It’s not worse. It’s carbon neutral (as long as the energy source is renewable like the sun). Any carbon it takes in will be released exactly back to where it was. It’s a much much better option than digging up oil.
On top of that, there are currently no likely possibilities of replacing gasoline for things like planes. So replacing their gas with carbon neutral gas will improve the situation by 100%.
Any carbon it takes in will be released exactly back to where it was.
Except it won’t be. Combustion is not a perfect CxHy O2 > CO2 + H2O reaction. Theres a bunch of other side reactions happening, NOx, unburned hydrocarbons, particulate matter, carbon monoxide. There are lots of challenges to continuing to utilize hydrocarbon fuels, especially in mobile/small scale applications where you can’t clean the exhaust stream.
Except it won’t be.
None of the things you’ve described increase the carbon output.
What chemical reaction gets more carbon out than it puts in?
(Where do these new carbon atoms come from, fusion?)If anything, those other products include non-gaseous compounds which sequester the carbon from the fuel into a solid resulting in a net-negative amount of carbon being released into the atmosphere.
Those side-products are not good, I’m not saying otherwise, but they are not additional carbon.
It’s not worse. It’s carbon neutral
So replacing their gas with carbon neutral gas will improve the situation by 100%.
Referring to things as carbon neutral is typically shorthand for net neutral CO₂e (or net-zero) CO₂e.
You’re pedantically right that the machine is not creating or destroying carbon atoms, but the things it does create have massive “carbon dioxide equivalence”. Or, phrased differently: the emissions of this equipment are equivalent to emitting significant amounts of carbon dioxide.
They also reek havoc on people’s lungs.
This is worse than air, but better than doing nothing I suppose. The situation is not “improved by 100%”. It’s marginally better, but definitely not 100%.
The particulate matter won’t occur in a hydrocarbon that is generated, that comes from imperfect processing of crude. If you pull the carbon directly out of the air there are no particulates.
But yes it will still be carbon neutral. No additional carbon will be released back into the atmosphere.
For planes there’s a catalytic process that can turn ethanol into jet fuel.
Battery electric aeroplanes aren’t as far off as you might think, but you’re technically correct that they don’t currently exist.
No they do exist! But most scientists agree that we are unlikely to ever see commercial airliners using it, nor will freight liners use it. We would have to see ENORMOUS scientific improvements and many many many things that seem incredibly far fetched invented to get to that point.
You overstate your case, several firms are already at various stages. Wright Electric is working on a >500km range passenger craft for easyJet right now. That won’t be able to fill every role, but a worthwhile number of them to be sure.
If you could link that it would be great. As far as I understand it, a commercial passenger plane (which holds several hundred people) is no where close to being possible. If you are talking about small planes that hold maximum ten-15 people then sure.
I just read it from the Wikipedia page. Their site doesn’t have a lot of info other than a white paper
There are lots of claims going around, but the physics just isn’t there. Battery storage density isn’t high enough currently (and doesn’t look to be close) to support large planes. It’s the same problem as with 18 wheelers. The larger the vehicle, the battery size increases superlinearly, not linearly. Because adding in battery storage increases the weight required to carry the vehicle, thus increasing the battery storage needs, thus … and so on. With liquid fuel, the weight is variable based on the passengers, and the weight drops as the flight continues, thus increasing fuel efficiency the more weight is lost.
Well, it shouldn’t be carbon neutral… It should used to get carbon out of the atmosphere and into a less damaging substance.
Carbon capture does not replace getting rid of our dependency on burning fossil fuels.
We wouldn’t get back the same amount that we are burning anyway. So this approach is worse, because dumb people think it would save us, without us changing the way we produce energy.
It is worse, because it is a distraction from actually doing something.
Until we get rid of the necessity for gasoline, this is better than extracting new fossil fuels and might be better than biofuels produced far away.
Also, I don’t think any form of carbon capture from atmosphere is realistic at scale to reduce CO2. You need atv least as much energy as we are burning just to keep up, and that’s assuming 100% efficiency which is impossible. Focusing on reducing new CO2 emitted seems more effective
Finally a way to turn clean solar into something I can burn.
It takes twice as much electrical energy to produce energy in the form of gasoline.
We lose money on every sale, but make it up on volume!
Eh, not quite.
Sometimes electricity is so cheap that we could be giving it away for free. This and other techniques could be used to store excess energy for when we need it later.
Also it’s a carbon sink if you barrel it up and bury it
What’s the alternative? Turning down production when demand is lower than supply or try to out it into batteries.
So you can either do nothing, or use the capacity you’d otherwise waste. Then it comes down to which is a better / cheaper storage method: building batteries, or something that turns that extra power I to some that can be easily stored/used later.
Aircela is targeting >50% end to end power efficiency. Since there is about 37kWh of energy in a gallon of gasoline we will require about 75kWh to make it. When we power our machines with standalone, off-grid, photovoltaic panels this will correspond to less than $1.50/gallon in energy cost.
Meanwhile, an electric vehicle could go hundreds of miles on the same amount of energy input…
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Plastic is already made from the residues of gasoline production.
Sure we can extract a bit more gasoline from it but it’s not going to replace drilling oil.
Another device of the type that Thunderf00t used to ‘bust.’
Thunderf00t
Love his YT channel… he destroys Elon reputation (if he ever had one…) and calls his 90% BS . lol
The “Why ‘Feminism’ is poisoning atheism”, “Feminism Vs FACTS” chud?
I’m surprised he still has an audience tbh. Well, sadly not that surprised.
Yeah, anyone who isn’t blindly loyal to your cause deserves no recognition.
Make sure you always go out of your way to convince others to only watch what you approve of.
insert Adam Something’s “shitting in the living room” metaphor here
This machine uses 75kWh per day to make 1 gallon of gasoline. Using the cheapest electricity in the country, that’s $9.29 per gallon (+ the machine itself is $20k).
It’s useful if you can rig it to solar or wind, but that’s about it. Hydrocarbon fuel is convenient because it’s compact and energy dense compared to must other fuel sources. If the world ran on nuclear and renewable energy entirely, it would be extremely useful to create a circular carbon economy without digging up new fossil fuels. In our shitty reality though, it’s only marginally useful.
Could also be useful for logistics reasons, say remote communities capable of making electricity but fuel may be a bit of an issue. Plus if these catch on at any capacity it could eventually lead to smaller cheaper models popping up which do have a tonne of uses.
Come run it in Finland during the summer months, we have too much solar and wind generation then and electricity is often free or even goes negative every once in a while.
I wonder is a scaled up version of this could work for grid-scale medium length storage. Smoothing out weeks of dunkleflaute is the main blocker to going to a primarily renewable grid. Gasoline is a lot easier to store than hydrogen and large scale gasoline generators should get close to the efficiency of natural gas peaker plants.
Problem is that the efficiency is on the ground here.
The same energy that might get an EV 200 miles instead produces a single gallon of gasoline, to get a sense for the relative value of the efficiency.
Sure, but you cant store that electricity as electricity. IMO this is most interesting as a energy storage technology, so the comparison isnt what that gasoline would do in an ICE car compared to an EV, its to what it would cost compared to battery storage (or compressed air or whatever other technology) to store a few weeks of output on the order of months. The big advantage I see here is that unlike those other technologies capacity is dirt cheap to build, its just a metal tank. So whenever a renewable plant would curtail its output it can instead redirect to creating gasoline to burn when the renewables arent producing much electricity.
Liquid fuels have a couple advantages in certain scenarios. Aircraft, for example. The energy density of liquid fuels is considerably higher than batteries. Aircraft only take on as much fuel as they need to safely reach their destination. They takeoff with more weight than they can safely land, burning off fuel weight throughout their flight until they are light enough to land. Dumping fuel overboard to get down to landing weight in an emergency.
Switch these aircraft over to batteries, and their landing weight is the same as their takeoff weight. They carry the same “fuel” weight for a regional flight as they do for a maxinum-range flight.
Well, I don’t know if the reason given is that significant, they’d just plan around the fixed weight. The issue being the energy per unit volume/weight being so far behind hydrocarbons that some applications do demand it.
So while stationary/grid applications may lean battery since size/weight hardly matters, and EVs are debatable good enough for many scenarios, I will grant that for aircraft, boats, and some heavy equipment it’s hard to beat hydrocarbons.
Unfortunately, on that front it has to compete with extracted hydrocarbons and doesn’t seem like it can compete as yet. It however may give hope for a more resource constrained future that the battery-hostile scenarios may still be fulfilled in a sustainable way, just at higher relative expense than today. Or they iterate on their processes to have cheaper equipment and/or increased efficiency to come closer to competitive with extracted hydrocarbons. Or a viable thing to reference for some governments mandating sustainably sourced hydrocarbons when they are really needed.
There is another major advantage…
There is a major problem with solar and wind. Daily and seasonal variation in solar flux and wind speed forces us to size our renewable generators based on their minimum expected output. We have to install enough solar panels that we can supply our needs with only low-angle sunlight on short, winter days. But we won’t do that, because that many solar panels are about four times what we need to supply our needs on long summer days. With that much oversupply on the grid, generators won’t be able to command sufficient revenue to justify that number of panels. But we need that number of panels to supply our winter demands.
We can match a large percentage of daily variation with sufficient grid-scale storage. We fill up reservoirs with our excess mid-day production, and run that water through hydropower plants overnight. But it is simply not possible to expand storage sufficiently to match seasonal variation.
If we build out sufficient solar generation capacity to meet winter demand, we don’t need seasonal storage. The problem we have becomes one of seasonal oversupply. The solution to that problem is an increase in demand. We need energy-intensive products that can be brought online in daylight hours from spring to autumn, then shut down for winter.
Producing net carbon-zero fuels could very well create part of the demand needed to justify massive expansion of our renewable power grid.
Honestly, I would have expected worse than that
At least taking their figures at face value, about 75kwh to generate a gallon of gas, and let’s say 67 kwh to get a an EV 200 miles (assuming some losses between the generation and the actual battery capacity, and 3 miles/kwh which is on the low-ish end of EVs, but realistically close). The most aggressive hybrids getting 50 mpg so we end up with it being about 4x worse than charging an EV with that energy source.
At least at residential rates where I live, that’s about $10, so it would only really make sense when gas gets to $10/gallon, otherwise, go to the pump for the fossil fuel. That’s ignoring the cost of the station itself.
So maybe nearer than one might imagine, but still highly impractical. Maybe if they doubled the efficiency and gas eeks up without residential electricity rates going up…
But all this is assuming it will work exactly as well as they say it is, and I’ve learned to have a healthy dose of skepticism… Here though I can be as optimistic as they like and it’s still a tough sell…
Grid scale storage doesn’t strike me as an area of application where high energy density is important, so wouldn’t batteries with less conversion loss do an overall better job? I think grid scale Lithium-ion battery stores have become somewhat common.
I’d see gasoline from CO2 capture of interest more for airplanes, drones, ships, maybe even certain modes of long haul terrestrial transport where weight and volume is important.
This would actually provide me enough gas each week with my hybrid in office schedule.
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Sell these to the “but mah vroom vroom noise” crowd and switch everything to electric.
Hmm, 75kwh to make a gallon of gasoline at even a low estimate of 15 cents per kWh is $11.25/gallon. That’s if they meet their full efficiency targets. I’m sure there will be a few who are willing to pay but it’s pretty expensive fun.
The big car brands in Germany are pivoting to internal combustion for the top as an audible status symbol and electric for the common man, so that tracks.
I imagine this as a system that uses spare renewable energy like solar to generate gas that can be used to smooth the curve that is a renewable power source. It’s real value is that it reduces infrastructure needs, allowing its use in remote environments. But it does add a lot of additional failure points.
All the catches
I swear Porche was already doing something similar…years ago.
