[JimRed]

When fashioned into an electrode and stimulated with voltage...

How much voltage, for how long? IOW, will it cost more to supply the necessary voltage than the net value of the fuel produced?

Will it end up as inefficient as the other "green" technologies?

[nuke rocketeer]

More than likely, the cost of producing the catalyst will be higher than the energy from the hydrocarbons produced. No where in the article did they give hard numbers for the energy cost of making this catalyst. Also, there are ALWAYS problems with scaling up a lab process to a commercial operation. Things that work well on small scales sometimes have a tendency to get unstable when scaled up.

[Gandalf_The_Gray]

How much voltage, for how long? IOW, will it cost more to supply the necessary voltage than the net value of the fuel produced?

Will it end up as inefficient as the other "green" technologies?

Well, let's see...First you burn coal to make steam to turn a turbine that drives a generator that produces electricity. The process also produces CO₂ which can be reacted with a copper/gold electrode in an undefined solution to produce methane (natural gas). So lets just burn the methane along with the coal, oh oh, we just produced more CO₂...Back to the magic cells to make more methane.

At some point could we drop the coal altogether and just burn methane to produce electricity and CO₂ while reacting the CO₂ with the copper/gold electrodes and the secret sauce (with just a pinch of the electricity produced, leaving enough power to keep our customers smiling!) Let's look a little closer, we have a closed process with a fixed amount of CO₂ which we convert to methane using a catalyst and electricity. We then burn the methane, extracting heat to produce electricity and more CO₂ to continue the process indefinitely.

Neat! Except that the laws of physics regarding the conservation of energy require that the amount of energy needed to synthesize the methane will be greater than what you can recover by burning the same amount of as fuel. This is why all thermodynamic processes reject heat to the environment (cooling towers!!).

Lastly, converting all the CO₂ produced by a coal fired power plant to methane or methanol does not destroy the gas forever, it hides it as unburnt hydrocarbons in the newly produced fuels. As soon as those fuels are burnt, presto, the same amount of CO₂ is released into the environment, the energy recovered will be less then the energy input to the synthesis as electricity. And what a long strange trip it's been...

The closed box that produces perpetual energy output is just as imposable as the proverbial "free lunch".

Regards,
GtG