Posted on 11/10/2006 9:54:57 AM PST by Red Badger
With the price of oil topping a wallet-busting U.S. $70 a barrel yesterday, the search for alternative fuels keeps heating up.
Last week, scientists announced what may be a new end-run around the oil problem: producing diesel fuel from coal, natural gas, and organic material.
Reporting in the current issue of the Journal Science, researchers say they have developed a way to shuffle the carbon atoms derived from cheap fuel sources like coal to form more desirable combinations, such as ethane gas and diesel fuel.
In their study, scientists scrambled the makeup of hydrocarbons—organic compounds found in fossil fuels—using two chemical processes, one of which earned last year's Nobel Prize in chemistry.
The reaction produced ethane gas and diesel fuel.
The synthetic diesel "is much cleaner burning than conventional diesel, even cleaner burning than gasoline," said Rutgers University chemist Alan Goldman.
Goldman co-developed the process with Maurice Brookhart, a chemistry professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
"It's a very clever idea," Robert Bergman, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, told Science in an accompanying news report.
"I don't think this will be an industrial process tomorrow. But conceptually, it is important."
Nazi Germany
The technology might one day wring more diesel fuel and ethane gas from hydrocarbon byproducts produced by oil refineries.
But the new chemistry's greatest potential may be as a follow-up to an 80-year-old technology known as Fischer Trospch (FT) synthesis.
Developed by German scientists Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch in the 1920s, FT synthesis converts carbon from coal, natural gas, or wood into hydrocarbons, including propane-like gas and diesel fuel.
Nazi Germany used the technique during World War II to manufacture synthetic fuel from coal, churning out 124,000 barrels a day by 1944.
Today oil-poor South Africa uses FT synthesis to distill most of the nation's diesel from its extensive coal deposits.
One downside to the process, however, is the output of so-called mid-size hydrocarbons—molecules with 4 to 8 carbon atoms—which can't be used as fuel.
Hydrocarbons consist of hydrogen and carbon atoms. The number of carbon atoms (anywhere from 1 to, say, 99) determines whether a particular hydrocarbon is a gas, liquid, or solid and whether it's the proper weight to burn as fuel.
Goldman says his new method can convert the otherwise low-value byproducts of the FT process into high-value fuels.
He says, for example, that two mid-size hydrocarbons with six carbon atoms each could be broken up and reassembled into a two-carbon molecule (ethane gas) and a ten-carbon molecule (diesel fuel).
The chemist thinks the breakthrough could deliver U.S. energy independence.
"The United States, for example, has 40 times as much energy in coal than we do in oil, and we have even more than that in oil shale," Goldman said.
"So I think Fischer-Tropsch chemistry is really the key to energy independence for the U.S., China, [and] India."
Key to Energy Independence?
In the U.S. the governors of Pennsylvania and Montana, both coal-rich states, have touted FT technology as a future source of homegrown diesel fuel.
Last September, Pennsylvania governor Edward Rendell said his state's government would buy fuel from a planned FT plant in the state designed to convert waste coal from mining operations into low-sulfur diesel.
Montana governor Brian Schweitzer has expressed even more ambitious plans. He believes Montana's 120 billion tons (109 billion metric tons) of coal could supply the nation's gas, diesel, and jet fuel needs for the next 40 years.
Because FT plants are expensive to build and maintain (an entry-level plant falls in the range of 1.5 billion U.S. dollars), the higher cost of FT synthetic fuels have made them too pricey for U.S. markets in the past.
"When oil was $20 a barrel, it really wasn't considered economical," Goldman, the Rutgers University chemist, said.
But today's high oil prices are now tipping the scales in favor of alternative fuels.
(See National Geographic magazine's "The End of Cheap Oil.")
"Our hope is that what we've discovered will lead to something a little bit more economical [and] efficient," Goldman said.
Environmental Impact
One thorny issue is the net environmental impact of coal-based synthetic fuels.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, FT fuels are cleaner burning than petroleum-derived products, producing fewer particulates and less dangerous nitrogen oxide.
But as FT fuels burn, they also release carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, coal-based synthetic fuels may produce twice the greenhouse gas emissions of petroleum-based fuels.
Experts say one alternative may be the use of carbon collectors derived from animal waste, plants, and other organic material, which trap carbon from the atmosphere.
Is that second one a Swiss Army crane?
3 carbon chain, propane, gas. easily compressable and a great fuel.
4 carbon chain, butane, gas. easily compressable and a great fuel.
5,6 and 7 carbon chain, pentane, sextane and septane, liquids and easily burned in an IC engine.
Wait a minute. Didn't the Nazis do this in WWII?? HAve to do some checking on that.
Nonetheless, diesal is much cheaper to produce than premium gasoline. No way in hell am I paying more for it, I'll buy a horse first. Oil companies which want to play that game can play it with somebody else.
Nope. They're both excavators used to strip-mine for coal.
Check this site for more interesting stuff.
http://www.worsleyschool.net/science/files/extreme/machines.html
I can send you gassifier plans and you car run a normal IC engine on horse dung if you want!
So what happens if there is a coal shortage?
Maybe they meant cannot be used as "diesel" fuel or conventional gasoline fuel...............
I don't think that's gonna happen any time within our lifetime or children's......Unless the UMW gets uppity........
Yes, and South Africa during the Embargo times.......
Diesel engines are made tougher because they have to be. The compression ratio of a diesel is around 24 to 1, to get that high of a pressure and to make use of the slower burn of diesel they use a longer stroke crankshaft which produces a lot more torque. The long stroke crankshaft will make it hard to get 7,000 RPM from the engine.
A gasoline engine and a diesel engine made to the same specks and run at the same RPM will last near the same number of hours. The diesel will make the oil dirtier faster and if not changed will cause more ware on the internal compotes.
The only real advantage of diesel is they run at a leaner air/ fuel ratio so they can get better mileage. They still blow a lot of soot into the air and will need some kind of scrubber to clean that up. If they want to make that fuel for all the diesel trucks then great but that fuel will cause more pollution in all the major cities.
A gasoline engine with water injection is a better solution from an emissions stand point.
Both Honda and a Bosch partnership have both come up with soot removal systems that meet the newer diesel pollution standards, so that will not be a problem anymore........
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1707675/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1729053/posts
There's no more stink in the ULSD fuels now sold. They took out all the sulpher that caused the stink.
It's not the relatively few diesel cars that suffer most from high diesel prices. it is diesel trucks. Almost everything you eat, wear, use, need, listen to, sit on, lay on or want comes to you all or part of the way by trucks, most of which are diesel powered.
The high price of diesel fuel is passed on to manufacturers, distributors and retailers who pass it on to consumers.
Nevertheless, you are right in implying that diesel fuel made from coal will bring down the price of oil.
This is the reason for Platform Item #5 in the above post.
We are going from a 500-ppm diesel standard to a 15-ppm standard. To emit the same amount of sulfur pollutants you would have to use 33 times the fuel. Are you seriously arguing that whereas you might get 15 mpg from the current ULSD diesel, you used to get 500 mpg with the 500-ppm diesel fuel? You would have to use 33 times the fuel over the same distance to emit the same amount of sulfur pollutants with the new stuff as you did with the old.
Yes, unless we force the issue, it won't happen very fast, if at all. The (D) preach a good line but don't do anything to help the problem. We have more coal than we know what to do with. Diesel from coal and other renewable sources will fix the imported oil problem, along with opening up the ANWR and Gulf of Mexico and California coasts.............
Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet.
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