# Ethanol from CO + H2O + electricity



## Duncan (Dec 8, 2008)

Hi Phantom
Sounds great 
But its behind a paywall - can you give us some more details?


----------



## PhantomPholly (Aug 20, 2008)

I'm not a paying subscriber on that site. If you look at the popup blocker, there is a tiny "X" in the upper right corner that just makes it go away.

Re-read it, and apparently they aren't really ready to put it in your basement - the process requires a steady supply of Carbon Monoxide (poisonous to us animules). Still, anything that gives us a cheap SynFuel for the price of solar power? Great idea, best of all worlds.

About 2 1/2 - 3 years ago on this site I predicted that within 5 years some combination of technologies would be identified which could get us off oil economically, and that it would probably be another 5 years until it matured to where the solution set was economical to the average Joe. I still think we're going to get there. If nothing else, the Navy solution for creating fuel from seawater is economical if you have a cheap enough source of power. As solar gets cheaper and cheaper, that solution also comes down in price - even allowing for the inefficiency in conversion.


----------



## Nabla_Operator (Aug 5, 2011)

This is “Power to Gas” or “Power to Liquids” technology, based on Sabatier (1920) and Fischer-Tropsch (1925) .
In WW2 the Germans made synthetic airplane fuels and nowadays Sasol is world leading in this technology…. both result from their oil boycotts. Modern scientific developments are about the catalysts and low-temperature process parameters. 
Engineers can make super clean synthetic fuels (entirely CO2-neutral by capturing it from the air) , for a long time now, but nobody wants those fuels, because they are much more expensive than drilling a hole in the ground, let the fuel spit out. 
No doubt synthetic fuels are the future, especially for airplanes, but first: humankind is going to burn all the oil that is easily accessible and then increase the oil prices.


----------



## aeroscott (Jan 5, 2008)

I sounds like cracking water to make o2 and h2 with a added copper . In effect storing excess solar power as ethanol and cleaning the air of co2 in the process . 
A house could become energy independent with roof of solar panels , lithium batteries and this converter for winter of extended low solar output.
We'll be fighting over who gets the co2 . lol


----------



## PhantomPholly (Aug 20, 2008)

Nabla_Operator said:


> This is “Power to Gas” or “Power to Liquids” technology, based on Sabatier (1920) and Fischer-Tropsch (1925) .
> In WW2 the Germans made synthetic airplane fuels and nowadays Sasol is world leading in this technology…. both result from their oil boycotts. Modern scientific developments are about the catalysts and low-temperature process parameters.


Yes, Fischer-Tropsch has been out there almost 100 years but except during the war when the Nazis couldn't get more oil it was never cost effective. 

Another interesting side effect of this new process might be the reduction in cost of cheap booze...


----------



## Nabla_Operator (Aug 5, 2011)

aeroscott said:


> ... A house could become energy independent with roof of solar panels , ... for winter of extended low solar output.
> We'll be fighting over who gets the co2 . lol


(1) here a dutch company developing this principle. 
(2) indeed: CO2 / CO is required for synthetic fuels and expensive to acquire (if you can't use oil anymore to extract it from).... that is a good reason for future fights.


----------



## Moltenmetal (Mar 20, 2014)

Any "fuel" made from CO2 or water is not a fuel, but an energy storage medium. If you already have the energy to push the products of combustion back UP the internal energy gradient to make a fuel, you have the energy to charge batteries!

We'll run out of the planetary carrying capacity for the combustion effluent long before we run out of fossil carbon to burn. The best thing we can do is burn less of it, and what we do burn, we should use for purposes that aren't easily replaced with renewables, such as for chemical feedstocks etc.

You can make syngas from anything containing carbon- coal, wood, agricultural waste, natural gas...but doing so to make fuels puts at absolute minimum 50% of the carbon in that source, back into the atmosphere as CO2. Once you have syngas, you have numerous options for hydrogenating the CO and linking up molecules to make hydrocarbons, alcohols, ethers and other molecules- but all of them are energetically lossy and capital intensive as well. Some processes such as F-T are as little as 25% carbon efficient and only make sense when the natural gas feed is basically free. You'd be far better off to just burn these fuels for stationary power or heat needs than to gasify them to make transportation fuels.


----------



## PhantomPholly (Aug 20, 2008)

Moltenmetal said:


> Any "fuel" made from CO2 or water is not a fuel, but an energy storage medium.


Splitting hairs. To an ICE engine, gasoline is a fuel. Thus, it is valid to discuss these synthetics as "fuels."



> If you already have the energy to push the products of combustion back UP the internal energy gradient to make a fuel, you have the energy to charge batteries!


Try that in an airplane and see how far you get. My previous plane would fly my wife and I over 1,000 miles @ 200mph on 42 gallons (250 lbs) of gas. It's going to be quite a while before that can be achieved with batteries.



> We'll run out of the planetary carrying capacity for the combustion effluent long before we run out of fossil carbon to burn. The best thing we can do is burn less of it, and what we do burn, we should use for purposes that aren't easily replaced with renewables, such as for chemical feedstocks etc.


No need to worry. For most applications, solar and battery will be cheaper than other alternatives in a bit over a decade, sooner if there is a "leapfrog" technology discovered, and so other stuff will start to disappear quickly as the price comparison begins to favor renewable.


----------



## Moltenmetal (Mar 20, 2014)

The difference between a fuel and an energy storage medium is that one can be grown or mined with most of its energy content intact. That's not splitting hairs, it's a fundamental difference.

Pushing stuff up the energy gradient from the very bottom (total combustion products) is just dumb. It fools nobody who understands basic thermodynamics or physical chemistry. There are plenty of better feedstocks from which to make liquid fuels for your plane or anything else that truly needs the intense energy density that liquid fuels offer. The largest single source of fuels for that purpose is to stop wasting them on applications where those benefits are not required, but rather are just something nice to have- if you can afford it. When we have a substantial tax on fossil carbon emissions to the atmosphere, how people use energy will cease to be my business, but while everyone bears the consequences of those emissions irrespective of how much benefit they derive from the energy produced, it's a problem without a technological fix.


----------



## PhantomPholly (Aug 20, 2008)

Moltenmetal said:


> The difference between a fuel and an energy storage medium is that one can be grown or mined with most of its energy content intact. That's not splitting hairs, it's a fundamental difference.


In the ivory tower academic world, you are absolutely correct. Believe it or not, many here on this forum have advanced degrees in science or equivalent real-world experience. However, in the real world it's pedantic, academic hair-splitting of interest only to people either tenured or desirous of becoming so - in other words, "those who can't...." 

7 billion people on this planet call gasoline and diesel "fuel." If a substitute becomes available that is cheaper, they will still call it "fuel" no matter that you or I might object. A substance is "fuel" within a particular context irrespective of its absolute source. For that matter, stuff you hypocritically acknowledge as being "fuel" (petroleum "mined" from the ground) is technically a storage medium "accidentally and conveniently available in quantity." Nature, thankfully in disregard of your advice on what is and isn't dumb, was kind enough to push it up the energy gradient for us so we could "mine" it. Some day, we will "mine" solar energy on a planetary scale and use some of the excess to push similar substances up that same energy hill. You will call it dumb, and everyone else in the world who needs dense energy on-tap will call it smart. You may still believe it to be dumb, and you will be alone in that opinion. At the end of the day to the world at large it's still fuel when you need gas in your car. 



> When we have a substantial tax on fossil carbon emissions to the atmosphere, how people use energy will cease to be my business, but while everyone bears the consequences of those emissions irrespective of how much benefit they derive from the energy produced, it's a problem without a technological fix.


Fortunately for the rest of us, the ivory tower idiots don't yet rule the world, and in the real world there will never be such an idiotic tax. Such a tax would do absolutely nothing to help the world, but would in fact cause millions to move from the category of "simple poverty" to "famine." All of that, and the solution will happen on its own with or without such a foolish tax. Our best chance at getting countries like China and other 3rd world nations to stop burning dirty coal is to stop taxing the world to death so as to let innovation accelerate in the inevitable ensuing flood of investment. That requires giving up CONTROL, however, so the ivory-tower geniuses are not liable to support such a sensible solution.

As for the consequences, it is clear from the U.N. Climate Report that there will be none of any particular magnitude. All of their models, when the starting conditions for 1900 are plugged in along with known changes in atmospheric changes since then, tell us we are currently in a hothouse. Huh, no hothouse. Too, if you are one of the faithful who staunchly believes that the model is true despite their inability to make it predict the past 100 years, there is the small problem that all of the doomsday predictions are based on a phony assumption - that more man-created CO2 will be introduced to the atmosphere at an increasing rate over the next 50 years. The problem with this is that, for exactly the reasons we are discussing, even a 6th grader can plot the price-performance of different energy sources over the past 30 years and predict rather reliably that in about 20 years no one will be burning coal and oil on any large scale. Even with a perfect theory, when you start with false assumptions you are unlikely to have valid conclusions.

All of this has been discussed in the great Climate Change Debate thread ad-nauseum, should not be discussed further here, and I mention it only because of the incorrect assumptions in your post which suggest "there will be consequences." Tell your nieces and nephews about the Boogey Man, us grown-ups aren't buying that nonsense.

The inability of self-styled "academic geniuses" to contemplate the "unintended consequences" of their "brilliant plans" has brought us $17 trillion in debt with no way out, 30 million more unemployed than there were 15 years ago among working age folks plus 30 million more moved from higher paying jobs to lower paying jobs. The "sheer genius" of higher academia is being played out in the real world, has been measured and weighed, and has been found wanting.


----------



## Moltenmetal (Mar 20, 2014)

Academic pedant...that's a laugh. I'm a chem eng whose day job is helping people develop and pilot fuels and chemicals technology to commercialize it. I know these processes from the inside. 

Petroleum is stored solar energy that can be mined and processed for precious little of the energy it contains. It's a gift we should feel free to use to meet our needs. We have no right to waste it to fulfill mere wants. You may not want to pay the full and fair cost because you don't believe in the consequences, but the weight of science on the subject is contrary to that opinion. You've made your point and so have I on that subject.

To the original pointeople will continue to use feedstocks which aren't at the very bottom of the internal energy well because that makes economic sense, with or without a carbon tax to level the playing field. CO and water is just CO and hydrogen with some other energy source being used to split water, or some of the CO being wasted in the water-gas shift reaction. Either way, starting with syngas makes more sense.


----------

