[HN Gopher] Engineers find neat way to turn waste carbon dioxide...
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Engineers find neat way to turn waste carbon dioxide into useful
material
Author : geeklord
Score : 34 points
Date : 2020-06-14 19:20 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (newsroom.unsw.edu.au)
(TXT) w3m dump (newsroom.unsw.edu.au)
| crimsonalucard1 wrote:
| Doesn't the net CO2 in the air increase?
|
| So you harvest CO2 to into fuel. That fuel is burned and the CO2
| is released back into the air. So net difference is zero.
|
| But to harvest the CO2 you needed to generate a high amount of
| heat. That's extra CO2. So net CO2 is more.
|
| It depends on the cost of harvesting that CO2.
| lykr0n wrote:
| You can use Solar and other renewable energy to power the
| conversion process. Progress is still progress.
|
| I would much rather to pay more for net zero carbon fuel, then
| not do anything.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > But to harvest the CO2 you needed to generate a high amount
| of heat. That's extra CO2. So net CO2 is more.
|
| That depends on where they get their energy from.
| WJW wrote:
| You can get the required high amount of heat either through
| concentrating solar collectors or through any renewable form of
| electricity that you run through electric heaters. If you want
| to be fancy, you can use microwaves to very selectively heat
| only the parts you want to heat.
| pronoiac wrote:
| I couldn't fetch the article, so I'm looking at the
| ScienceDaily page.
|
| It's a process to turn:
|
| * otherwise-waste carbon dioxide into (taking electricity)
|
| * syngas, which can be turned into
|
| * synthetic diesel, methanol, alcohol or plastics
|
| Plastics could be a carbon sink I guess.
| bit_logic wrote:
| Every time there's a discussion about synthetic carbon fuels,
| there's the same frustrating replies. I want to reply to those
| with one statement: the whole point is to use excess power from
| solar/wind. There's always the same replies pointing out how it's
| more efficient to use the power directly in EV batteries, laws of
| thermodynamics, and other similar things. Those completely miss
| the point. Solar/wind is going exponential and we have a big
| problem of storing excess power. Massive really massive amounts
| of batteries is one option. But converting that into carbon fuels
| that work directly in existing infrastructure and is effectively
| carbon neutral is a good option too. That's where the discussion
| should be, not pointless arguments about efficiency of EVs.
| wtracy wrote:
| > the whole point is to use excess power from solar/wind.
|
| Thank you.
|
| > But converting that into carbon fuels that work directly in
| existing infrastructure and is effectively carbon neutral is a
| good option too.
|
| This approach seems really underrated, at least for
| transportation.
|
| Hydrocarbons still have the best energy density of the
| realistic options. We have a century of experience building
| ICEs with favorable power/weight ratios. Why throw all that
| away?
| skybrian wrote:
| A problem with processes based on using excess power is that
| they use equipment inefficiently. If cheap power is only
| available for a quarter of the time then it would take 4x as
| long to pay for the investment in the equipment. Whatever
| scheme you set up to use excess power needs to be pretty cheap
| to make it worth running only a small part of the time, or it
| needs to be doing something especially valuable.
|
| Compare to the strategy of locating somewhere that electricity
| is always cheap and running all the time.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| You don't need carbon to store energy, you can just stop at
| hydrogen (or use nitrogen to make ammonia).
|
| Processes can be refitted to use pure hydrogen or it can just
| be added in small increments to existing gas burning plants.
|
| Replacing anything that burns fuel with carbon in it with
| alternatives that dont is a better solution.
| virtue3 wrote:
| hydrogen is notoriously difficult to store. Being an atom
| "thick" generally means it leaks through containers
| regardless of what you try to do.
|
| And I don't know if you've played the game "Oxygen Not
| Included", but creating liquid hydrogen is no easy task
| either.
|
| A more dense energy storage substance (such as a hydrocarbon)
| would probalby be more efficient in terms of transportation /
| use / storage.
| p1mrx wrote:
| Lots of homes and buildings use natural gas for heat. It
| would be nice to replace that with something carbon neutral,
| but the infrastructure can't handle hydrogen levels above
| 10-20%.
| regularfry wrote:
| I was going to ask if anyone knew what the efficiency of this
| process was. Obviously we can't get a perpetual motion machine
| out of it, so it must be taking more energy to form the syngas
| than gets released from the fuel in the first place, right?
| lstodd wrote:
| Right.
| pronoiac wrote:
| This looks like the same story:
| https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200610152016.h...
| credit_guy wrote:
| The application doesn't really make sense the way they explain
| it: use CO2 from a power plant to produce syngas. If the power
| plant burns methane, you might as well produce syngas straight
| out of methane, and short-circuit the step where you produce CO2.
| From the net energy usage point of view, you are better off
| (otherwise, you just found a recipe for perpetual motion).
|
| Where this could make sense is energy storage. Say you are next
| to a large solar power plant, and you want to store the excess
| energy produced during the day and release it at night. Batteries
| are too expensive, pumped water requires some mountains, etc.
| With this, you store a quantity of CO2 in some tanks. At day you
| generate syngas and consume electricity, and store it in some
| other tanks. At night, you burn the syngas, get some of the
| initial electricity back, and store the CO2 back in its tanks.
| [deleted]
| Animats wrote:
| _"We used an open flame, which burns at 2000 degrees, to create
| nanoparticles of zinc oxide that can then be used to convert CO2,
| using electricity, into syngas."_
|
| Is this a real catalyst? (That is, it doesn't get used up in the
| process.) Or do they have to keep making more zinc oxide clouds
| to keep the process going? The paper summary is unclear about the
| energy inputs to this process.
|
| Costs $10 to read the paper.
| philipkglass wrote:
| It's a real catalyst. Full paper here:
|
| https://sci-hub.tw/10.1002/aenm.202001381
|
| I don't think it will have industrial significance any time
| soon, though. Catalysts and processes for the reverse water-gas
| shift reaction are better developed. The hope is that
| electrochemical catalysts like this can combine the
| electrolysis process for making H2 and the syngas production
| step into one, with lower equipment costs. It's hard for me to
| believe that it will overtake better established industrial
| processes. It's very hard to take a maybe-better process from
| lab scale to industry when there's already an established pair
| of processes that get to the same outcome.
|
| My prediction: electrolyzers and catalytic processes will
| continue to be optimized separately, and combining those
| modules will continue to be more predictable and affordable
| than all-in-one electrocatalytic approaches like this.
| elcritch wrote:
| Do you have more resources regarding the current state of art
| for the separate processes?
| ajuc wrote:
| How are they converting CO2 into H2+CO? Where is the hydrogen
| coming from?
| thereisnospork wrote:
| Water. In a conventional CO2 electrolyzer (electricity + CO2 ->
| CO + O2) where CO2 is dissolved in water (plus salt) H2 is the
| standard byproduct per H2O + electricity -> H2 + O2. The
| concept of CO2+H2O directly into H2 + CO is neither novel nor
| useful, as dedicated green-H2 production is more efficient.
|
| This is an example of 'meh' level work being puffed up.
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