Stripping CO2 from the air and using it to produce carbon-neutral fuel

Chemical engineer with experience in alternative fuels here. The key line is this:<p>&quot;But for it to work, it will have to reduce costs to little more than it costs to extract oil today, and – even trickier – persuade countries to set a global carbon price.”<p>Their feedstock costs are probably quite low. Air, and from the sounds of it, water to produce hydrogen through electrolysis. They&#x27;re probably then doing some combination of reverse water-gas-shift + Fischer-Tropsch to go from CO2 + H2 to diesel. Not unlike a similar project in Qatar using natural gas as their hydrogen source.<p>Problem is that carbon and hydrogen from methane is much cheaper than from air and water. Their electric&#x2F;energy bill is probably massive, and also begs the question: could they fuel their plant with their own product and still have net energy gain? Or do they depend on cheap energy from more thermodynamically favorable fuels like coal and oil to be viable?<p>Solar, wind, nuclear, batteries, electric self-driving cars, next gen A&#x2F;C, hopefully fusion someday... these are the energy or conservation technologies of the future, not something that&#x27;s DOA because of basic thermodynamics.

A few notes to help get this to the mainstream. Take these quotes:<p>* &quot;persuade countries to set a global carbon price&quot;<p>* &quot;paid for by the emitters, or by the fossil fuel suppliers&quot;<p>I think they should carefully examine how such efforts have failed or been sabotaged in the past. The issue most libertarians and conservatives have is not &quot;co2 offsetting&quot; itself, the issue is they don&#x27;t like taxes and regulations because it interferes with individual liberties. From past experience, hinging an entire industry on a government-created market appears to be a sure path to failure. For all of the clever ingeniuty described here, I&#x27;m baffled why no one is addressing that, which seems to be the bigger issue.

Legit question here, not snark. How could this possibly be better than something like an algae based biofuel? Have self-replicating, solar-powered machines do the CO2 extraction and reduction work on their highly specialized membranes. Then use the product? I get that this sounds fancy, but I&#x27;d be surprised if they can be even close to energy neutral pulling power from the grid to reduce the CO2 into hydrocarbons. At best, their plan just externalizes the carbon cost to the generator infrastructure (which could be renewable, sure, but again: plants are solar-powered as well).

So much managed tech for something nature already solved for us passively. I think if we just changed where and how some of our basic input and outputs go we could solve this without any tech.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;halfhillfarm.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;04&#x2F;21&#x2F;how-hugelkultur-can-help-heal-the-planet&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;halfhillfarm.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;04&#x2F;21&#x2F;how-hugelkultur-can-help...</a>

One of the huge pluses of electric cars (besides the obvious elimination of humanity-threatening climate change gases) is that cities will be less choked with car exhaust smog. Living in a major US city, whose air is quite clean compared to many other places in the world, still means you get exposed to constant facefulls of car exhaust, truck smoke, and particulates every time you set foot outside.<p>That&#x27;s not healthy on a direct human level, let alone a climate change level. We&#x27;re at the cusp of getting rid of this miserable pollution completely, and maybe even having truly clean air in our major cities, in our lifetimes--why invent a technology to allow us to keep the smog and particulates around even longer?

Multi-pronged solutions are needed for this massive issue. We need to avoid emissions where we can, switch to clean energy where we can, and use clean-up technologies if they do become energetically feasible. And keep in mind that just planting more trees or preserving existing rainforests can also go a long way. In the end doing <i>something</i> is better than coming up with endless roundtable resolutions and pledges that are then universally ignored.

The obvious problem is that too make enough gas to power a gasoline car, you&#x27;ll need to spend more energy than it takes to charge a Tesla (likely many times more, I&#x27;m not sure what the energy efficiency of the conversion process is).<p>I do have a fantasy that if we had an abundance of fusion energy (or just nuclear, perhaps), you could not only power cars, but also make oil from co2 and put it back where it came from.

That&#x27;s a bit of a weird idea.<p>CO2 is not present in fairly high amounts in the air, using some quick math, I would estimate that for 1kg of CO2, one would need to filter over 2.5 tons of air (Though if we keep pumping more CO2 into the air, this will become more efficient). The energy required to do this won&#x27;t be trivial, so it would have to be from renewable resources. Why not use those directly?<p>I would suggest it would be more efficient to draw the water from the air and produce hydrogen, which is a clean fuel unlike carbon (which just burns into CO2 again, under normal conditions). And if you run out of water to pull from the air, you can probably find a bit of water on this planet to use, it&#x27;s not like we want a rising sea level (though it&#x27;s unlike we will impact the sea level by pumping out the water and turning it into hydrogen fuel)<p>And as I just mentioned, the CO2 you just pulled from the air will burn straight into CO2 again, in fact, it&#x27;ll burn into the exact same amount of CO2 (assuming clean combustion), so it&#x27;s just a very inefficient battery...<p>[repost from dupe, original deleted]

Even if there is no carbon price, the idea could work if - and that&#x27;s a rather big if - the cost of making &quot;oil&quot; from air with CO2 and water can be made low enough.<p>We might look into energy efficiencies along the process and into energy efficiencies to make those energy efficient components of the factory. Yes, it&#x27;s far from closing economically or even energetically today. Will it always be so?<p>However, another aspect seems to worth attention here. It seems rather inefficient first to have cars which make CO2, release it into - rather big - atmosphere, then spend efforts to capture CO2 from that. But this approach - let&#x27;s pump all the air of the planet through purification devices - allows to do other things, not only capture CO2. How about extracting noble gases (it&#x27;s already done, AFAIK)? Or other greenhouse gases, like methane? Or ozone-destroying substances? May be we can engineer our atmosphere to our tastes? May be we can use those technologies elsewhere - say, on Venus?

The concept of generating synthetic fuels from biospheric sources of CO2 is not new. And atmospheric CO2 may not be the most sensible choice: costs for sequestration from seawater (measured in energy) are much lower.<p>I&#x27;d become somewhat excited by the potential of seawater-based Fischer-Tropsch fuel synthesis about four years ago after a set of articles from the U.S. Naval Research Lab were published. I was shocked several ways to learn that the concept was far older -- both because I&#x27;d been unaware of the fact, and that the NRL&#x27;s own publications failed to cite the pioneering work in the field, from Brookhaven National Labs, in 1964 (by Meyer Steinberg). The original concept was suggested by M. King Hubbert, of &quot;Hubbert Peak&quot; (peak oil) fame, in a 1963 paper.<p>I&#x27;ve compiled a set of early research from Brookhaven, M.I.T., and NRL:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;comments&#x2F;28nqoz&#x2F;electrical_fuel_synthesis_from_seawater_older&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;comments&#x2F;28nqoz&#x2F;electri...</a><p>On the positive side: the research is solid and there&#x27;s ample history. On the negative: there&#x27;s been very little actual proof-of-concept and virtually no scaling of the concept. This suggests potential engineering challenges.<p>Otherwise, the basic size and energy budgets are within reason, contrast biofuels, which in virtually any configuration simply does not produce enough viable fuel to sustain modern energy budgets. See:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;comments&#x2F;2cvap7&#x2F;the_intractable_problem_of_biomass_for_fuels_is&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;comments&#x2F;2cvap7&#x2F;the_int...</a><p>The acreage requirements alone approach <i>or exceed</i> the total land area of the U.S., in more conventional cases. In the case of algae, this is reduced to &quot;only&quot; virtually all current agricultural acreage.<p>Hubbert&#x27;s suggestion: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hubbertpeak.com&#x2F;hubbert&#x2F;EnergyResources.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hubbertpeak.com&#x2F;hubbert&#x2F;EnergyResources.pdf</a><p>Steinberg&#x27;s obituary, from 2015: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newsday.com&#x2F;long-island&#x2F;meyer-steinberg-of-melville-worked-on-manhattan-project-1.10603175" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newsday.com&#x2F;long-island&#x2F;meyer-steinberg-of-melvi...</a>

Beyond any greater dialogue about the relevance of this tech, at any scale, in mitigating our impact on the climate, I simply like the idea that this allows for local creation of hydrocarbon liquid fuels in remote locations.<p>Given the amount of energy required to shift energy around the globe, it makes sense to develop systems that can act independently of the greater fuel economy. It also (I think?) allows us to keep using existing ICE tech for years to come, which no matter how utopianistic one gets about electric drives, is an insurmountable reality.

This is a crazy scheme. If you want CO2, there are much easier places to recover it than from AIR. Flue gas of furnaces&#x2F;boilers, chemical plants that make it as a byproduct, etc.<p>Worse, their whole plan needs a source of hydrogen, which they claim will come from green energy electrolysis - but the math doesn&#x27;t work well. You&#x27;d need nuclear reactors or big hydro dams to make enough to make fuels at scale.<p>And it won&#x27;t be carbon neutral because of the second law...

So... Wouldn&#x27;t burning wood meet the headline?

I hate when they confuse CO2 extraction with &quot;cleaning the planet&quot;. Such popularizing&#x2F;oversimplifying is irresponsible! These are two completely different things; clearly someone who submitted this to HN understood it too when adding the title.

How about planting more trees? Cannot think of a more efficient process of removing CO2

Nature already developed this technology: trees.<p>More seriously: perhaps it&#x27;s not such a bright idea to build a for-profit industry on the concept of removing CO2 from the atmosphere. Plants need it and if we overdo it for the sake of maximising profits, the ecosystem will suffer (alarmism: we&#x27;ll all starve).<p>Just plant more trees, please.

What is &quot;burning wood&quot; Alex?

Nature already has this technology. Plants &amp; Trees. Plants &amp; Trees have numerous other advantages compared to Bill Gates&#x27; solution:<p>* They are less expensive<p>* They don&#x27;t require a technological infrastructure, meaning 3rd world countries could easily deploy them<p>* They require little to no maintenance<p>* They promote life &amp; ecosystems<p>* They have been tested in the field for hundreds of millions of years<p>* As CO2 increases, plants &amp; trees grow &amp; consume more CO2. A positive feedback loop!<p>Plants &amp; Trees are a far superior solution. We should spends billions of dollars on more plants &amp; trees.