Anthracite biocoal comes to mind. Current South Africa spot price for metalurgical anthracitic coal is an astounding $(US) 275 per tonne. At that price it certainly pays to run a hydrothermal carbonization plant to produce very high grade (only kind hydrothermal carbonization makes) bio-anthracite.

I had just finished posting a similar, albeit less detailed and less erudite, comment at Daily Kos in response to a diarist who was puffing the New York Times piece, when I noticed that your post. I’m beginning to think that all my reading is paying off.

Throwing modesty to the wind, I’ve copied my comment below.

I have a lot of doubts about this proposal.

According to the Times’ article:

“Even with those improvements, providing the energy to produce gasoline on a commercial scale — say, 750,000 gallons a day — would require a dedicated power plant, preferably a nuclear one, the scientists say.

According to their analysis, their concept, which would cost about $5 billion to build…”

Let’s do some quick back-of-the-envelope calculations. The US uses 388.6 million gallons of gasoline per day. 388,600,000 divided by 750,000 gallons of gasoline gives 518 as the required number of processing facilities and corresponding nuclear power plants. At 5 billion a plant, the figure given in the article, the cost would be 2.59 trillion dollars.

A couple of questions:

First, assuming that we want to spend enormous sums building more nuclear power plants, which is, I believe, a questionable assumption, why should we bother to make gasoline instead of using the electrical power directly to replace coal-fired power plants? After all burning coal produces far more greenhouse gases than burning petroleum does.

Second, if this process really can remove carbon from the air why would we put it back in to the air? Shouldn’t we sequester it instead and use either renewable energy sources or even more nuclear to generate electricity and power our vehicles?

The Los Alamos group appear to be “proposing” a process that was studied in the 1970s by Steinberg http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0013-7480(77)90080-8 and several times thereafter by Bandi 1995, Stucki 1995, etc. Capture of CO2 from the atmosphere using the same chemistry has been studied (http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/news/2007/story04-24-07.php , http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/es070874m ). Electrolyzing the absorbent, whether it is carbonate or bicarbonate after CO2 absorption, has patents dating back to the 1960s and studied by the previously mentioned workers. They admit that it has all been studied but they are looking at how to piece together the parts in more detail than before. Unfortunately then, this is not a breakthrough and does not warrant the level of hype it is receiving.

There are a few research groups in the world working on the same goals with new, different processes that haven’t been demonstrated in the 1970s. The major energy consuming step is the decomposition of H2O and/or CO2 (which Steinberg and the Los Alamos guys partially integrate this with the CO2 air capture absorbent regeneration step).

Solid oxide electrolysis is one very promising, high efficiency and likely economical way: http://www.energy.columbia.edu/solid-oxide-electrolysis
http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1016/ j.ijhydene.2007.04.042

And thermochemical decomposition is another:
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2007/12/sandia-applying.html

And thermolytic decomposition is another:
http://lare.us/

Then people are also working on methods that split water and/or CO2 using sunlight more directly (photoelectrochemical and photolytic methods).

http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/

I’ve been to a wind power conference in North Dakota and one word is the big 800 pound elephant in the room, Stranded. The wind velocities and power potential is great in North Dakota, but it’s stranded energy, not enough power transmission lines to bring it to the places to sell the electricity.

What many in wind areas are looking for is an industrial process that needs electricity and can be done on the schedules that wind allows, more at night and in winter and intermittent. The authors of this article talks about nuclear power because of it’s non carbon, but apparently wind power producing electricity would also work. North Dakota does have the coal plants to use as the CO2 feed.

Some people are looking at making NH3 (ammonia) from the wind energy produced, but I’m sure that process is something like this process to make gasoline and uses quite a lot of electricity to get back much less product, NH3. Making the fertilizer NH3 would be better (cheaper) done the old fashioned way, with natural (methane) gas.

So I suppose, making H2, gasoline or NH3 with electricity is very energy inefficient.

Algae & plants do a good job of using CO2 at low concentrations, which is what we have. IF I had a wish, it would be to develop more uses of plants like switchgrass for non-fuel uses so the carbon stays sequestered, i.e., like insulation.
http://www.thestar.com/ comment/ columnists/ article/ 96050 was interesting.

I too have marveled at the magnificent wind turbines in the Dakotas and across the Plains. Those who have opposed offshore wind farms for aesthetic reasons have a different sense of beauty. I wondered why some of the turbines didn’t spin. Sometimes it is maintenance, but more often it is unneeded capacity. There is nowhere for the power to go. Stranded energy also hinders large scale desert solar. We cannot move industries and people closer to the power source. The changeover to alternatives requires sufficiently efficient 1,000 mile power lines. I believe on the West Coast huge amounts of hydro-electric power are sent 1,200 to 1,500 miles using direct current. Is there an electrical engineer in the house?

Can you clarify what that even means? If you have an electric car then you have no “gallons”, just batteries. Do you mean that with an electric car you can get the distance equivalent of 1 gallon’s worth of travel on a conventional car, (eg 25 miles), on one dollar’s worth of electricity?

The Los Alamos paper doesn’t give all the details, but it looks like 55% or so of the electricity energy ends up in the gasoline (there is also heat energy that is required as an input that I am not counting here). Since your typical ICE is 21% efficient, you’re getting about 12% of the energy out of the engine than the electricity that went in. The Prius is better, and using it instead of a typical ICE would give you about 19% of the starting energy back.

One way to think about this, if we need 40,000 sq.mi. of wind turbines to power our 2050 passenger vehicles directly with electricity, then you will need 80,000 sq.mi. of wind turbines if you want to do it with hydrogen (assuming they achieve their goals), 160,000 sq. mi. if you want to do it with gasoline Priuses, and 320,000 sq.mi. if you want to do it with non-hybrid gasoline cars. I prefer the 40,000 sq.mi. solution.

The cost of fueling vehicles is higher than the land areas above would indicate since the H2 production plant or gasoline production plant have capital costs that must be depreciated and included. My estimate is that the per-mile cost of driving directly on renewable electricity is 2.4 cents a mile, hydrogen from renewable electricity about 7.5 cents a mile, gasoline from renewable electricity about 19 cents a mile (using 35 MPG from the new CAFE standards).

However, this requires obtaining right-of-way and some moderately expensive construction of transmission line towers.

There is indeed an HVDC line from the Pacific Northwest to Southern California and at least one more back east somewhere.

Fuel for airplanes, ships and large trucks can be produced from biomass, fairly inexpensively. For reasons I don’t understand, the initial tests of biofuel for airplanes use a 50% biofuel, 50% fossil fuel mixture.

Nuclear is a serious competitor in the first category.

In the second category, carbon from somewhere and energy from somewhere will be combined to create the jet fuel. Air travel is not going away and there simply isn’t any other energy source light enough to fly around with.

The idea of getting automobile fuel this way instead of making a big push to convert to electric cars (not to mention shared transport, local services and telecommuting) seems ridiculous to me.

If there is some reason these two issues are tightly linked so far I haven’t seen it. It seems to make sense as a usage for episodic wind and solar as John Mashey points out.

However, this does have potential for solving the aviation problem and should not be sneered at. I’m not sure that it’s needed for land freight; reinventing rail might be more effective. Since rail pretty never took note of the 20th century, a pretty substantial leap seems plausible directly from the 19th to the 21st.

If that’s right, I guess the trucking industry will have to go away.

And don’t worry about building more Yucca Mt. sites, building thousands of nuclear power plants would require practically all of the plutonium from spent fuel to be reprocessed and converted into more energy. If anything, using nuclear power to replace transportation fuel would probably produce a severe shortage of plutonium.

Plug-in-hybrids cars would probably be the perfect vehicles for a nuclear economy since they would make even the most expensive nuclear gasoline affordable while also utilizing the much cheaper nuclear electicity. However, the mass production of thousands of nuclear power plants, hopefully, in remote centralized locations, should dramatically reduce the capital and labor cost of nuclear power plants which should also significantly reduce the cost of gasoline produced from nuclear power facilities.

Isn’t this exactly what is supposed to be the idea behind cellulosic ethanol? When a gallon of ethanol is burned, it puts 30% less greenhouse gas into the air, but it also gets you 30% less distance down the road. The only reason that it is thought to be carbon neutral is that it uses an equal amount of carbon from the environment in order to produce it.

This scheme doesn’t seem to be doing anything that the environment isn’t already doing for you when it produces the feedstock for ethanol.

What gives?

Glen

Don’t forget the potential for hydropower.
See these links:

1)http://peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/2006/05/301-inga-dams-enough-to-power-all.html
2)http://www.geni.org/globalenergy/library/renewable-energy-resources/globalmaps.shtml

Mark

To get adequate ranges and storage densities both Hydrogen and Batteries are impractical, so everyone is racing to find the best “hydrogen binding” medium, from metalic matrixes to buckyballs. But we all ready have a great hydrogen binding medium, it’s called carbon. The fuel economy of the future will need to include a liquid hydrocarbon at room temperate, whether that is Methonal or Gasoline, etc. Nothing compares for energy storage densities, Methonal fuel would enable much more efficient than ICE’s - Direct Methonal Fuel Cells and would allow us to keep our existing infrastructure. That methonal or similiar liquid hydrocarbon would necessarily require the manufacture of synthetic fuel via the application of energy in some form to Water for the Hydrogen and CO2 for the Carbon.

The “Green Freedom” process doesnt sound very practical, but some form of synthetic liquid hydrocarbon or similiar fuel will ultimately be the only thing which makes any sense, where carbon functions only as a temporary carrier.

When you consider various fuels, it isn’t an accurate comparison to compare gas and hydrogen without dealing with the handling of the byproducts. Hydrogent has some greater efficiencies in that regard that I don’t see being discussed in these comparisons.

Information Says:
February 19th, 2008 at 9:17 pm

The link http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0013-7480(77)90080-8 is not correctly hyper linked the link is only being created up to 7480. The complete link should be http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0013-7480(77)90080-8