Los Alamos can Produce Gasoline from CO2 in Air at $4.60/gal

[Ichingcarpenter]

Federal Lab Says It Can Harvest Fuel From Air (With a Catch)

In the category of things that sound so good they have to be checked out more thoroughly (so stay tuned) is this news out of Los Alamos National Laboratory:

Scientists there say they have developed a way to produce truly carbon-neutral fuel and useful organic chemicals at large scale using water and carbon dioxide removed from the air as raw materials. There are plenty of schemes brewing to capture carbon dioxide, both directly from the atmosphere and from the stacks of power plants. All of them, for the moment, are costly or hard to envision at the billion-tons-a-year scale that would be needed to blunt the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere coming mainly from fuel burning.

UPDATE: 2/13, 5 p.m.: This plan has a minor hurdle, too; the electricity for driving the chemical processes, according to a white paper describing the overarching concept, would come from nuclear power. The proposal says it’d be worth it to have a payoff of steady, secure streams of methanol and gasoline with no carbon added to the atmosphere (and a price for gasoline at the pump of perhaps $4.60 a gallon — comparable to petroleum-based fuels as oil becomes harder to find).

At least one process for using CO2 to make fuel, developed by a team led by George A. Olah, a Nobel laureate at the University of Southern California, bears some resemblance to the fuel-generating part of the Los Alamos proposal.>>>>>snip

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/federal-lab-says-it-can-harvest-fuel-from-air/index.html?ref=science#3

[AndyTiedye]

1. Should Do This With Hydroelectric Power

Since you could do this anywhere, why not do it where you can easily generate hydroelectric power? No need to drive it from nuclear.

[Ghost Dog]

2. Yup.

[speedbird]

8. most good hydro sites already taken

the electricity from current dams
is usually already spoken for

[Ghost Dog]

3. Can the $4.60 a gallon cover construction & decommisioning and safe waste

storage and overall long-term security for nuclear fission power stations?

Surely not.

Nice concept all the same.

[hunter]

4. This and cheap fusion and we could scarf down what's left of the biosphere.

It's fascinating how the first thing we think is "gasoline!" The automobile culture permeates so much of our thinking.

Why don't we just get rid of cars? Then we wouldn't need gasoline.

[jmondine]

5. They should harvest in L.A. Plenty of fuel in the air there

[NNadir]

6. This is kind of an old story. Granted, the New York Times is scientifically illiterate,

but really...

Olah's publications on the electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide are almost a decade old.

Frankly, I have always thought that they are the best idea in energy storage, but they are hardly new.

One of the fun things missing of course is the question of whence all that rhodium, ruthenium, etc is going to come. I know an excellent source.

Maybe the Times should go back to getting Judith Miller to ramp up anti-nukes to kill if it wants to be in the "science" business.

We can always trust the Times, by the way, to sweep the Second Law of Thermodynamics under the rug.

[eppur_se_muova]

7. This has always been possible IN PRINCIPLE. Just CO2 + H2 ...

in the right proportions produces CO or CH4. Combine these with more H2 over a Fischer-Tropsch catalyst and you can make liquid fuels. Ultra-low-sulfur diesel fuel is already made by FT. So it's just a question of getting the H2, which can be done by electrolysis (or a thermal process, which NNadir has posted a few times) **IF** you have the energy.

I've said before, H2 is just an energy "currency" -- it provides a medium of exchange, which can be exchanged (either direction) for hydrocarbons, or just about any other form of energy (at least one-way). But there are no **H2 mines** on Earth. So making HC'S from H2 just 'begs the question' -- where does the energy to make the H2 come from ? That's the real problem, whether you choose to use H2 directly or convert it to HC's -- or for that matter, whether you store the energy in flywheels, compressed air, capacitors, etc. WHERE does the ENERGY come from ?

(PS: Yes, I know the outer planets would make great sources of H2, but there are certain practical obstacles to overcome, to put it mildly.)

[Massacure]

9. Powerplants usually only convert about a third of their heat energy into electricity

That so called waste heat should be used to produce synfuels.

[zeaper]

10. Not possible

If it was possible we would be doing just that. However, the two thirds wasted energy that you are referring to is low temperature energy, around 100 degrees F. Can’t do much with that other than use it for heating homes or businesses.