Feb 20, 2008 (From the CalCars-News archive)
The New York Times, is reporting a possible exciting breakthrough: zero carbon gasoline. Since we're already getting inquiries from people who wonder if this doesn't mean that all of those promoting electrification of transportation are wasting their time, in an effort to put some kind of damper on the excitement, we're sending around the original article and a highly entertaining and informative explanation/critique by one of our favorite energy experts, Joseph Romm, former DOE official, author of "Hell and High Water," and an influential blogger on the climate crisis, who explains why batteries remain better.
Scientists Would Turn Greenhouse Gas Into Gasoline http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/science/19carb.html?_r=2&ref=science&oref=slogin&oref=slogin By KENNETH CHANG, The New York Times, February 19, 2008
If two scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory are correct, people will still be driving gasoline-powered cars 50 years from now, churning out heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- and yet that carbon dioxide will not contribute to global warming.
The scientists, F. Jeffrey Martin and William L. Kubic Jr., are proposing a concept, which they have patriotically named Green Freedom, for removing carbon dioxide from the air and turning it back into gasoline.
The idea is simple. Air would be blown over a liquid solution of potassium carbonate, which would absorb the carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide would then be extracted and subjected to chemical reactions that would turn it into fuel: methanol, gasoline or jet fuel.
This process could transform carbon dioxide from an unwanted, climate-changing pollutant into a vast resource for renewable fuels. The closed cycle -- equal amounts of carbon dioxide emitted and removed -- would mean that cars, trucks and airplanes using the synthetic fuels would no longer be contributing to global warming.
Although they have not yet built a synthetic fuel factory, or even a small prototype, the scientists say it is all based on existing technology.
"Everything in the concept has been built, is operating or has a close cousin that is operating," Dr. Martin said.
The Los Alamos proposal does not violate any laws of physics, and other scientists, like George A. Olah, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist at the University of Southern California, and Klaus Lackner, a professor of geophysics at Columbia University, have independently suggested similar ideas. Dr. Martin said he and Dr. Kubic had worked out their concept in more detail than previous proposals.
There is, however, a major caveat that explains why no one has built a carbon-dioxide-to-gasoline factory: it requires a great deal of energy.
To deal with that problem, the Los Alamos scientists say they have developed a number of innovations, including a new electrochemical process for detaching the carbon dioxide after it has been absorbed into the potassium carbonate solution. The process has been tested in Dr. Kubic's garage, in a simple apparatus that looks like mutant Tupperware.
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, could produce gasoline at an operating cost of $1.40 a gallon and would turn economically viable when the price at the pump hits $4.60 a gallon, taking into account construction costs and other expenses in getting the gas to the consumer. With some additional technological advances, the break-even price would drop to $3.40 a gallon, they said.
A nuclear reactor is not required technologically. The same chemical processes could also be powered by solar panels, for instance, but the economics become far less favorable.
Dr. Martin and Dr. Kubic will present their Green Freedom concept on Wednesday at the Alternative Energy Now conference in Lake Buena Vista, Fla. They plan a simple demonstration within a year and a larger prototype within a couple of years after that.
A commercial nuclear-powered gasoline factory would have to jump some high hurdles before it could be built, and thousands of them would be needed to fully replace petroleum, but this part of the global warming problem has no easy solutions.
In the efforts to reduce humanity's emissions of carbon dioxide, now nearing 30 billion metric tons a year, most of the attention so far has focused on large stationary sources, like power plants where, conceptually at least, one could imagine a shift from fuels that emit carbon dioxide -- coal and natural gas -- to those that do not -- nuclear, solar and wind. Another strategy, known as carbon capture and storage, would continue the use of fossil fuels but trap the carbon dioxide and then pipe it underground where it would not affect the climate.
But to stabilize carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere would require drastic cuts in emissions, and similar solutions do not exist for small, mobile sources of carbon dioxide. Nuclear and solar-powered cars do not seem plausible anytime soon.
Three solutions have been offered: hydrogen-powered fuel cells, electric cars and biofuels. Biofuels like ethanol are gasoline substitutes produced from plants like corn, sugar cane or switch grass, and the underlying idea is the same as Green Freedom. Plants absorb carbon dioxide as they grow, balancing out the carbon dioxide emitted when they are burned. But growing crops for fuel takes up wide swaths of land.
Hydrogen-powered cars emit no carbon dioxide, but producing hydrogen, by splitting water or some other chemical reaction, requires copious energy, and if that energy comes from coal-fired power plants, then the problem has not been solved. Hydrogen is also harder to store and move than gasoline and would require an overhaul of the world's energy infrastructure.
Electric cars also push the carbon dioxide problem to the power plant. And electric cars have typically been limited to a range of tens of miles as opposed to the hundreds of miles that can be driven on a tank of gas.
Gasoline, it turns out, is an almost ideal fuel (except that it produces 19.4 pounds of carbon dioxide per gallon). It is easily transported, and it generates more energy per volume than most alternatives. If it can be made out of carbon dioxide in the air, the Los Alamos concept may mean there is little reason to switch, after all. The concept can also be adapted for jet fuel; for jetliners, neither hydrogen nor batteries seem plausible alternatives.
"This is the only one that I have seen that addresses all of the concerns that are out there right now," Dr. Martin said.
Other scientists said the Los Alamos proposal perhaps looked promising but could not evaluate it fully because the details had not been published.
"It's definitely worth pursuing," said Martin I. Hoffert, a professor of physics at New York University. "It's not that new an idea. It has a couple of pieces to it that are interesting."
Turning CO2 into gasoline -- A new way to waste energy http://climateprogress.org/2008/02/19/turning-co2-into-gasoline-a-new-way-to-waste-energy/ Climate Progress February 19, 2008 Tip o' that hat to Earl K. [That's EV advocate Earl Killian, who has written for Climate Progress]
Last week, NYT climate Andy Revkin blogged about a federal laboratory that says it can take atmospheric carbon dioxide and turn it into gasoline:
One selling point with Los Alamos's "Green Freedom" concept, and similar ones, is that reusing the carbon atoms in the captured CO2 molecules as a fuel ingredient avoids the need to find huge repositories for the greenhouse gas.
The only problem with that exciting statement is that it is almost certainly not true, a point I will come back to.
Now the NYT has published an article on the subject that also overhypes the technology:
There is, however, a major caveat that explains why no one has built a carbon-dioxide-to-gasoline factory: it requires a great deal of energy.
To deal with that problem, the Los Alamos scientists say they have developed a number of innovations….
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.
Hmm. Let's see. Problem one: Motor gasoline consumption in this country is almost 400 million gallons a day. So we would need more than 500 nuclear power plants … just in this country … and just for gasoline (you'd have to more than double that to displace all the other petroleum products we consume, like diesel fuel). And that would probably require another 5 Yucca mountains just to store the waste, although I'm not sure the word "another" is right 'cause this country can't even agree on one friggin' storage site in the middle of nowhere.
Problem two: According to the Los Alamos "Overview of Green Freedom," each 750,000 gallon a day plant (with accompanying nuclear reactor) costs $5 billion. So cutting under half of all petroleum use in this country would cost over $2.5 trillion (not counting this cost of uranium or disposal)!
This supposedly yields a gasoline price of $4.60 a gallon, though the authors say with a couple more technological breakthroughs, that could drop to $3.40. How about if instead of assuming more breakthroughs, which hardly ever happen in the energy sector, we apply Romm's Rule of Costs for Future Energy Sources." Romm's Rule says that for any new energy technology that is not yet commercial (and in this case we have a "concept" for which the patent was still pending in November), take the inventor's highest projected cost and double it. Also flip a coin and if it comes up heads, the technology will never be commercialized -- think fusion. And that's generous -- in reality, if the coin comes up head or tails (i.e. doesn't land and balance on its edge) it will probably never be commercialized -- remember the fuel cell was invented in 1839 and commercial fuel cells are just a tad more common than time machines. [Please note this rule does NOT apply to technologies that are already commercial.]
Problem three: Romm's Rule of Energy Transformation. This rule, developed for analyzing hydrogen cars, says: You can probably make a sow's ear from a silk purse if you try hard enough, but why would you do that? Zero-carbon electricity is arguably the most premium energy carrier you can make in a carbon-constrained world in part because electric motors are so efficient. Electricity can directly run a motor to move your electric car or plug in hybrid for under $1.00 a gallon, even using expensive nuclear power. You lose maybe one-fifth of the original electricity in the process. The entire Green Freedom process is so inefficient it probably throws away more than three-fourths of the original nuclear power (if not much more). Basically, after spending all that money and wasting all that premier power you are stuck with a low-grade (but conventional) fuel that has to be run through an inefficient gasoline motor. Why would you do that?
[Yes, we don't quite yet have commercial plug ins, but they are straightforward extension of already commercial hybrids, we don't need any technology breakthroughs, and multiple manufactures will almost certainly be selling them within three to five years. EVs will be common in other countries within the same time frame, as I've written. All of this will happen decades before "Green Freedom," assuming it even proves feasible.]
Before coming to the last problem, let me complain about the NYT article, which, while skipping happily over the myriad problems with Green Freedom, bizarrely says of other alt fuels:
Hydrogen-powered cars emit no carbon dioxide, but producing hydrogen, by splitting water or some other chemical reaction, requires copious energy, and if that energy comes from coal-fired power plants, then the problem has not been solved. Hydrogen is also harder to store and move than gasoline and would require an overhaul of the world's energy infrastructure.
Electric cars also push the carbon dioxide problem to the power plant. And electric cars have typically been limited to a range of tens of miles as opposed to the hundreds of miles that can be driven on a tank of gas.
Yes, if the energy comes from coal, neither hydrogen or electric cars make sense. But the same exact thing can be said of Green Freedom: It makes no sense if you use coal plants, but the NYT never mentions that fact. That's why the Los Alamos inventors go the nuclear route. But if you can assume, say, 500 nuclear plants for Green Freedom, surely you can live with maybe 100 nukes for electric cars, which brings us to ….
Problem four: We are going to need a vast quantity of zero-carbon electricity in this country just to reduce emissions 80% in the electricity sector while supporting population growth and increased living standards. In the very unlikely event we would build 500 nukes and 5 Yucca-sized storage sites (and find the necessary uranium, given that, presumably, ever other country is going to be doing the same thing) to make carbon-neutral gasoline, it is safe to say that's all the nuclear power plants we will be building this century. So the electricity will have to come from renewable power and … yes, coal power with carbon capture and storage (CCS). And if we keep dawdling, we are going to overshoot the safe level of carbon dioxide concentrations, and need to pull carbon out of the air and then NOT burn it. So Green Freedom does not save us from "the need to find huge repositories for the greenhouse gas." If coal with CCS is practical and affordable, which strikes me as much more likely than Green Freedom achieving both of those goals, we are going to be doing as much CCS as we possibly can.
The scale of the climate solution is enormous -- so great you would never contemplate it if the result of doing nothing were not so irreversibly catastrophic. That's why, in spite of all these problems, in spite of the fact that it is exceedingly unlikely we would choose to use much Green Freedom by 2050 even in the equally unlikely event it is actually feasible on a large-scale in that time, it probably deserves some exploratory funding. Although that assumes we have a President who triples federal clean tech funding -- no I wouldn't waste much money on it at current federal R&D levels. It certainly shouldn't be hyped by the media (or anyone else -- this means you, Roger Pielke, Jr.), it is certainly no silver bullet, it probably isn't even one of the ten silver bullets we need -- but we can't afford to ignore any solution that has even some microscopic chance of working.
While we're at on the subject, we also want to point to a posting by The NYTimes' Andrew Revkin at his "dot earth" blog, raising the issue of what to call Global Warming/Climate Change. Some of the more effective names, it seems to us, are Al Gore's Climate Crisis and Planetary Emergency, and John Holdren's Global Climate Disruption.
