From the UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA and the “fuel out of thin air” department comes this announcement that says right off the bat it can’t compete with oil, especially when gasoline is now under $2 a gallon in some parts of California.
Carbon dioxide captured from air converted directly to methanol fuel for the first time
Research could one day create a sustainable fuel source from greenhouse gas emissions
They’re making fuel from thin air at the USC Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute.
For the first time, researchers there have directly converted carbon dioxide from the air into methanol at relatively low temperatures.
The work, led by G.K. Surya Prakash and George Olah of the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, is part of a broader effort to stabilize the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by using renewable energy to transform the greenhouse gas into its combustible cousin – attacking global warming from two angles simultaneously. Methanol is a clean-burning fuel for internal combustion engines, a fuel for fuel cells and a raw material used to produce many petrochemical products.
“We need to learn to manage carbon. That is the future,” said Prakash, professor of chemistry and director of the USC Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute.
The researchers bubbled air through an aqueous solution of pentaethylenehexamine (or PEHA), adding a catalyst to encourage hydrogen to latch onto the CO2 under pressure. They then heated the solution, converting 79 percent of the CO2 into methanol. Though mixed with water, the resulting methanol can be easily distilled, Prakash said.
The new process was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society on Dec. 29. Prakash and Olah hope to refine the process to the point that it could be scaled up for industrial use, though that may be five to 10 years away.
“Of course it won’t compete with oil today, at around $30 per barrel,” Prakash said. “But right now we burn fossilized sunshine. We will run out of oil and gas, but the sun will be there for another five billion years. So we need to be better at taking advantage of it as a resource.”
Despite its outsized impact on the environment, the actual concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is relatively small – roughly 400 parts per million, or 0.04 percent of the total volume, according to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. (For a comparison, there’s more than 23 times as much the noble gas Argon in the atmosphere – which still makes up less than 1 percent of the total volume.)
Previous efforts have required a slower multistage process with the use of high temperatures and high concentrations of CO2, meaning that renewable energy sources would not be able to efficiently power the process, as Olah and Prakash hope.
The new system operates at around 125 to 165 degrees Celsius (257 to 359 degrees Fahrenheit), minimizing the decomposition of the catalyst – which occurs at 155 degrees Celsius (311 degrees Fahrenheit). It also uses a homogeneous catalyst, making it a quicker “one-pot” process. In a lab, the researchers demonstrated that they were able to run the process five times with only minimal loss of the effectiveness of the catalyst.
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Olah and Prakash collaborated with graduate student Jotheeswari Kothandaraman and senior research associates Alain Goeppert and Miklos Czaun of USC Dornsife. Their research was supported by the USC Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute, and their paper can be found online here: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jacs.5b12354
Amazing. Simply amazing.
But if you ask me, Hans Erren has a better proposal for turning CO2 back into C and O2.
Wow! UCLA has repealed the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
Except some USC Trojans might be getting a bit huffy about your reference to the UCLA Huggie Bears, who had nothing to do with this. Although some Trojans might be wishing that this could be pinned on UCLA.
Okay. You reduce CO2 to CH3OH, and then distill. Let’s say that you burn methanol to run the boiler to supply the steam to power the distillation. How much methanol would you have left over? If you care about energy efficiency, you are not going to like the answer.
At that point, they could turn to Rossi for advice.
“right off the bat it can’t compete with oil, especially when gasoline is now under $2 a gallon”
So basically that is why energy rates have “necessarily skyrocket” so these un-viable ideas become viable.
Oil, gas and coal at record low levels. However no reductions in electricity prices.
Since I have worked in the energy business for over 50 years including CO capture which is expensive, one can imagine how many similar claims have been made over the years from the universities et. al. that have contributed ZERO net energy. Clearly now that the taxpayer is funding this activity the number of claims for viable alternative energies have increased geometrically. For example, numerous failures have been associated with using catalyst that is too expensive, rare, and has a short activity life.
I don’t know the particulars on this claim but here is some info on the catalyst mentioned. It may cost more than the value of the product?
“Ruthenium is a chemical element with symbol Ru and atomic number 44. It is a rare transition metal belonging to the platinum group of the periodic table. Like the other metals of the platinum group, ruthenium is inert to most other chemicals.”
Ruthenium Price 42.00 USD/ozt (37.92 EUR/ozt) 03 Feb 2016 – 52 Week Low 42.00 USD/ozt 52 Week High 56.00 USD/ozt ..
Why would you spend tax dollars on RARE elements as your catalyst? This issue among the many other limitations already mentioned including the energy required many be greater than the energy provided. Of course this is the huge problem with ethanol from corn which the Dept of Agriculture distorts to mislead the public and the politicians.
I’m not ready to invest in this claim from the university. It probably cannot compete with $100/bbl oil and likely cannot be commercialized based on past experience with other University projects.
Would like to be wrong once, but I have no confidence in those handing out other peoples money. Let the free market decide as long as we have ample fossil fuels.
I’m intrigued by the number of respondents who have so quickly and correctly identified that there’s nothing ‘free’ in this process in terms of energy/Laws of Thermodynamics. It contrasts with the seeming majority on WUWT who believe that heat flows the wrong way, from a cooler atmosphere to the warmer surface and makes the surface yet warmer, because magic.
‘It contrasts with the seeming majority on WUWT who believe that heat flows the wrong way, from a cooler atmosphere to the warmer surface …’
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I haven’t a clue how you came up with that statement. If you ask me, you are somewhere near 180 degrees off with your attribution of belief.
Heat doesn’t flow, it radiates.
Big difference.
Heat radiates from any object that is above absolute zero. The higher above, the more it radiates.
Thus heat can radiate from a cool object to a hot object, while at the same time heat is radiating from the hot object to the cool object.
The rate at which the hot object loses energy is heat radiated minus heat absorbed. Hence by making a near by cool object warmer, you can slow down the rate at which the hot object looses heat.
Please try to learn something about thermodynamics.
Let me more precise, heat does flow, but only so long as the two objects are in physical contact.
The ground is only in physical contact with the molecules of air that are at the lowest layer of the atmosphere, and that layer is only one molecule thick.
For surface and atmosphere interactions, it is the relative radiations that you need to examine.
@ur momisugly MarkW Feb 4, 09:28 & 10:41 am
How interesting.
Let’s keep in mind that there are 3 forms of heat transfer that are normally considered in the Engineering world including Conduction, Convection, and Radiation. It seems that most discussions seem to be centered on radiation (only) which does not make sense to me.
Objects do not have to be in physical contact to have heat transfer between them as long as there is a temperature difference. Heat transfer is often a combination of Conduction and convection and radiation in the real world. Often a different material (insulation) is used to reduce heat transfer between to mediums to reduce conduction. The other major factor that can significantly affect heat transfer in the real world is convection. Even though two objects are separated by a gap the fluid between the objects transfers the heat. Empirical Heat transfer coefficients are used to calculate heat transfer via convection to simplify the calculations.
“Heat energy transferred between a surface and a moving fluid at different temperatures is known as convection.”
“In reality this is a combination of diffusion and bulk motion of molecules. Near the surface the fluid velocity is low, and diffusion dominates. Away from the surface, bulk motion increase the influence and dominates.”
“Convective heat transfer may take the form of either
forced or assisted convection
natural or free convection”
It’s hard to believe that wind blowing across the earth or sea surface is not an important factor in transferring a significant amount of heat energy which may be convected upward with negligible impact of CO 2.
What have I missed?
So many comments here saying that the process needs energy input so therefore it is not viable. The main point is not that it needs energy input, rather it is the quality of that heat that matters. Being able to run at 165 degrees centigrade means that this process can piggy back on many forms of waste heat that currently needs to be vented. Think power station cooling towers (especially nuclear which like to stay at full output over night) or just straight solar thermal. Same for the distillation step.
Being able to make fuel from waste heat and CO2 in places that don’t currently have access to hydrocarbons has the potential to significantly reduce world political instability related to oil production and use. For that reason alone this research should be strongly supported. The fact that it could help produce peace in our times is exactly why it won’t be funded of course…oh, and the nay sayers…
Mike,
Your first paragraph makes a lot of sense. The second one seems a tangled web. Some writers claim various countries need oil at 100USD to operate, Russia is one, I think, but not the only one. You do say “places that don’t currently have access to hydrocarbons” and so such a process might be good for some. For others, anything that keeps the price close to 30USD is detrimental. Therefore, it is not clear how “world political” stability would come about.
Yes and to go massive these things will require a massive source carbon-neutral non-intermittent electricity or process heat source to accomplish, which LFTR advocates (CO2 lovers and haters both) have been shouting from the rooftops, for awhile.
There is also the challenge of capturing nitrogen from the air to make the fertilizer used in large scale agriculture without the use of oil or natural gas. Be wary of the move afoot to bring into being genetic solutions to this problem. The oxygen depletion problems which stem from chemical fertilizer runoff largely stem from extreme over-use, not mere use.
Anything man does chemically and industrially, man can voluntarily scale down by any degree. But tailoring microbes and splicing ‘superior’ attributes into them carries the potential to bring about an Unmentionable Bad Thing that no one can control or unintended consequences we cannot live with. Because we’d be dead or dying.
PRESERVE THE ENVIRONMENT using ONLY applied energy, machinery, chemistry and industry.
Because molecules do not breed. So long as we use do it this way we retain complete control.
Hand control to bio-engineers and they might lose control of their critters.
Perhaps bio-ethics is not about morality after all, it’s just common sense applied.