Researcher Breakthrough Turns Carbon Dioxide Into Ethanol (cleantechnica.com) 190
Slashdot reader Third Position quotes CleanTechnica:
According to a press release from Argonne National Laboratory, researchers at the lab, working with partners at Northern Illinois University, have discovered a new electrocatalyst that converts carbon dioxide and water into ethanol with very high energy efficiency, high selectivity for the desired final product, and low cost. Ethanol is a particularly desirable commodity because it is an ingredient in nearly all U.S. gasoline and is widely used as an intermediate product in the chemical, pharmaceutical, and cosmetics industries.
"The process resulting from our catalyst would contribute to the circular carbon economy, which entails the reuse of carbon dioxide," says Di-Jia Liu, senior chemist in Argonne's chemical sciences and engineering division and also a scientist at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. "The process resulting from our catalyst would contribute to the circular carbon economy, which entails the reuse of carbon dioxide," he says. The new electrochemical process converts carbon dioxide emitted from industrial processes, such as fossil fuel power plants or alcohol fermentation plants, into valuable commodities at reasonable cost... It breaks down carbon dioxide and water molecules and selectively reassembles them into ethanol using an external electrical field.
"What we are witnessing is a convergence of technologies that may result in ways to substantially lower the amount of carbon dioxide that gets added to the atmosphere by industry," writes CleanTechnica, " and at far lower cost than previously thought possible."
"The process resulting from our catalyst would contribute to the circular carbon economy, which entails the reuse of carbon dioxide," says Di-Jia Liu, senior chemist in Argonne's chemical sciences and engineering division and also a scientist at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. "The process resulting from our catalyst would contribute to the circular carbon economy, which entails the reuse of carbon dioxide," he says. The new electrochemical process converts carbon dioxide emitted from industrial processes, such as fossil fuel power plants or alcohol fermentation plants, into valuable commodities at reasonable cost... It breaks down carbon dioxide and water molecules and selectively reassembles them into ethanol using an external electrical field.
"What we are witnessing is a convergence of technologies that may result in ways to substantially lower the amount of carbon dioxide that gets added to the atmosphere by industry," writes CleanTechnica, " and at far lower cost than previously thought possible."
It's an ingrediant in US Gas (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's an ingrediant in US Gas (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It's an ingrediant in US Gas (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, adding more to use as fuel is more of a political thing than useful.
Ethanol in gasoline is only a political thing because it requires government subsidies.
Ethanol from corn is stupid for many reasons.
But Brazil makes ethanol from sugar cane, which is far more cost-effective and needs no subsidies.
Ethanol fuel in Brazil [wikipedia.org]
Re:It's an ingrediant in US Gas (Score:5, Informative)
It usually runs about the same price as gasoline there which is high... since they don't have the leverage we do to keep prices low.
Soybean biodiesel is also quite a good fuel and excellent for your engine lubricity wise. If you run regular diesel, a gallon of soy per tank will way decrease the wear on your engine.
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The most sensible is to bioengineer algae that can produce what you need as waste, preferably an algae that can tolerate saline conditions and with low resistance to biological attack (you don't want it to run wild) and you are pretty much done.
Re: It's an ingrediant in US Gas (Score:3)
Actually you need a high resistance to attack because it is insanely difficult to keep from getting a pathogen to come in and lay waste to your algae monoculture.
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Most pathogens are killed by alcohol.
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IMO it would be much more sensible to stop internal combustion engines altogether. What you are trying with this proposal, and others such as ethanal and bio-diesel, is to try and control, or at least balance, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. It would be much better to move to electric vehicles and power them by means that do not generate any CO2 at all.
Re:It's an ingrediant in US Gas (Score:5, Informative)
When it couldn't be used in the US during prohibition they replaced it with lead.
Ethanol blended gasoline, and even straight ethanol fuel were both used throughout the prohibition period in the US. But lead was already being pushed over ethanol as an octane booster well before prohibition by the big oil companies in the US. They didn't control the ethanol market and were afraid of losing sales. Lead additive was much easier for them to deal with because only very small amounts are needed, while ethanol blends needed to be at least as much as 10%. Even though they were well aware of the highly toxic nature of lead additive, they downplayed the dangers and spend enough money pushing it over ethanol for it to dominate the market for over 60 years
Re: It's an ingrediant in US Gas (Score:3)
Yep. Its actually BAD for engines. E10 especially is bad for engines not able to deal with it, such as high compression engines. E85 might be cheaper, but its actual energy per volume rating is much lower as well so your mileage goes down, making the cost not that much of a savings.
Better off using this in chemistry reactions, hand sanitizers, infusions, and extractions. Pure ethanol (90% and higher) are better at extractions.
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E10 especially is bad for engines not able to deal with it, such as high compression engines.
Huh? Higher ethanol content is great for high compression engines as it raises the octane rating. The higher the octane rating the less susceptible the fuel is to pre-detonation.
Since ethanol has lower energy density compared to gasoline, you need large enough injectors/jets and tuning to keep from running lean. In higher horsepower engines, especially, this can lead to catastrophic results. Running an engine too lean burns holes in the pistons.
But the biggest issue with ethanol is how corrosive it is.
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But the biggest issue with ethanol is how corrosive it is. In engines that are not built for it, it tends to cause a lot of issues. Fuel pumps are one of the first things to go.
It's highly hygroscopic so that's a problem with corrosion. They recommend running E5 /E10 once in a while to "clean" the fuel tank.
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So is the brake fluid. Yet the only drawback is changing it yearly.
Re: It's an ingrediant in US Gas (Score:5, Interesting)
You can't really flush a fuel tank as easy as brake lines though. In fact, one of the easiest ways to "DIY" yourself some ethanol-free gasoline is to take your average gasoline canister, fill it 2/3 full of gasoline, and then add water and a few drops of food coloring, shake well, and turn it upside down for a day or so - the different densities of the liquid will cause the water to sink to the bottom, the water / ethanol mix to be above that, and the purified gasoline to be above that with no food coloring dye in it - start pouring without shaking the can, and you'll get the water and ethanol out first, leaving only gasoline.
Here is a handy example of using phase separation to get the ethanol out. [youtube.com]
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is there really a need to flush the fuel tank considering that the fuel is constantly replaced anyway?
Re: It's an ingrediant in US Gas (Score:2)
You would be surprised how much sediment and crap ends up in there. There is a reason why you have a fuel filter, sometimes two.
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My brakes use mineral oil, donÂt have to change that at all. Then again it is a bicycle, not a car.
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Nope, my MT2 is still working as new after 5 years. Only the pads have been replaced. Had to bleed the BFO several times, but that was only because it leaks somewhere. Never had to bleed my previous Shimanos either.
Re: It's an ingrediant in US Gas (Score:5, Informative)
I own a 2.4l Toyota Avensis that has a high compression engine that cannot take E10. E5 is maximum it is rated for. It caused me something of a headache a couple of years ago when Finland switched 95E5 to 95E10. I had to go to next highest octane number fuel with 5% ethanol content, which in this country is 98E5. It's about ten (euro)cents more expensive for no meaningful benefit.
(Pricing in my city for reference: https://www.polttoaine.net/ind... [polttoaine.net] )
Stated reason from local Toyota representative when I inquired about it when change was coming is that high compression engines have different valve seals which are more tolerant to high pressure but as a tradeoff less tolerant to being corroded and dissolved by higher ethanol content. Ones in my engine were rated for maximum 5% ethanol content. It really annoyed me, because same car model's cheaper variants (2.0l and down do not have high compression engines) all could take 95E10.
Said Toyota rep said that my engine would survive maybe a year of 95E10 and then require complete replacement of all valve seals. For the record, this is also the only engine in this model line that I couldn't find a flexifuel conversion kit for. I looked that up at the same time.
I can look up the specific engine model from the manual if you want to dive deeper.
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Re:It's an ingrediant in US Gas (Score:5, Informative)
Ethanol is excellent for raising octane rating. If there is a way to produce it in a not-too-harmful way, adding it to gasoline is absolutely a good idea. Some of the alternative options for raising octane rating are very nasty indeed.
It lowers the specific density of the gasoline and it carries an extra oxygen atom, so you will needs slightly more fuel by volume to go the same distance. Most cars have sufficiently large fuel tanks that this is a very small issue.
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Better, if they can make it cheaply enough then it could totally replace gasoline. But you need to slightly redesign the engines as well have slightly large fuel tanks.
OTOH, would propanol or butanol be even better? If we're going to go after synthetic fuels, we ought to pick the best one to aim for.
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The bigger problem is that people see worse fuel consumption. All while introducing E10 instead of E5 doesn't usually mean lower pricing. So you end up paying same price for less distance.
Other than that, and the problem with high compression engines, higher ethanol content is excellent in gasoline. For all the reasons above plus the fact that unlike gasoline, ethanol is renewable. We can convert plant matter to it in an economic fashion today.
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Ethanol is excellent for raising octane rating. If there is a way to produce it in a not-too-harmful way, adding it to gasoline is absolutely a good idea.
It's hygroscopic, so it attracts water to fuel, and leads to corrosion of fuel system components. It's better than MTBE, but it's still got real-world drawbacks.
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It still exists, but I can't remember the last time I saw any pumps. They apparently have it in Australia still.
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Ethanol is great for raising octane rating, but it's hell on carbureted engines, which includes most small engines like lawn mowers, weed eaters, all manner of industrial equipment ranging from welders to concrete mixers and everything in between, most scooters, and smaller displacement motorcycles, boats, etc. etc.
Ethanol sucks up water from the atmosphere, and deposits it right in your carb's inner workings-- since most have to have vents to function--increasing the rate fuel turns to varnish, rusting out
Re:It's an ingrediant in US Gas (Score:5, Informative)
If there is a way to produce it in a not-too-harmful way, adding it to gasoline is absolutely a good idea.
It is still not a good idea for the following reasons:
1. Ethanol absorbs water and separates from gasoline mix resulting in drastically reduces shelf life. 0% ethanol can be used for 2-3 years, 10% ethanol fuel would only last 6 month.
2. Ethanol corrodes fuel system - pump, tank, lines and hardening them against that makes it more expensive. It also makes increasing ethanol content not backwards compatible with many engines.
3. Ethanol, a degreaser, causes lubrication issues inside cylinders by attacking oil film.
4. Ethanol has less energy density - everything else equal, you get less mileage out of ethanol-containing fuel.
5. Ethanol-containing fuel is not suitable for cold climate, as it form gel at very low temperatures.
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Most of which comes from the sun, which is free.
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You can make engines to run on 100% ethanol. If this works, then this is the same as an electric battery for an engine like that. Of course, the fact that you need about one and a half times the amount of ethanol as gasoline does throw a little damper on things.
Problem is, we've heard this before. I can think of at least two other times someone has made a big press release of making ethanol on the cheap from just atmospheric CO2. This doesn't impress me. When my Mr. Home Ethanol is producing it by the
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You can make engines to run on 100% ethanol.
Yeah good luck anywhere else than Brazil (One of the only place that makes car run 100% ethanol from factory). You need warm temperature to make it vaporize. It's out of question for mid to north USA. Not even thinkable for Canada.
Re:It's an ingrediant in US Gas (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, VW just came out with an engine that will run on E100 without having a supplemental gasoline tank for cold starts. I suspect some sort of an inline fuel heater. It's not like running a diesel engine on SVO, when it gets too cold the whole tank gels there. Ethanol still flows quite nicely when cold, so all you need to do is have an inline heater in the fuel pump to warm it up for use downstream.
Replaced corn starch with wheat flour (gluten) (Score:2)
An unfortunate side-effect is that all of the soups, sauces, etc that used to be thickened with corn starch now contain flour instead. That's because it's made corn more expensive. Flour that's full of the gluten, the kind that celiacs can't eat.
That's been a problem for my wife. A lot of products she uses to be able to eat, she no longer can.
On the plus side for her (but not for other people), the major increase in wheat gluten in US food products caused a lot of other people to realize gluten is a probl
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Neither corn starch nor flour has to do anything inside of a soup!
And if you cook yourself and think otherwise, you can use starch from rice or potatoes.
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Yeah the corn lobby is going to mess with anything like this becoming widespread.
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How come this tread is all about ethanol and not about how much electricity this process needs and whether or not it's viable?
I don't see any figures published on the linked pages so I smell a rat.
eg. If this needs 90% of the output of a coal plant to convert the CO2 from that plant then it's just VC snake oil.
Also: Ethanol is useful but converting all the CO2 produced by fossil fuels would probably produce too much of it. There's only so much ethanol you can bottle or make hand sanitizer with.
Maybe we can
Good (Score:2)
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True everclear would be 200 proof, since it's pure alcohol.
There is 151 rum, though, which is more tasty than everclear... although still a bit too high in alcohol for my taste - cask-strength bourbon or strong absinthe is pretty much my limit.
can't go over 194.4 proof by distilation (Score:4, Informative)
True everclear would be 200 proof, since it's pure alcohol.
True Everclear is a brand-named product that comes in several strengths. The max proof available is 190. (Next is 189, for states that ban 190 and up).)
You can't go higher than 194.4 proof (97.2% ethanol by volume) using distillation, and you need more stages as you approach it. To go beyond that, water is removed by absorption using another chemical, and that can result in trace contamination of the product.
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True Everclear is a brand-named product that comes in several strengths.
I had no idea. I'd always just heard "pure" ethanol referred to as everclear.
I also remember being in a remote field camp with some Alaskans who were missing their usual booze. We had plenty of ethanol (it was being tested for use as a drill lubricant for ice coring), so they spent lots of time trying to make ethanol into something worth drinking. It was all pretty awful, to my taste, but it seemed to keep them satisfied until their "booze pallet" arrived some weeks later.
Man, those guys drank a lot...
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You only need to mix it with a fruit juice and some soda ... (with soda I mean sparkeling water).
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Well if you want some you can drink, just stop in at the liquor store and get some 151 proof Everclear.
In many states, you can get it in 190 proof -- my state, Virginia, limits things to 151 (Everclear, Rum. etc...)
Unintentional applications (Score:5, Funny)
If it works this is a real breakthrough (Score:2)
Re:If it works this is a real breakthrough (Score:5, Insightful)
Planting and harvesting corn is currently a petro-chemical intense process, considering the fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation, harvesting, processing and so on that are involved.
As oil and gas become scarce, corn ethanol will become infeasible. This (in theory) sounds like it provides a more direct route to ethanol production and could be a game changer if it works out.
Re:If it works this is a real breakthrough (Score:4, Informative)
As oil and gas become scarce ...
Oil and gas will not become scarce in the next few centuries. We are finding new deposits way faster than we are using them up.
There are good reasons for moving away from fossil fuels, but "they are running out" isn't one of them.
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We needn't find them. We already found them. The key element when it comes to harvesting that fuel is whether it's economically feasible.
There's plenty of oil left. The problem is that getting it ready to shipping costs 200-300 dollars a barrel. With a barrel price of less than 50, that's simply not economically feasible. You might remember the recent discussion about fracking and oil shale harvesting. Haven't heard anything about that for over 8 years now. Why? Because the oil price fell from 120 to about
Re: If it works this is a real breakthrough (Score:2)
Link? About 20 years ago, I worked in the oil industry, and the story at the time and since (I did keep in touch a bit with some colleagues) was that drill attempts struck oil about as often as in the previous decade, due to the oil reservoirs being harder to find and exploit, mitigated by the fact that equipment and such got much better. The rate of finding new deposits was said to be going steadily down. If that isn't the case it'd be inte
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Depends only on how much you're willing to pay for it.
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Well, technically they're renewable... the problem is waiting for that to happen.
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Ethanol from corn was a political choice. I think we all know there are better options, such as switchgrass.
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Then use sugar cane. That's what Brazil used historically. It doesn't use much oil to produce, because the reason they started using it was they couldn't get (or afford) oil.
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The corn lobby keeps convincing the Us Gubment to put tariffs on Brasilian ethanol and Brasilian sugar cane. Hmm, wonder why?
Re:If it works this is a real breakthrough (Score:5, Informative)
Unlikely. The whole ethanol gas program began because the U.S. intentionally over-produces food. That was a consequence of lessons learned during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. For the first time, the country wasn't producing enough food to feed everyone. So the government implemented all sorts of farm subsidies to guarantee that they overproduced food. The government guarantees farmers a certain price for their crop, buys it all, then sells it to supermarkets below the purchase cost. The higher price means that farmers produce more food than they would at (lower) market price. That way even if some of the crops are destroyed due to pestilence or a natural disaster, there should still be enough to feed everyone.
The flip side is that in years when there is no pestilence or natural disaster, the U.S. has too much food. Much of that excess is used as feed for cattle (which is why reducing meat consumption won't really reduce water and fuel use - that corn will still be grown). Some of it is sent overseas as foreign aid. Some is converted into high fructose corn syrup to reduce the country's dependence on imported sugar cane. And some of it is converted to ethanol. So the cost of planting and harvesting corn is irrelevant. It's a sunk cost - already been paid to guarantee an excess food supply. The only choice is whether to convert some of that corn into ethanol, or to let it rot in silos feeding rats. Pretty easy choice.
The newer corn ethanol programs however were designed to grow corn specifically for converting it into ethanol. That's corn which would not have been grown if we weren't converting it into ethanol. So it's not a sunk cost, and it will become economically unfeasible the higher fuel prices go. But as long as we're subsidizing farms, there will always be an excess amount of corn available to convert into ethanol. The only way for corn ethanol to become entirely economically unfeasible is if we stop subsidizing food production. We're highly unlikely to do that since it would leave us vulnerable to food shortages in the event that part of the food crop gets wiped out.
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It doesn't take CO2 right from the atmosphere anywhere that you build the facility. It's right in the summary:
The new electrochemical process converts carbon dioxide emitted from industrial processes, such as fossil fuel power plants or alcohol fermentation plants
Basically it's going to be like Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) where the Storage bit is the ethanol being created. If the ethanol was just stored and never used then it would be exactly the same as CCS but they plan on using the ethanol.
The best way of getting rid of CO2 in the atmosphere is to stop producing it in the first place. Schemes like CCS just make people think that it's okay to keep bur
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hmm.No. Nukes are switched off.
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If it works from electricity, then that's a good choice too. But be sure you've properly amortized the costs of decommissioning the plant, and have insurance that covers cleaning up and reimbursement after an accident.
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In that case you aren't properly counting the cost of generating the power. Just because you've stuck someone else with the bill doesn't mean the actual cost is lower, just that you can use shady bookkeeping and legal tricks.
Is it useful? (Score:3)
It of course requires energy, so only make sense if our marginal energy production is non carbon-based. In that situation do we still have a CO2 problem that we need to fix?
The is regional variation in available non-carbon energy. so I guess we could have some situations where non-carbon energy is available at the industrial plant but is too expensive to transport to other locations that are using carbon based energy production.
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It of course requires energy, so only make sense if our marginal energy production is non carbon-based. In that situation do we still have a CO2 problem that we need to fix?
As per the IPCC reports, if the aim is to limit global warming to 1.5 Celsius then we globally have to go CO2 net-negative by around 2050, not just net-zero. The reason for this is to offset other greenhouse gasses such as methane produced by livestock and agriculture.
The ethanol produced could also play a part in replacing gasoline and diesel vehicles, which account for about a third of a the energy used by western countries.
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I think we should stop talking about the dreams and fantasies in a world where countries like China and India exist, and start talking about real world scenarios instead.
In all the likelihood, this is just as dead of a technology as all previous "high efficiency CO2 to ethanol" technologies, because of the first law of thermodynamics. A far more reasonable option is solar energy to ethanol via plants, i.e. bioethanol.
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I think we should stop talking about the dreams and fantasies in a world where countries like China and India exist, and start talking about real world scenarios instead.
That's a very defeatist mindset. Are you saying it's not even worth decarbonizing the energy and industrial sectors? Why not try to pick the low-hanging fruit from every category instead? We could do our best to both decarbonize and plan for the then milder consequences.
In all the likelihood, this is just as dead of a technology as all previous "high efficiency CO2 to ethanol" technologies, because of the first law of thermodynamics.
The Earth is not a closed energy system, so I'm not sure what you're trying to convey by appealing to the first law of thermodynamics. Could you elaborate?
A far more reasonable option is solar energy to ethanol via plants, i.e. bioethanol.
How did you weigh the different factors that determine whether bioethanol is more "rea
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>Why not try to pick the low-hanging fruit from every category instead?
Because this is already done. In most fields, we're reaching for the scraps on the very top of the tree. And the "let's make burnable hydrocarbons out of air" is nonsensical as an idea because of first law of thermodynamics. You'll have to put more energy in than you get out in resulting fuel. Burning which will put CO2 back in.
So you end up at net zero in theoretical best case scenario of zero energy input and perfect burner for etha
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Which European levels? Europe isn't a nation, it's a continent. Do we go with France or Estonia? Russia or Spain? Germany or Moldova?
Because opinionated idiots such as yourself don't know that for example, Estonia has ridiculously high CO2 emissions because their grid is powered by shale rock. Wheres France is pretty much a world leader in the opposite end of the spectrum with nuclear power doing overwhelming majority of power generaiton.
And both use technologies that are highly advanced in their specific f
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And because Sun rises from the East, you're obviously wrong.
Re:Is it useful? (Score:5, Insightful)
Incorrect. The major issue we have is not power generation but power STORAGE. This method allows us to build any carbon neutral power plants anywhere we have: 1. Water, 2. Air, and 3. green power.
We go to the middle of nowhere, build a huge Ethanol plant that runs on your choice of (Nuclear, Solar, Wind, Geothermal, or even Tidal). It runs and creates Ethanol. We build a pipeline or fleet of Ethanol specific tanker trucks to carry the Ethanol to populated areas.
We do not need to worry about the nuclear power plant melting down and killing the city nearby because there is no city nearby. (Major issue with nuclear power is that it has to be build close to the city using it).
We do not need to worry about needing a ton of land for the solar/wind generators to be worthwhile.
We do not need to worry about geothermal being restricted by the few "hot spots" locations.
We no longer have the restricted location for geothermal.
For equatorial desert/beach combination areas (middle east) we do not need to worry about the intense heat making the area disliked.
All because we can convert the power+water+air to an easily transportable liquid that does NOT slowly leak power over distance/time the way batteries and transmission wires do.
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Yes. So the question is efficiency. How efficient is it at storing and regenerating energy relative to, say, pumping water uphill? (True, it's less limited in location, but there are other approaches that can be used, and that's a good base-line measure.)
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How efficient is it at storing and regenerating energy relative to, say, pumping water uphill?
There are not very many places where pumping water uphill is feasible. You need a pretty high drop, and you need a very, very large basin at the top, where basins tend not to form. You also need it relatively close to a city to make the line losses worthwhile. Plus you're gonna destroy the local ecology.
Also, energy storage is the giant problem for renewables. So generate ethanol when you have local excess power. Burn the ethanol in things where you need high energy density (eg. vehicles).
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Yes, different places have different costs. But the foot of every dam is a place where you could pump water uphill is the costs were right. It would take a minimal amount of rebuilding.
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Agreed
Also, the ethanol could be used on-site to power turbines for electric generation during night and/or low-wind periods.
They can be placed anywhere if you have HVDC lines.
http://www.ethanolproducer.com... [ethanolproducer.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Last time I checked, nothing can be transported as efficiently, cleanly and cheaply as power. So why not transport the power instead of the ethanol?
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The summary states:
The new electrochemical process converts carbon dioxide emitted from industrial processes, such as fossil fuel power plants or alcohol fermentation plants
While you can put the facilities in the middle of nowhere they are going to have to be attached to something that is generating CO2. That probably means a facility that requires many people such as a nuclear power plant and a source for the CO2 (fuel for a power plant).
Pipelines leak. No matter how well built they are, they leak. According to a 2014 NPR article [npr.org] the US loses approximately one-sixth of the treated drinking water in the pipes. Natural gas and oil pipelines leak.
Society needs
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We would need to worry about a nuclear power plant melting down if the "no nukes" idiots would let people build melt down proof nuclear power instead of trying to keep 80 year old reactors running.
You mean like the promised "melt proof" of pebble beds? Germany built one. Pebbles jammed. Graphite layers wore off much faster than anticipated. Heavy elements were found in the cooling loop, and nobody could figure out how they got there.
"Melt proof" would be nice, but the designs are not working as well as promised when they're actually built, and we don't have 30 years to figure out how to make them work, and then another 20-50 to build enough of them.
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You mean like the promised "melt proof" of pebble beds? Germany built one. Pebbles jammed. Graphite layers wore off much faster than anticipated. Heavy elements were found in the cooling loop, and nobody could figure out how they got there.
Nice straw man there. There's plenty of designs for "melt proof" nuclear power. Why pick the one that failed as your example? Should we say all solar power is doomed to fail because one solar power facility set itself on fire?
"Melt proof" would be nice, but the designs are not working as well as promised when they're actually built, and we don't have 30 years to figure out how to make them work, and then another 20-50 to build enough of them.
OR, we could do all the things to find a workable source of energy for the future. We can say that nuclear power is doomed to fail but that's just ruling out a solution before it's even been tried. What if solar and wind power fails to provide the power we need in 80 years? In t
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What has that got us so far? Not a whole hell of a lot.
It only drove the panel cost down from $100/watt in 1976 to $0.25/watt in 2019 [pv-magazine.com] - a 400x cost reduction. Too bad nuclear power never saw a fraction of that kind of price drop, after 70 years and $85 billion [wikipedia.org] in R&D.
Look, I agree with you that we should be spending more on nuclear power research, we're going to need it as part of the energy mix - but you're not winning any minds by outright dismissing alternatives like that. It just makes you look uninformed.
Great (Score:2)
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This is great. All we have to do to save the world from global warming is to all become alcoholics.
I'm doing my part, and then some!
(I kid, I kid...)
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Bottoms up! [youtube.com].
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Thermodynamics (Score:2)
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Only if you completely missed the energy input.
Faradaic efficiency 90%+ (Score:4)
Re:Faradaic efficiency 90%+ (Score:5, Informative)
Is it scalable? (Score:3)
Down I mean.
Can it be miniaturized and be put into the car exhaust and transform the CO2 as fast as it comes out and fill the tank again?
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Why bother?
The air is gonna carry the CO2 to the ethanol plant.
I hereby volunteer (Score:5, Funny)
If they need any help with the reverse process, you know where to find me.
Wow (Score:2)
"The process resulting from our catalyst would contribute to the circular carbon economy, which entails the reuse of carbon dioxide," says Di-Jia Liu, senior chemist in Argonne's chemical sciences and engineering division and also a scientist at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. "The process resulting from our catalyst would contribute to the circular carbon economy, which entails the reuse of carbon dioxide," he says.
It's so awesome, he had to say it twice. Gee, I wonder if it would also contribute to the circular carbon economy?
Thermodynamics is a bitch (Score:2)
Ethanol is particularly desirable ... (Score:2)
alcoholic drinks and the other ones are unfit for human consumption.
Oil industry patent in 3..2..1.. (Score:3)
and it's gone.
Re: (Score:2)
That's not even close to being true unless you're talking about some weird edge case. Ethanol has about a third less energy content per volume than gasoline, but since it's an additive that raises octane number, you can reduce those or you can compress fuel more or both. So whatever range you lose switching from gasoline to ethanol shouldn't exceed a third of volume being switched, and nominally is probably going to be closer to 20%-ish.
Re: (Score:3)
If you take advantage of the ethanol in your design then you can raise compression quite a lot. But if you don't then the best you can do is advance the timing, which is what flex-fuel vehicles do.
For new vehicles, it's fine. You use a smaller engine, with a variable geometry turbo with lots of boost. For retrofits, it's going to impact range substantially.
Re: (Score:2)
>For retrofits, it's going to impact range substantially.
We seem to be in agreement:
>So whatever range you lose switching from gasoline to ethanol shouldn't exceed a third of volume being switched, and nominally is probably going to be closer to 20%-ish.
My point of contention is with this claim:
>Ethanol reduces vehicle mileage by about the same percentage as its content in gasoline
Which is patently absurd.
Re: (Score:2)
then you can raise compression quite a lot
Yeah. And combustion temperatures. And NOx production.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe people learned we solved the problem, that's why concerns on climate change ranks so low.
What rock have you been living under?
You're in for a surprise [worldometers.info]
Or you could have just read the Heading of your own link. More Americans Cite COVID-19 as Most Important U.S. Problem... [gallup.com]