Posted on 01/08/2008 2:18:32 AM PST by CutePuppy
From today's IBD:
Greenhouse gas fuel of the future?
Researchers at Sandia National Laboratory say they can take global-climate-change causing CO2 and sunlight out of the atmosphere and turn it into fuel. The CO2 recycling technique, Sunlight to Petrol project, essentially reverses the combustion process to recover the building blocks of hydrocarbons. The researchers say the technology already works, but a large-scale deployment could be a decade or more away. They hope to have a prototype available by April.
And so we will never see it.
Fender-benders should be more interesting with what is essentially a low-level car bomb.
At last, a story from a credible source. But Sandia underestimates the noble quality of greed. If oil prices continue to rise, natural Capitalism will simply do a "Manhattan Project". This engineering is not more difficult than Iran's thousands of turbomolecular centrifuges, after all.
There is a LOT of work going on in this field, using the old Fischer-Tropf catalysis and variants. Here is the first hit:
Patent Agent: Air Liquide - Houston, TX, US
Patent Inventors: Paul Wentink, Denis Cieutat, Guillaume De Souza
Applicaton #: 20060116430 Class: 518726000 (USPTO)
Related Patents:
Chemistry: Fischer-tropsch Processes; Or Purification Or Recovery Of Products Thereof, Hydrogenation With Gaseous Hydrogen To Purify Or Recover
If they can take “climate-change causing” CO2 out of the atmosphere to make fuel, doesn’t it just become CO2 again when it’s burned? So the net effect is zero, which is better I guess than taking it out of the ground. CO2 is a greenhouse gas , but a very mild one, and plants just consume excess CO2 anyway, resulting in more plants. Of course, Al Gore would beg to differ. His numerous degrees in climatology would tell him that CO2 is likely to drown more trees as ocean levels rise than anything else.
~~Anthropogenic Global Warming ping~~
What part of the Hindenburg disaster demonstrated that hydrogen is the most difficult element to compress into a safe, usable form?
This writer is absolutely clueless.....
bttt
Do you think this fuel would contain more chemical energy or be more flammable/explosive than gasoline?
So, we are running out of “fossil” fuels, or someone is hoping we will so that an expensive solution for what we have plenty of, will stand a chance in 7734 upside down and backwards of being produced. First of all, using fossil before the word fuel, strikes me just like the word change, in the present political campaign. I have a great deal of trouble dealing with the word and it’s implications.
Hmmm... effectively patenting sunlight. Or maybe, just maybe, he can even blame global warming on it. It’s even believable, if spun the right way...
Yes, it’s now down to just a “scale” thing... and, of course, the profitability at different scale levels. Fortunately, we know the ultimate size of the market and thus, scale.
Well, somebody has to... I can't imagine a better candidate, except maybe one of the Clintons... I don't think Kerry could pull this off, he'd be immediately "sun-boated".
If this works, it's worth trying. Yes, we could cover the Southwest with plants like this and algae farms to make biodiesel. We have sunshine and we have ingenious people. And Hugo and Mahmood would be weeping into their beers because China would copy it in a New York minute, and where's the $100 oil?
Sounds good....better than centrifuges for Iran.
Huh?
The are talking about synthetic gasoline or diesel as the final product, not hydrogen.
as the Hindenburg disaster demonstrated, hydrogen is also the most difficult element to compress into a safe, usable formThe Hindenburg's hydrogen gas was merely contained in a number of lift cells, not "compressed"; the hydrogen that burned during the Lakehurst disaster was leaked out of a leaky cell, beginning a few minutes before docking maneuvers began, and when ignited (and there's no firm concensus on how that happened), burning holes in the other cells, which ignited the rest of the hydrogen in the cells.
Rich Diver, inventor of the Counter Rotating Ring Receiver Reactor Recuperator (CR5)... claims that his solar-powered reactor could help clean up the planet by making internal combustion a reversible process... Right now, it's cheaper to drill for oil and refine it, according to Diver; but in 20 years, as oil grows scarcer, synthesizing fuels for traditional gasoline and diesel engines will become an increasingly attractive alternative... Diver's invention, the CR5, is essentially a stack of counter-rotating rings coated with iron oxide (rust) along their edges. The top ring in the stack is exposed to direct sunlight to supply the necessary heat to power the fuel generator. Inside the reactor, the levels of iron oxide are diminished as some of their oxygen atoms are removed. At the other end of the stack of counter-rotating rings, water is introduced in the form of steam. The iron grabs oxygen from the steam, thereby re-oxidizing the iron oxide (which is conserved throughout the reaction) and leaving behind pure hydrogen... The traditional method of making hydrogen from water uses electrolysis, but Diver claims his technique offers greater than 20 percent higher efficiency because it "eliminates the step of making electricity from solar energy." ...carbon dioxide would be collected from coal-burning plants and recycled by the CR5 to produce synthetic fuels able to power conventional automobile and truck engines, making vehicle powering a renewable process that does not further pollute the planet. However, even if all steps come off without a hitch, 15 to 20 years are needed before the CR5 can be put into widespread use in creating synthetic fuels, according to Sandia.Iron oxide has also been used to improve the efficiency of the competing technology, water electrolysis to produce gaseous hydrogen / oxygen. Thanks Ernest.
You rang the bell when you swung the hammer. :’)
New Catalyst Paves Way For Cheap, Renewable Hydrogen
Science Daily | National Science Foundation | 30 June 2003
Posted on 06/30/2003 1:21:26 PM EDT by sourcery
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/938133/posts
Fuel cells get a boost
ISA | 9-17-04
Posted on 09/17/2004 6:43:53 PM EDT by Indy Pendance
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1219346/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1492650/posts?page=3#3
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