My personal thought is that if they can’t make that process cheaper than cracking oil into gas without some effing government subsidy like for ethanol, then they should STFU.
Just fill your tank with water and drop a pill in.
Voila!!!
Still technology meets the 21st century....the moonshiners are gonna have some competition.
Actually I could easily see how some alcohol beverage companies may want to leverage this to reduce process costs and better control alcohol content. Then it would just be a matter of how to appropriately ‘flavor’ it.
This joins a number of similar technologies going back six or seven years that I know of. Success would be making money at it.
All of these discoveries point out the low relative cost of oil, and that there should be no restraints on oil production because there are plenty of viable alternatives should oil TRULY become too expensive.
It's not just a good idea... IT'S THE LAW!
To change a low-energy-state substance, like Carbon Dioxide, into a fuel, like Ethanol, energy must be expended. This process can be made more efficient through the use of catalysts, but you can't get something for nothing.
The energy will have to come from somewhere. It will probably come from the electric grid, which means it will come from coal or other fossil fuels.
So, if you draw the big box around the whole life cycle, you use electricity, which produces Carbon Dioxide, to change Carbon Dioxide to Ethanol. This Ethanol can then be burned to produce energy, which will release all of the Carbon Dioxide back into the environment.
So, the only question is, is the amount of energy released by the burning of the Ethanol greater or less than the amount of energy used to change the Carbon Dioxide into Ethanol. Unfortunately, it is an absolute physical reality that the amount of energy released must be less than the amount of energy consumed. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
So, in order to minimize the amount of Carbon Dioxide in the environment, if you're into that sort of thing, is to do nothing. This process cannot do anything but make the amount of Carbon Dioxide in the environment go up.
This could solve energy needs in perpetuity. Or at least alcohol needs.
Hey DOE, I have a process for turning ethanol’s base material into methane. Any interest?
The stoichiometry at their site doesn’t work for me. They are missing some atoms here and there.
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/co2-to-ethanol.jpg
Ya gotta balance the equation ...
And this HAS to be endothermic. HOW endothermic is it?
Yes...but is it efficient? Meaning, is the output greater than the input?
I kinda like the traditional approach:
CO2 + corn plant ————> corn
corn + Pappy Yokum —————> corn likker
“The team used a catalyst made of carbon, copper and nitrogen and applied voltage to trigger a complicated chemical reaction that essentially reverses the combustion process.”
How much voltage did they have to apply, though? If it is greater than the energy they could release from burning the ethanol, then the process is useless for making fuel.
My first thought: cold fusion, it’s 1989 all over again.
All Right!!!
We can all get drunk for cheap now.
So, this makes it energetically downhill from CO2 to ethanol? I didn’t think so.
Maybe we can build more dams to provide the electrical power to do this. I didn’t think so.
Uh oh, the corn lobby is going to flip out.
Sure this might work in a laboratory, but it is a long way from being a practical process on an industrial scale and at what cost. Our current corn ethanol boondoggle works only because of massive government subsidy from planting the corn to pumping the ethanol into your tank. Ethanol is a poor fuel and the energy needed to produce, ship and blend it with gasoline is more than obtained from using it as a motor fuel. I doubt this process would be any more energy efficient .
