I don’t worry much about excess plant food in the atmosphere, but this seems like a nice little breakthrough. It could pair well with solar.
11 thoughts on “CO2 To Ethanol”
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I don’t worry much about excess plant food in the atmosphere, but this seems like a nice little breakthrough. It could pair well with solar.
Comments are closed.
While I fall into the “AGW is possibly happening, but models alone don’t prove it” camp, I’ve long held that with cheap electricity, we could make fuel out of air. Now it looks like it’s possible.
The details will be important on this process: is making the nanospikes scalable? what are the energy inputs? are the spikes cheap enough? is the ethanol pure enough to drink?
Digging deeper into the links, the reaction is 84% selective for Ethanol (it also generates H2, CO, and CH4 – methane, all of which would be fairly easy to separate). I’m not sure how 63% Faradic efficiency translates into overall system efficiency. Probably not as simple as ‘63% of power delivered stored in Ethanol’… but even if it was, you’ve still got losses from separating the Ethanol from the water, and the thermodynamic inefficiency of burning Ethanol as fuel.
Using it as a chemical battery might be interesting, as you could use Ethanol fuel cells to recover electricity fairly efficiently…
Where do they get the hydrogen from? How much energy does that take?
Never mind..the CO2 was dissolved in water.
“Perhaps most importantly, it works at room temperature, which means that it can be started and stopped easily and with little energy cost. This means that this conversion process could be used as temporary energy storage during a lull in renewable energy generation, smoothing out fluctuations in a renewable energy grid.”
Energy sources like solar and wind need something like this to be practical. If this is cheap enough, and we find sufficient demand for the ethanol fuel produced, it could lead to a reversal of “renewable” driven rise in electric rates.
The demand could simply be energy storage for use when the sun doesn’t shine, or wind doesn’t blow.
If it works in an economic fashion it seems like a major finding. Another way to make moonshine I guess…
A way to remove excess CO2 from the atmosphere inside a spacecraft?
For terrestrial power generation you’d want to be sure the solar actually ever returned the energy used in manufacturing and maintaining the cells.
Go nuke.
Burn the gases in the RCS thrusters and drink the ethanol after landing.
So this is a solid state device?
Meh. I can’t count how many pie in the sky articles like this I have read over the years (so, I didn’t bother). The Achilles heel is always scalability.