Comments on: Turning CO2 into gasoline — A new way to waste energy

By: perry hawkins

perry hawkins — Wed, 14 May 2008 00:44:01 +0000

i guess that from the first response that we should just give up and burn at the stake all those who propose such a idea, remember you first have to start a with general idea and then move on down to get it right!

By: RC

RC — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:56:03 +0000

Please correct your the post in the post by: 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

By: craig t

craig t — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 05:14:25 +0000

why not convert electric dams uhmmm lets say somthing like the hover.

By: Dan

Dan — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 18:11:03 +0000

The thing that needs to be considered, especially with any hydrocarbons, is that it must be clean energy, in the sense that pollutants are accounted for in the process. If you ignore the by-products, then you’re ignoring the cost of dealing with those by-products. Sending carbon into the air is an example of this. If you don’t build in the cost of then you’re just postponing the cleanup costs untill later and in many cases pushing costs off into other industries such as water sourcing and healthcare.

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.

By: Joe

Joe — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 19:02:08 +0000

Batteries aren’t terrible for the kind of energy storage needed by plug in hybrids. Hydrogen is going nowhere. Biofuels will run planes and long-distance travel, when we stop using petrol.

By: Matus1976

Matus1976 — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 18:21:17 +0000

Do your criticisms adequately take into account that batteries are terrible for energy storage density (~300 Wh/kg) and completely impractical for long distance travel of vehicles? And additionally, no civilian aircraft will be battery powered any time soon, let alone military vehicles. Hyrdogen is great for gravimetric energy storage density, but it’s volumetric storage density is terrible.

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.

By: M.R.

M.R. — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 06:38:17 +0000

Hello all,

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

By: Glen

Glen — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 16:58:23 +0000

This whole thing seems to be predicated upon the idea that it is carbon neutral only because it uses as it’s source carbon that is already in the atmosphere.

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

By: David B. Benson

David B. Benson — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 22:27:44 +0000

Peter Foley — Thanks for the explanation.

By: Marcel F. Williams

Marcel F. Williams — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 08:10:44 +0000

This is an idea that I’ve been promoting for more than a decade. Using nuclear energy to produce synthetic industrial chemicals and transportation fuels such as gasoline, diesel fuel, aviation fuel, methane, methanol, and ammonia is the only solution to the world’s problem with greenhouse gases and their energy needs.

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.