE vehicles. The idea is that if the costs of solar keep decreasing and the costs to extract and refine oil keep increasing, you hit an inflection point where this is economically feasible and as a byproduct possibly save the planet.

Here's an example startup https://terraformindustries.com/

We don't need electro fuels because we want to keep existing ICE vehicles, but rather because energy density is hugely important for fuels -- especially for things like airplanes, which rely on high-density energy sources in order to function. The comparison to direct "solar" power isn't fair; rather, electro fuels should be compared to other energy storage solutions, such as batteries, which have a much lower energy density than fossil fuels.

I don't think it's very smart to bet against technology that is currently at least 50% energy efficient - end to end -, because of density, that can be improved, with thermic engine, which reach less than 30% efficiency, in the engine alone, on best scenarios.

I really don't understand your comment -- can you clarify? Gasoline thus has about 100 times the energy density of a lithium-ion battery. [1] I'm not sure of the numbers, in terms of electrofuels, but I'm sure they're similarly skewed against battery storage. I'm not sure how 50% vs. 30% efficiency of an engine plays much of a role in this.

1. https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201208/backpage.cfm

I'm not speaking about density but efficiency, billions in r&d has been poured into combustion engine r&d and no engine reach more than 30% efficiency on the car sold.

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.

Yes, the idea is that if solar energy is "free" (it's not, but set that aside for sake of argument) then it doesn't matter how inefficient the process is.

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 waste stream from making cement is kinda capture-ish... because the concrete slowly absorbs CO2 as it cures.

Capturing CO2 to be burned elsewhere sounds like releasing half the CO2. Not great, but better?

No, it re-releases all of it.

But then you're only releasing it once, rather than twice as much. Hence: half.

No, that makes no sense at all. You might as well say you sweat/piss out half as much water as you drink. No: all of it.

You have two things that burn fuel and produce CO2. Thing A burns fuel, its CO2 isn't released but captured. That captured CO2 fuel is then burned at Thing B and released. Half. (if you assume the energy from reprocessing the CO2 into fuel doesn't produce Co2 itself and comes from clean sources)

X tons mined carbon in, X tons atmospheric carbon out. What you do with it on the way doesn't matter. What matters is purely carbon in the atmosphere.

The only thing that does make a difference is if you succeed in getting the carbon back into the ground.

And a bit more because producing it wasn't free.

> The theory is that you make "electro fuels" compatible with existing ICE vehicles

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.

Well, a couple decades from now is still a couple decades away for one thing. For another, some things like long haul trucking or air travel may be harder to directly electrify.

I can't imagine synthetic hydrocarbon fuels being anywhere near cost competitive with either petroleum or bio derived hydrocarbons in the next couple decades.

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.

The site I linked originally has a whitepaper on the economics of the business and thinks it should end up cheaper than conventional fossil fuel drilling. I'm not familiar with bio derived hydrocarbons other than ethanol, but that doesn't seem all that promising from anything I've heard about. The founder left his job as a NASA software engineer to start it up, so he's probably not a dummy. He could certainly be wrong though.

It seems like electric rail would make a great replacement for long-haul trucking.

Subtrack the emissions and an IC engine has any number of advantages, from range and refuel time, to recycling potential. Steel is far far easier to recycle than any battery tech.

Right, the associated talking point is that it might be impossible to replace the worlds cars fast enough to reduce the emissions in the next 5 years. Also some people think battery production will hit a hard limit because of resources. I can’t judge 100% but I have a personal opinion on those points.

It's just a university press release. They exist to wildly overhype every mildly interesting project in hopes of getting attention and support for the institution in question.

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.

"Imagine the amount of brainwashing it took from the oil industry to convince people that cows are the problem instead of the oil industry".

[0] - the old interview that supposedly states the origin of "fossil Fuels" by Oil Exec...

[1] - One of the many articles refuting [0]

---

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2RC9DgbJtM

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-fossil-fuel-rockef...

With methanol, density is higher and storage costs are lower than batteries though, right? Those things may matter depending on application. Like, building battery banks to store energy for a season? no way. building tanks to store methanol? maybe?! I dont know.

Going that route has some promising aspects if you look at a larger picture. If you can get clean methan via hydrogen powered by solar, wind, or water you don't have to replace huge amounts of machinery right now. Replacing millions and millions of natural gas heaters all over Europe will also emit huge amounts CO₂ in the atmosphere. If we could continue to use them until their normal end of life with CO₂ neutral fuel, that could be a real benefit. And the life span of heating units is often measured in decades.

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.

> CO2 to methanol is energetically uphill. This is going to take energy to do. A lot of energy.

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.

Yeah, the key issue is energy. If we have unlimited energy we can deal with climate change in so many ways. Unless there is a full energy accounting it is just useless at this point.

But this pull CO2 out of the air and puts it to good use, whereas building solar panels only prevents future CO2 emissions. They are different goals.

This doesn't pull CO2 out of the air. CO2 in the air is at 420ppm meaning you would need to process a huge amount of air to get a significant amount of methanol.

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....

> whereas building solar panels only prevents future CO2 emissions

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.

But what's cool is that the energy is easily stored and transported. 40% efficiency is fine as long as production is cheap.

It's not 40% efficient at turning CO2 in the atmosphere into fuel (If we had a technology that could do that, I would not worry at all about climate change), it's 40% efficient at turning highly concentrated CO2, from say, the chimney stack of a coal power plant into fuel.

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 disagree with the idea that we shouldn't build capturing innovations on top of chimney CO2 emissions just because we need to eliminate those chimney emissions. Yes, we should reduce chimney emissions. But it appears that isn't going to be as easy as we'd like. It's why we're seeing various European countries turning on their coal plants again because Russia turned off the gas. We really need to have these capturing innovations that happen at the chimney too.

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.

I don't know the specifics of this idea, but there's actually some merit to the more general idea you are denouncing.

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.

Also isn't escaped methanol a worse greenhouse gas than CO2 (86x worse by a quick search).

I'm fairly sure that you're thinking of methane, CH4, which is a gas at normal temperature/pressure. Methanol is a simple alcohol, is liquid at home temperature/pressure, and I don't believe it has the same extreme GG effect as methane.

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