From a more detailed article....
“Now let’s talk about the energy efficiency. The energy efficiency is essentially the energy you store divided by the energy you put into the reaction. We haven’t really investigated this, but we’re ballparking it around 20 percent, which is low. This is why, in the paper, we actually said that the overpotential (which defines the energy efficiency) is probably too high for the catalyst as it currently stands to be used commercially.”
Doesn’t look all that promising to me with a 20% efficiency. And that doesn’t count the energy/expemse needed to capture, store the CO2.
I’m also skeptical about a system that uses the output of a reaction (burning ethanal produces CO2) as part of its input without also inputting net energy. Sounds like a perpetual motion machine.
One more observation...
Besides CO2, the other output of ethanol combustion is water, which they also use as input.
So to recap... They claim that using water and CO2 plus a magical catalyst produces ethanol which you then burn to produce water and CO2 plus lots of free energy.
Totally bogus. This from the very prestigious Oak Ridge National Lab, that’s how far basic research has sunk in this country.
The only saving grace to that low 20% efficiency is that burning Democrat foundation cash is the magic wand in this process giving a 300% efficiency, so by this time next year we will have a world set free of Democrats and gloBULL warming, and about a day’s supply of ethanol.