Petrol from thin air?

[cromwell]

Sounds interesting; I'd be up for some of this.

https://www.springwise.com/innovation/a ... m-the-air/

[Suff]

Not interesting at all. They would do far more by moving to electric vehicles, planting 1bn trees, use the trees for biomas to power the EV and then CCS the output from the biomas into CO2 sinks.

Well to wheel on this idea has to be as low as 10% efficiency. Even then they are simply wasting all that energy to capture the CO2 only to release it again.

It falls into the category of greenwashing fossil fuelled cars. Can you imagine the sheer cost of this fuel? You would be better off with Hydrogen and that's a disaster for cars. It only works for remote locations which have no power.

[Workingman]

There is a popular saying: "Every little helps" and if the links are followed they all fall into that category.

There is another saying about there being "No such thing as a silver bullet" and that's where BEVs come in.

[Suff]

The energy required for this CO2 conversion, if using it for fuel, could power 9 times as many battery EV vehicles, avoiding at least 5 times the emissions compared to running FF vehicles. If not more.

Why waste the energy? In this scenario it ALL comes down to numbers. If the numbers are bad the solution is bad. That's the end of it.

In this case it is a LOT of energy for a LITTLE return. When you get to world scale engineering, using a lot to get a little back means we fail. In this case it is not every little helps it is very little return hurts a LOT. Except for the pockets of those who run the system and also for the people who keep on making ff engines.

There is, literally, no scenario where this makes sense.

[Workingman]

Planting 1bn trees, eh - easy!

At 10.000 per day (very unlikely) it would take 274 years - a doddle.

We then chop them down using FF powered machinery. Next we transport the logs using FF transport to energy intensive pulping units where the bark is used to help fuel the drying fans, but being in Mississippi the rest is coal powered. So, the logs are pulped and extruded into pellets, which are then loaded by their thousands of tonnes into tankers powered by dirty bunker fuel to be transported 5.5 thousand miles to Drax to be burned.

At Drax they are burned in furnaces without CCS, so their CO2, and that of production, goes into the atmosphere because it only has a prototype system that, when perfected, will only remove 90% of the CO2, but only from the pellets, not the rest of their production chain. There are only 51 such working CCS facilities of any size in the whole world.

Compare that to the system in the link that removes CO2 "already in the atmosphere" and only releases 10% of it back to produce fuel... fuel for 250,000 vehicles per year per unit.

Meanwhile Mr and Ms Smug, with their 'No emissions here' bumper stickers on their EVs, trundle along totally forgetting the environmental damage done to pristine remote parts of the world to get their rare earth metals and lithium to make their - hard to recycle - batteries, not to mention the other materials and CO2 expended in their vehicle's production.

EVs CO2 neutral or zero emissions, my fundament.

The energy required for this CO2 conversion, if using it for fuel, could power 9 times as many battery EV vehicles, avoiding at least 5 times the emissions compared to running FF vehicles. If not more.

You have links to peer reviewed papers to your claims - facts and figures - or are they made up?

[Suff]

Planting 1bn trees, eh - easy!
You have links to peer reviewed papers to your claims - facts and figures - or are they made up?

It is simple. Most FF engines are 20% efficient with an absolute max for a petrol engine of 42% seen in the atkinson cycle engine they use in the latest prius. CCS is extremely energy inefficient. BEV are over 90% efficient in the use of energy.

I was being extremely conservative. All of these data are easily available from a quick search. The well to wheel of CCS fuel is likely to be under 10%, potentially as low as 5% given that FF engine efficiency averages around the 32% mark. The well to wheel efficiency of BEV is over 90%.

I'm just not going to present these figures any more, they are never read, always discarded and it is extremely irksome to go back through them over and over again.

When blue hydrogen from oil and steam reformation, burned in a fuel cell which returns 65% efficiency, has a well documented well to wheel efficiency of 40% or less, Attempting to separate C from CO2 and then mix it with Hydrogen (which has to be extracted), to create CH compounds for fuels, it is going to be orders of magnitude less than 40%.

This is not imagination. This is simple hard fact. The more steps there are in the process, the less you get out of it. The more stable the source material you are going to crack into a fuel, the more energy required. The efficiency (or lack thereof), of FF engines is so well documented there is simply no point in talking about it.

These articles exist for one reason and ONE reason only. To slow down the adoption of BEV and keep of Fossil fuelled vehicles for as long as possible.

[Workingman]

I'm just not going to present these figures any more, they are never read, always discarded and it is extremely irksome to go back through them over and over again.

You mean in the same way you BEV zealots always deflect from or body swerve the negatives or go off on a tangent....? BTW I always read the numbers.

You specifically mentioned planting 1bn trees.

I answered giving reasons why it was not so simple.

You then made a direct claim about the conversion method from Huron Clean Energy and BEVs..

All I asked was for figures for that specific claim.

What you came back with was a load of generalised guff comparing BEVs with FF burners. Those figures, or variations on them depending upon what you read, are well know but irrelevant. Huron do not give a figure for the conversion of green electricity per kWh / litre of 90% cleaner fuel. All that is said is that one facility can produce enough clean(er) fuel for 250,000 vehicles. Your claim of 9x etc. is, therefore, a guesstimate but is presented as fact.

So, yes, it is irksome and frustrating, but it is what it is. I am not going to stop questioning EVs. They have a part to play as we transition away from FFs, as do windmills and solar panels, but they are not the whole answer. It is unfortunate that we have thrown all our eggs into those three baskets at the expense of other methods, and that irks me no end.

[Suff]

OK this is getting boring.

Trees.

Generally the number of trees planted per hectare will vary from 1,000 to 2,500 trees, but the number will vary hugely, depending on the species and the type of planting.
A native, mixed woodland could contain around 1,600 trees per hectare

Let us take the 1,600 figure. So that is 625,000 hectares.

Scotland’s forest and woodland area now covers more than 1.4 million hectares (ha)

Over the last five years we have created over 4,000 hectares of new woodlands (roughly 3,000 football pitches). That’s new areas of forests where previously trees weren't growing. We’ve also replanted an area of 32,500 hectares (an area larger than Malta). Most of the trees that we establish are grown in nurseries and planted out as saplings. But, a significant and increasing number are grown naturally from seed in the forest. This is a process we call ‘natural regeneration’. In 2021, we’re establishing 5 trees for every person in Scotland, around 25 million in total.

Doable.

CCS and long chain hydrocarbons (fuel for vehicles) and the efficiencies.

Capturing CO2 emissions using direct-air-capture (DAC) technology requires almost as much energy as that contained in the fossil fuels that produced the carbon dioxide in the first place, according to new analysis.

Here is a search for the kw/h to strip hydrogen from differing materials.

KW/h to remove hydrogen from differing meaterials

Stanford engineers create a catalyst that can turn carbon dioxide into gasoline 1,000 times more efficiently

<snip>

Cargnello and his team took seven years to discover and perfect the new catalyst. The hitch: The longer the hydrocarbon chain is, the more difficult it is to produce. The bonding of carbon to carbon requires heat and great pressure, making the process expensive and energy intensive.

CO2 (black and red) and hydrogen molecules (blue) react with the help of a ruthenium-based catalyst. On the right, the uncoated catalyst produces the simplest hydrocarbon, methane. On the left, the coated catalyst produces longer chain hydrocarbons, like butane, propane and ethane. (Image credit: Chih-Jung Chen)

In this regard, the ability of the new catalyst to produce gasoline from the reaction is a breakthrough, said Cargnello. The reactor in his lab would need only greater pressure to produce all the long-chain hydrocarbons for gasoline, and they are in the process of building a higher pressure reactor.

Gasoline is liquid at room temperature and, therefore, much easier to handle than its gaseous short-chain siblings – methane, ethane and propane – which are difficult to store and prone to leaking back into the skies. Cargnello and other researchers working to make liquid fuels from captured carbon imagine a carbon-neutral cycle in which carbon dioxide is collected, turned into fuel, burned again and the resulting carbon dioxide begins the cycle anew.

Please note that 1,000 times more efficiently is never quantified. But it is not Zero.

How about some ICE engine efficiency.

What is the Thermal Efficiency of a Gasoline Engine Versus a Diesel Engine?
The thermal efficiency of a gasoline engine is extremely low. While there are companies making strides to improve the thermal efficiency of gasoline engines, to even match the combustion efficiency of older diesel engines is extremely difficult. According to Toyota, a company attempting to increase the thermal efficiency of its vehicles, “Most internal combustion engines are incredibly inefficient at turning fuel burned into usable energy. The efficiency by which they do so is measured in terms of ‘thermal efficiency’, and most gasoline combustion engines average around 20 percent thermal efficiency.

Diesel typically has a higher thermal efficiency, a thermal efficiency approaching 40 percent in some cases. Toyota is in the process of developing a new gasoline engine which the company claims have a maximum thermal efficiency of 38 percent, a thermal efficiency that is “greater than any other mass-produced combustion engine.”

This article is slightly out of date and is slightly low in it's efficiency rating. Toyota hit 42% efficiency. The Diesel engines they are talking about at the higher end are marine diesels which turn over at 200rpm and burn multiple litres of fuel a second. Standard vehicle diesels top out around 38%.

OK so let's set the scene here.

We're going to strip CO2 from the atmosphere at the energy cost of the fuel used to create it.
Then we're going to strip Hydrogen from Water. At a cost of 50kw per kg
The we are going to use some undetermined sum of energy to reconvert the hydrogen and CO2 into long chain hydrocarbons (petrol and/or diesel).
Then we're going to burn it in an engine which is no more than 42% thermally efficient. Note thermally, not even mechanically.

You wanted numbers. There they are. Nobody has a full set of numbers because the people touting the "wonder solution" are carefully screening you from the reality of what those numbers are.

Do you begin to understand how utterly desperate are those who are trying to convince us this abortion of a solution is going to "save us"???

In the end it comes down to numbers. There is NO MORE EFFICIENT way of using electrical energy for transport than putting it in a battery and running an electric motor. None. Everything else burns more and more energy for less and less gain.

The very nearest you can get to it is Hydrogen fuel cell and even with a 99% efficient converter (experimental) and a 65% efficient fuel cell to produce electricity from Hydrogen; it is 40% from electricity source to turning moment of force at the wheels.

Who do you think all these universities get their money from for these studies? Who do the press get their money from to operate and why do they jump on these articles as if they are the second coming of Christ only to fade away from all knowledge within 2-3 years?

Right now, in terms of "fuel" for vehicles in order to go Net Zero, there is only one metric to track. Wh/kg for batteries. Right now, that is around 250Wh. For 600 mile vehicles that needs to go up to 500Wh. There are a very significant number of university studies being funded right now to achieve that. 500Wh is also seen as the threshold for shorthaul aircraft.

I'm not going to do this again. The end to end numbers are not there. This is deliberate. After the end to end numbers for Hydrogen proved, beyond doubt, that Hydrogen was a fantasy for transport, any future "miracle cure" is carefully managed so they do not release the entirely damning numbers which prove it is no more than a pipe dream designed to keep fossil fuel sales relevant and to try and head off the cut off for FF vehicle sales. The story is, as far as I can determine it, "Batteries are bad and we can produce fuel out of CO2, just not enough, but don't ban FF engines because we'll get there in the end and we can fill the gap with smart fuels and a much smaller amount of traditional fuels. We will get there in the end".

In short these articles are there to convince those who just browse that they should get on to their politicians and STOP the banning of FF engines because the solution is "just round the corner".

Those who have been through the rather bruising process of being educated on the realities of well to wheel efficiencies are not so easily convinced.

This post is now WAY longer than I would have made it and of very little interest to anyone who is not deep in the details of this.

Apologies for the bored.

[Workingman]

And today your super-clean electric 'emissions-free' Tonka toy is powered by.... 66% "dirty" electricity, as is your heating / aircon, cooking, lighting, and almost all industry.



Head - wobble - Go! Net-zero and emissions-free my fundament.

Then there is the environmentally destructive production of said "emissions-free" transports and batteries for the few. Well done you battery boys and girls - you saved us all.

[Suff]

You think I don't know that. It is why I'm pro nuclear and in sufficient amount to balance renewables. I'm for Zero Carbon not Nirvana in the Green/Renewables world.

Regardless of that I'll say this one more time. It will take 25 years to replace all the fossil burners. If we replace them today they will emit less emissions on the current "dirty" infra than FF vehicles emit running on fuel. When the power stations are switched over, millions of vehicles at a time instantly become zero emissions.

Your arguments are the same as smokers who aided the tobacco lobby in fighting off legislation even though they knew that smoking was killing people. All because they didn't want to give up their poison.