20/12/2022
Porsche and international partners working with the Chilean operating company Highly Innovative Fuels (HIF) have started the industrial production of synthetic fuels.
https://newsroom.porsche.com/en/2022/company/porsche-highly-innovative-fuels-hif-opening-efuels-pilot-plant-haru-oni-chile-synthetic-fuels-30732.html
Wow, they really dont talk about the fuel do they. What system have they found to convert atmospheric carbon into a liquid form with just electricity? Im more interested in the sequestering potential than immediately returning it to the atmosphere.
Im bigger on the fan producing enough fuel for the mining and construction of it and the facility and maintenance and upkeep. This has been a re-occuring point of can we create wind and solar panels just from wind and solar panels without digging up oil. As for sequestration. What is the point if we are still digging up oil and refining it into the same fuel??? I could see it being something if we were otherwise not digging up hydrocarbons but I fail to see how sequestration is better than replacement while we are doing that.
I dont know what your first two sentences are about. As for sequestration, just imagine it as an independent effort to reduce greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere.
yes but what I mean is if we are putting in co2 from fuels then usually it will reduce more to just use the fuel and not pull out additional oil over sequestration. simply due to overhead. the fuel from oil produces co2 and the refining produces co2 and the extraction produces co2.
I dont know what you mean by pulling out additional oil over sequestration. sequestering is just taking carbon out of the atmosphere, to be kept away from the atmosphere in some kind of solid form. Plants are the easiest example.
yes. yes. I understand that. but fuel is a fungible commodity and if fuel is created in this process (it is) utilizing it will keep more carbon out of the atmosphere if we are still getting it from oil. If we have completely stopped using oil for fuel then yeah sequestration makes sense, but if its making fuel and we are using fuel (from dug up fossil fuels) the sequestration will result in more overall co2 than using it.
Electrofuel : great potential here I believe.
In September 2022, Finnish company Q Power sold P2X Solutions a synthetic methane production unit to be delivered in 2024 in Harjavalta, Finland, next to its 20 MW green hydrogen production plant.
More here : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrofuel
The more interesting approach is synmethanol, particularly via electrosynthesis. Only half of energy density of gasoline, and suitable for fuel cells, including DMFCs.
Methanol or ammonia, both are good
Haber-Bosch for fertilizer, Fischer-Tropsch for synfuel.
But, really, we need something with mild conditions and preferably something directly electrosynthesis driven. Large potential for improvement in both.
I mean ammonia is pretty decent fuel in itself, it can be decomposed to hydrogen or burned as is
The Haber-Bosch approach to breaking the nitrogen triple bond takes a lot of energy in terms of high pressure and temperature which is not present in the product, hence wasted. Ammonia is a fertilizer either as gas or as ammonium nitrate, and too precious to burn.
Another random fact: half of the combustion enthalpy present in liquid hydrogen has been spent on its liquification.
And also, you don’t need to use Fisher-Tropsch process either. Methanol is good enough fuel that you can get more directly from syngas and getting fractions of hydrocarbons this way is simply wasteful (tar formation, too light products etc). Additional benefit is easier conversion back to hydrogen if need be
That is, unless energy density is critical. I don’t think that difference matters in most of the cases
No. Haber-Bosch process is very mature by now and it doesn’t take much more energy than thermodynamically necessary to do so. You get there by recycling heat and reusing energy of compressed gases. The actual problem is getting that hydrogen in the first place
If you want to use hydrogen as a fuel anyway, you can add that little overhead and get fuel that you can either burn in ICE or go the whole nine yards, crack it back into elements and put that in fuel cells, and, more importantly, this comes with massive advantage of ammonia being about as easy to liquefy as propane, and we already have propane fuelled cars. Energy density is vastly higher than hydrogen this way, less than propane, sure, but it’s something
Another option is dimethyl ether, but this thing needs to take carbon from somewhere, just like methanol
Direct methanol fuel cells (DMFCs) still have low power densities … so maybe we should look at molten carbonate fuel cells or simple heat engines ? Anyway, synmethanol looks great !
can we create wind and solar panels just from wind and solar panels (('s energy))
PV (solar cells) : EROIs (Energy return on investment) between 8.7 and 34.2 were found … meaning : yes ! … they create much more energy than the energy needed for their production.
it’s all in here (also for wind thingy😋) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investmentThat is good but the specfic equipment needs to run on the energy created. Mining equipment and manufacturing. So if the mining equipment is all electrical then there will be loses in the energy harvested. As far as I know this is an open question. So theoretically the energy is surplus but can just the energy of the wind and solar completely power the equipment. Currently they do not as we use fossel fuel equipment. Of course the energy of the construction of equipment needs to be taken into consideration as well. Also manufacturing that uses massive heat tends to use fossil fuel. Don’t get me wrong im not trying to disparage wind/solar. Far from it but last I knew we have not gotten to were we have unhooked fossil fuel from the process so currently it acts as a sort of energy multiplier where rather than burning oil for X amount of energy we can use it as part of the mining/construction process of wind/solar and get that multiplier fro eroi. this is why this article is big to me as its creating fuel which could possibly take fossil fuel out of the solar/wind creation process. at least I hope.
Reading, entirely, again, this Wikipedia article you can realize, they are discussing such inputs as steel, “mining equipment” or whatever. They also discuss why there has to be limits on the details of the calculation and why, despite such limits, results of the calculation are still valid.
Technology benefits from simple explanations and sentences. Your comments are hard to read in a technical way.
Nearly neutral isn’t neutral, and neutral still kills the planet. These stop gaps prolong a business division and profits at the expense of climate catastrophe.
