Posted on 06/15/2012 11:16:18 AM PDT by Red Badger
When you burn the fuel produced from CO2, it turns back into CO2........
Only one aspect of this really intrigues me. That’s the idea that maybe something can come along to take the wind out of the carbon dioxide Nazi’s sails. That would be a beautiful thing.
Thanks! I figured as much. Key here is how much electricity does it take to convert CO2 into useful fuels?
/ smirk
Methanol is also called wood alcohol. It’s obvious why they didn’t mention that. They are re-inventing the tree, something that took billions of years of massively parallel natural computation to develop. Good luck with that.
Thanks for the interesting post Red Badger but looking at some of the replies it would seem we have some of the same mentality we decry from the left.
There is no perfect energy source for every application. A country like the USA needs every possible source imaginable as our energy requirements are so diverse.
What works good in a car may not work in the center of an explosives factory or what works to heat domestic hot water may not work in an airplane. So what? Give us as many possible sources of energy and the market place will figure out the winners for each application and there might be multiple winners for a single application.
I am disappointed so many shots taken at this and numerous other ideas by fellow Freepers. I almost had to look at the URL to make sure I had not been hijacked to the DU.
On a large scale, I foresee this technology being utilized to reclaim CO2 from power plants and factories to recover some of the fuel costs. On a small scale, it could also be used for home heating or small business CO2 reclamation.
With the CO2 factor being removed from the objections to coal fired power plants, there is no longer any bluster about greenhouse gases and global warming...............
Nuclear power plants are reallly difficult............
"... searching for ways to store, dispose of, or prevent the formation of the greenhouse gas, which is a major driver of global climate change."
The only problem with that is people don't enjoy drinking butanol. As others have pointed out the energy required to make methanol, ethanol or butanol would be more than returned through combustion. Therefore using this as a fuel isn't practical, so we might as well enjoy it!
Why not just use the fossil fuels that come naturally out of the ground// This is silly.
Thanks Red Badger.
sorry, but that was supposed to be taken as sarcasm directed to the liberal left.
” Understand your point about the shots, but most new “breakthroughs” never mature to viability. It’s very easy to remain sceptical, particularly when the article contains:”
As a corporate engineer for over 26 years I can attest to the value of “breakthroughs” which never reach maturity.
If ideas are allowed to be brought forth without all the chicken little, back biting, Monday morning quarterbacking it is amazing how the initial spark can create an entirely new concept even if the the actual spark ultimately is never used.
In fact it is unrealistic to believe the initial idea will remain unchanged after it is evaluated. I’d gladly take 100 failed ideas vs no ideas any day of the week as I have seen how failed ideas lead to a new path.
Leave all the negativity to the DU as that is all they have. They never create anything just destroy or steal the work of others.
During past years I'm aware of many phenomonal breakthroughs; not all of them matured but provided another rung on the ladder to reach something that did.
By the way, I just noticed that you and I have the same FR sign-up date: 1999-07-21. Welcome to FR. :)
Yes Ken, the glow-bull warming crapola was expected given the source. They will never learn.
Butanol can also be dehydrated using standard petchem catalysts to butane and then dimerized or trimerized or oligomerized to any other straight chain alkane, or isomerized to any of the branched chain aromatics this is standard petroleum refinery tech that is done on the level of millions of tons per day using crude oil and NG liquid feeds. Butanol is also an industrial solvent / base chemical that is currently worth more per gallon than gasoline on the wholesale market if they make butanol it will not end up as motor fuel it is too valuable a chemical commodity for that currently.
Methanol can be turned directly into isooctane using the MTG process at high commercially viable yields ask the South Africans they do the MTG process by the millions of tons commercially already. the MTG process yields isocatane and propane in an 3:1 ratio with no side reactions over a zeolite catalyst.
If the catalyst are cheap enough and blue light is all you need plus CO2 there are plenty of compounds that florescence in full sunlight one could be tuned to take in broad spectrum sunlight and florescence out blue light directly to one of these catalitic cells, but if you can go directly from electrons to chemical energy at 95% efficency skip the solar photon to semicondutor electron step and just use off peak power from wind, hydro, and nukes.
Texas has installed over 5 gigawatts of wind power that peaks out in the middle of the night while we all sleep and during the heat of the day anyone who has lived in west Texas will tell you there is no wind to be had it's just hot and dry till sun down then bam out of no where the wind starts to howl again it has to do with the advection of unequal cooling of the different land use types to the cloud less night sky. All that power at night mostly goes to waste as we Texans are off work and going to sleep right as the wind really peaks out all the way till the sun comes up and heats the ground up again the mid-mornings.
At which point, the complaint will become something else.
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