Engineers find a new way to convert carbon dioxide into useful products
news.mit.edu
news.mit.edu
Carbon monoxide is, indeed, an incredibly useful and versatile precursor in many industrial processes. Sourcing it from CO2 in the air unlocks all sorts of carbon-negative technologies, including sustainable fuels and plastics. As we begin to wind down fossil fuel extraction, this becomes increasingly important.
However, the only driver of adoption at scale is cost. Any new method to reduce CO2 must compete not only with established fossil sources, but also more established reduction techniques like RWGS. Even if there's a breakthrough in energy efficiency, as we seem to have here, one must consider the entire system cost as compared to the alternatives.
This is why a lot of research isn't aiming for straight CO2 reduction, but conversion to C2+ molecules. This might allow a more efficient pathway from CO2 to more valuable chemicals. This article linked here suggests that the researchers also have this in mind:
> By swapping in different catalysts, the researchers plan to try making other products such as methanol and ethanol using this approach.
In my opinion, this is where the rubber meets the road. It's not just about making carbon monoxide: It's about turning CO2 into value-added molecules.
And energy is probably free. Let me explain: if we install solar panels at scale only a fraction of the energy produced can be sold because in the sunny hours of the day there is overproduction.
So why would you want to have a better efficiency in energy use?
What matters is to build the cheapest possible machine, to make use of the energy in excess. At whatever efficiency, otherwise the energy is simply curtailed.
I see 4 ways you can use excess. Either sell it to other states or countries, make green hydrogen (natgas competitor), charge short term storage (batteries, pumped hydro), or carbon conversion.
Which requires a machine which may or may not be the cheapest to do keep available for opportunistic "power2somethinguseful". Batteries are also in this category, they excel in how many watts you can dump per dollar worth of battery (before they are full), but don't offer many Wh per investment.
Which brings us back to what GP wrote: "What matters is to build the cheapest possible machine, to make use of the energy in excess." It's all about how many hours of opportunistic activity does it need per year to be worthwhile. If you build some super efficient power2useful machine that is only worthwhile when running 24/7, then you are exactly zero steps closer to the green energy future. The key metric is where on the opportunisticity spectrum between 24/7 on one end and only the few most energy-abundant hours per year on the other end a technology can place itself.
At the opportunistic extreme end of the scale we will undoubtedly find resistive boosters to latent heat stores that usually run on heatpumps alone (boosters come online when maket price drops below the heat pump's buy threshold divided by work factor)
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9241117
Nevertheless, if we install enough panels, it will be so cheap that the cost is negligible for most applications.
Carbon as a construction material is the way to go, here on Earth, and other planets as well. In normal pressures we experience here on earth or in similar planets, temperature, radioactivity etc, carbon is the most versatile material of all. I think carbon gold rush is well on it's way.
The gas giants themselves are much harder to extract resources from than the moons, and ISRU from the moons (even our own) are beyond us for the moment even if they have more of both in total.
As we can already synthesise diamond from methane, I couldn't guess what we'll be doing by the time Titan looks like an interesting target for industrial expansion.
Of course load leveling / industrial power generation / etc will still be a huge need as will long haul shipping (that could use carbon capture). So those would benefit.
Something to make carbon extraction from the sea/air that is economical would very much be welcomed, an actual carbon tax would help even today.
I don't actually expect the whole world to do this because politics, but I won't be surprised if China makes a proof of concept in the form of a 100 Ω connection to both Africa and South America.
As for iron/steel specifically, I think people have only recently demonstrated that this can be electrified at scale, even without batteries.
Battery capacity is also in the early stages yet; what we need for fully electric transportation — which is probably around a decade of exponential growth away — is more than enough for balancing current (no pun intended) electrical demand, but I don't know if it's also enough once we electrify steel.
I think iron might be one of the cases where it makes sense to electrolyse hydrogen from water and use that as a direct chemical agent, but my chemistry knowledge is a mediocre GCSE from 24 years ago plus YouTube videos so I don't trust my own judgement on this regardless of what Wittgenstein says about 'to believe falsely' in the first person, present indicative.
Sorry, what does ohms mean in this context? I would get what gigawatts or gigawatt-hours would mean in this context, but don’t understand the relevance of resistance
The voltage you choose to put across it is a free parameter in the range +/- 1e6 V or so.
As most people would consider "mildly heating the Pacific" to be pointless, you add the resistance of the line to the effective resistance of all the load on the grid and then use P=IV=I^2R=V^2/R to work out how many volts/amps/watts are going though the line.
You actually have to have a number for grid load to turn this into "what percentage are we losing to the transmission line".
(Also: I'm simplifying by assuming DC, because AC resistance depends on the environment and the frequency and that length is long enough to just be an antenna at normal grid frequencies).
And using units of resistance is a way of talking about the loss independently of the amount of power transmitted.
Although, I think your original statement I quoted, is omitting some information you are relying on – e.g. how much energy is "$265 billion of aluminium", and so how much energy are we talking about such that 1 ohm transmission loss would amount to that
I don't understand the question.
$265 bn of aluminium is a square metre cross section going around the equator and back to the start, or any equivalent network.
How much energy can be conveyed through that depends how long it lasts, which depends on the specifics, and how much power on average it is used to convey over that lifetime.
Many grids are showing their age at 70-100 years. Perhaps it would last that long.
Perhaps we'd choose to put the entire world electricity supply through it continuously so that Anchorage nighttime in winter is powered by the simultaneous New Zealand daytime summer. Or perhaps we won't.
But these kinds of question are the domain of geopolitics and global economics, so the best I can do is give the numbers that show a very small electrical resistance is objectively quite cheap — significantly less than the US alone is planning on spending to modernise its grids.
I thought you were talking about how much electricity was consumed in smelting that much aluminium. Not actually using that much aluminium to transmit power
Orientating solar panels differently than simply south facing to better match usage patterns: https://youtu.be/LqizLQDi9BM?si=4uqsRO3qEGfm4Yxr
Building out a “supergrid”, like what’s already happening across Europe. Balance intermittent supply across a wide geographical area. There’s always wind blowing somewhere, Iceland has massive, 24/7 geothermal that’s not yet connected to mainland Europe, Southern Europe has huge solar potential, and so on. The UK has a project to get 8% of its electric demand from a massive solar/wind/battery project built in Morocco linked via undersea cable to the UK.
Finally, batteries. Lifepo4 batteries are constantly dropping in price. We haven’t seen a huge deployment of Chinese sodium ion batteries for homes yet, but it’s coming.
And that’s not touching on some of the other possible solutions.
The numbers show that armageddon, if it hasn't arrived for other power generation, is imminent: bundled unsubsidized solar/wind + storage is falling under natural gas turbine.
That is without sodium ion batteries coming into mass production that are 40% of the cost of Lithium ion and 20-30% less than even LFP chemistries. Without mass scale perovskites.
Sodium Ion and LFP are roadmapped for continued 20-30% density gains in the coming years. Coming down the pipe after that? Sulfur techs that might improve capacities 100-300% with no cobalt/nickel issues, solid state configurations, etc.
Yes, who knows how many cloudy days or windless skies the storage holds compared to leveling, but what is apparent is that the intermittence concern is going to simply not be a major factor. Yes it requires a LOT of grid development (and IMO we should be heavily encouraging, financing, and subsidizing home solar generation and storage by a factor of ten than we currently do).
This isn't a 10 year out trend. It's the here and now, and it's not the current invading horde (solar/wind being comprehensively cheaper than natural gas combined cycle with the issue of intermittency), there are waves of even stronger hordes coming to invade traditional power generation (solar/wind being cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, and storage being cheaper and cheaper and cheaper).
Factories are currently not running on batteries and the like, but... costs are costs. If a factory needs a lot of power, will it pick a natural gas turbine that is 2x more expensive right now and 4-5x as expensive in ten years, or nuclear that is currently 6x as expensive (and no SMR availiability anyway) and 12-20x as expensive in ten years?
Or will the factory adapt production to dirt dirt dirt cheap power production with some unreliability?
Alternative energy is a HUGE economic battering ram. If a factory is paying 4x the cost for its energy, it's not going to compete. If a data center is paying 4x the cost for electricity, it will be shut down and moved to a place with more reliable alternative energy production (desert, some mountain valley with sustained winds, etc).
It can be if done in a sealed device which then processes the remainder.
Which is important because aerobic life is basically a combustion process.
Isn't there a huge risk that this bacteria would also break down the plastics that are in use, so cars would just melt away, all plastic parts that are currently needed would break. So general industrial collapse.
This sounds good when talking about land fills.
It doesn't sound so good when all technology stops working.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/86452.Ill_Wind but it appears there are a few books that explore this idea.
Thus, the monetary cost of any technology is easily adjustable by regulation - taxes, carbon dividends, subsidies, etc.
The energy cost is what I’m more worried about because physics doesn’t care, it just does its thing, both ways. We’re at .25C of warming per decade due to CO2 and reduced sulphur emissions. If clathrates go, it’s going to be worse still.
I’m confident the global leaders will figure this out eventually, but I’m very afraid the tech won’t be there when the money stops being an issue.
In contrast, countries that earn large amounts of revenue from exporting fossil fuels will be much less interested in developing a technology that will end up making their exports worthless if optimized (especially as fossil fuel extraction costs rise).
That's not even mentioning the issue of hidden externalities not directly reflected in the cost of fossil fuels, massive state subsidies to fossil fuel producers that result in lower consumer costs, and so on. The conclusion is that the global energy market isn't some idealized economic model, it's highly controlled and manipulated and ignoring this reality is disingenous at best.
Usually, when your product is about to be replaced by something different, you want to be the one who makes that new different thing. Everybody who isn't depending on selling the old one has a little less incentive to be the one supplying the replacement. For all others, not investing in the new thing has lower opportunity cost than for exporters of the old thing. So from a game theory perspective, the incumbents can and will outspend others in investment in the new thing. Unless they don't try.
https://news.mit.edu/2022/turning-carbon-dioxide-valuable-pr...
(If it took less, we could make a perpetual motion machine by burning and unburning coal)
Are we really supposed to expend as much energy as we expended in the entire industrial age just to remove the excess CO2 in the atmosphere?
Another thing to consider is that aviation only accounts for around 2% of global carbon emissions. If SAF ends up being harder to make than expected, it might end up making sense to keep extracting + refining some fossil fuels and mitigate them using some other means (mineralization, perhaps).
Cheap carbon dioxide removal could end up leading to some rather unintuitive outcomes.
You mean: “aviation accounts for around 2% of global carbon emissions”.
There is no only about it. 2% is actually a meaningful and substantial number when you consider the pie-chart it's sliced out of represents a collossal problem.
Flying will cost at least 2x as much as it does today.
Flying will cost more, but not necessarily 2x more.
Plus that's only if we can't synthesize jet fuel from all that CO2 we're extracting from the air.
Fuel accounts 30-50% of the costs of air travel. A straight doubling of fuel costs would not double air travel costs (although it would hurt)
The CO2 emitted from air travel wouldn’t necessarily need to be converted back to a very high energy molecule like jet fuel. I’m not a chemist, but I’m pretty sure there are polymers that you can bind the carbon into and not be nearly as energy intensive as recreating petroleum molecules.
Finally, wind and solar electricity generation are already generally cheaper than any fossil fuel generation besides nat gas. The EIA (via Wikipedia) had that at around 2x cheaper solar versus diesel generation, and solar and wind continue to see cost improvement.
All that being said, any carbon elimination scheme is going to have a cost, but the theoretical cost efficiency can be much better than if you assume energy is 1-1 with cost.
PD: Yes, you could use a not electrified railway, but simply makes more sense to electrificate all railways
If only trains were traveling at predictable routes and you could supply them with electricity while traveling. Let's call it an electric locomotive.
Planes, at least passenger yets, will never use lithium ion batteries. Which is why the industry is pivoting to "green" aviation field.
Planes is another problem.
Basically, yeah!
The last IPCC described the need for carbon removal in their last report[1]. The gist of it is that we'll need to decarbonize virtually everything, and use removal for the last 5-10% of residual emissions. That ends up being like six billion tons per year by 2025.
It doesn't compute.
I mean, you get my point, right? That 5-10%, supposedly we couldn't get it from some renewable source....we could only get it from burning fossils fuels. So where is the energy going to come from to suck the CO2 back out of the air again? By hypothesis, we didn't have any more renewable energy to use. But you can't clean the air by burning fossils fuels--thermodynamics says that you will always release more C02 than you could recapture.
1. Just stopping burning carbon isn’t enough. We need to take the existing excess carbon from the atmosphere.
2. It would be rational to move on an emergency basis to renewables + nuclear and burn less carbon in order to save future energy. But….well that’s difficult and we need energy now and humans aren’t famous for being rational all the time or having great long run planning in groups
So either we figure out how to eventually do it with renewables, nuclear or some other method, or we fail
Yeah, I just don't see that happening. E.g. suppose we only wanted to take the CO2 out of the air that we put in last year. It would take more energy to do that than we got from burning fossils fuels last year.
I don't remotely see how that would at all be feasible. I mean, yeah, 100 thousand of years of plants doing photosynthesis--taking that energy slowly but surely from the sun--would do it.
But the shorter of a timeframe you want it done, the more energy you are going to need--and since energy is conserved, that will eventually end up as waste heat and heat up the earth anyways.
* Let the temperature rise so fast that plants and animals will struggle to adapt. Within this century, or * Do some sort of geoengineering that limits the amount of solar radiation entering earth and manually manage the planet’s temperature.
#1 is the default and is doom. #2 seems what we’ll likely try. The barriers there are:
1. We somehow have to manage it globally.
2. It will let us continue emitting carbon, thus acidifying the oceans and leaving those ecosystems unable to adapt
It’s still the best option, hopefully we can actually do it.
If we want to avoid it we need a surplus of energy and a way to store the excess carbon in a reasonable cost effective way. But it will almost certainly take more energy than was produced by burning it in the first place.
Animals and plants have fairly narrow bands of acceptable temperature and don’t have air conditioning. Mass extinction is hypothesized at ~5 degrees of warming from pre industrial levels. Note that land warming will be higher than average warming, as the average includes the oceans.
Sounds like the obvious choice...but can you put some numbers to it?
1. How much C02 do we need to take out of the air to prevent your doomsday scenario,
2. How fast do we need to take it out of the air?
3. How much energy would it take to do that?
4. What are the side effects of generating that much energy, and expending it according to the timeframe of #2?
HellifIknow the answers, but I can do a bit of Fermi-style estimation, and no matter what numbers I plug in, it just doesn't make any sense.
Depending upon the answer to #2, we might not even be able to: 1. convert 100% of our energy generation to carbon-neutral sources, 2. Install 2.5-3x (depending upon how efficient carbon capture can become) the amount of power generating capacity we already have--again, all from carbon neutral sites 3. And then start extracting C02 out of the atmosphere at the same rate we put it in.
#1 alone seems like it will take decades, to say the least. #2 says that doing #1 is going to be 2.5-3x harder. We will have to not only supply our current power budget, but also the energy needed to power these global scrubbers.
And is the rate in #3 even enough?
> Animals and plants have fairly narrow bands of acceptable temperature and don’t have air conditioning.
Yeah, unless I'm very mistaken, they are screwed. It might not even be physically possible to do steps #1 through #3 in time to save them.
The more likely scenario is we try to geoengineer and that buys time and we eventually get the energy to actually remove the carbon over a longer timescale.
Lot of uncertainty in that route but I don’t see a better one. But ultimately the sooner we can shift away from burning carbon the less energy we’d need to remove it in the future.
Of course, just like we'd all be better off not overfishing, but tragedy of the commons dilemma makes it hard to coordinate to stop that from happening. Not to mention, renewables have only become cheap recently, but we've been emitting for a long time.
1. You can't scrub the air using energy from burning fossils fuels--it puts more C02 into the atmosphere than it yields energy to take it back out again, and
2. In the scenario described, we were only able to provide 90-95% of our energy using carbon-neutral sources. That and #1 above means that we would not have the energy needed to scrub any C02 from the atmosphere. Burning fossils fuels at that point would be a net loss in power.
For things like long-distance flights, jet fuel is way more fantastic energy storage than any kind of electrification can sustain. It may make sense to spend 2x that energy sucking CO2 out of the air. The issue isn't "total energy production" it's "storing energy in a small metal box and releasing it over 13 hours".
Of course, producing that jet fuel in a carbon-neutral way (e.g., from plant biomass) is probably a better solution than sucking the CO2 out of the air, but we'll need the latter anyway...
[0] https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/01/09/terraform-indu...
I'm not sure that's the correct argument.
We only really need to expend as much energy to convert stuff into coal as was needed to turn it into coal in the first place. If we can do it more efficiently than Nature™ then we are energy positive since all the effort to extract it is already expended and (reading the terms & conditions) nonrefundable.
It seems to me... could be wrong.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/jacsau.3c00823
It's really more about tethered heterogenous catalyst development, the idea being that anchoring the soluble catalysts on the electrode via a molecular tether (DNA in this case) improves reaction performance on several axes.
> "Here, we demonstrate the first application of DNA “Velcro” to immobilize molecular CO2RR catalysts on electrode surfaces (Figure 1b). The DNA-catalyst conjugates are readily synthesized and have improved stability as compared to the small-molecule catalysts alone simply through the incorporation of the DNA. Subsequent immobilization on carbon electrodes through hybridization to predeposited complementary DNA strands showed improved Faradaic efficiency (FE) toward CO production. We anticipate this method to be a general strategy to more easily and efficiently immobilize electrocatalysts for improved catalytic efficiency."
Industrial development is possible but depends on the lifetime of the catalyst and ease of regenerating it in a timely efficient manner as it wears out.
Less PR and more doing.
2 CO2 -(700°C)-> 2 CO + O2
You burn carbon-fuel and oxygen to get energy (and most of the energy comes from the oxygen actually), then use the energy to release half the oxygen from the co2 back again. What's the point? Perhaps it makes some sense for methane, etc which has a lot of hydrogen?
(Apologies, I'm new to chemistry-related humor.)
280 > 420 PPM for CO2 is just 209,640 ppm > 209,500 ppm PPM O2 a drop of under 0.007%.