Featured B.C. company says it is sucking carbon from air, making fuel

(quoted from linked article)

If true, that is a world-changing deal right there. That could open the door to some serious reductions in the environmental cost of transportation without requiring so many changes in cars and infrastructure.

 

Also from the article.

Saying it is probably more than 25 cents a gallon in the US isn't going far out on a limb.

Here's the company's site, About Air to Fuels technology - Carbon Engineering

The making the fuel from CO2 is well understood. Audi has a couple of pilot plants making methane and a syncrude. Those plants are using CO2 rich exhaust from another plant though.

Carbon Engineering's main contribution seems to be in reducing the costs for direct atmospheric capture(DAC) of CO2 for commercialization.

Their process is covered in the research paper.
https://www.cell.com/joule/abstract/S2542-4351(18)30225-3
A Process for Capturing CO2 from the Atmosphere

 

That's not what they said, though. They said 25% more than gas born of crude. Now... even that is pretty wide. 25% more than retail gasoline bought in Norway? 25% more than wholesale at the refinery in Venezuela?

It's a big spread, but it's an impressive claim even from the pessimistic end.

 

Oops on my part.

Bring on the plug ins to make the requirement for such renewable fuels more acceptable.

Skimmed the paper. It appears working with part vendors and using off the shelf stuff was an important part of their strategy. So scaling up shouldn't be much of an issue from the technical side.

The quote about carbon pricing is probably how they stay in business now, and they are building a larger scale plant already.

 

Source: A Process for Capturing CO2 from the Atmosphere

. . . At full capacity, this plant captures 0.98 Mt-CO2/year from the atmosphere and delivers a 1.46 Mt-CO2/year stream of dry CO2 at 15 MPa. The additional 0.48 Mt-CO2/year is produced by on-site combustion of natural gas to meet all plant thermal and electrical requirements. . . . ​

It isn't clear how burning one part of methane making CO{2} to capture two parts of CO{2} makes sense. I'm fonder of biological means to fix carbon.

Bob Wilson

 

haven't you effectively cut the CO2 in half?

 

I guess I'm kind of fixated by the idea that if this were (scaled/subsidized/incrementally improved) enough, we could approach or attain a closed loop of hydrocarbon fuel. Sure, there's still a ton of energy going into the process, and most of it wasted off as heat somewhere, but that can be achieved without further fossil use.

The biggest benefit is that the fuel product is already compatible with the whole world, so adoption/uptake rates could potentially be huge right away.

In effect, everyone's car, moped and airplane would be electrically powered.

(I realize they have methane as an input now, but they might not always need to do it that way.)

 

The process requires an energy input. This company's experimental/proof of concept pilot plant uses a natural gas fired turbine for that energy, and they capture the CO2 from its exhaust. It can be powered by renewables, which is discussed in the paper, and done by Audi.

There will always be an increased cost to this in comparison to petroleum sourced fuel. I think we need to get to BEVs and PHEVs to reduce the need for such fuels for ground transportation in order to make a mandated switch more palatable to the public.

 

This explains it a little better bob.
Climate Change Can Be Reversed by Turning Air Into Gasoline - The Atlantic

The key is costs, and if they can get it down closer to $50/ton it will be less expensive than many proposals. Think of how many $/ton of ghg japan is spending on fuel cell vehicles and this starts to make a lot more sense.

As leadfoot says above natural gas can be replaced by 0 carbon fuels from the plant, the problem with this is it would greatly increase the cost of carbon reduction.

Think of it this way. Let's say it really costs $0.50/gallon more to make than gasoline. If you replace 50% of the gasoline with this synth gasoline then transportation will use half the oil but replace it with electricity and natural gas which today are more abundant and methane can be made renewably less expensively than gasoline (its one step in a lot of processes). The cost is about $0.25/gallon more at the pump, and it would reduce carbon dioxide from transportation by about 25%. Not a huge deal, but probably much cheaper for the US/Europe/Japan than other proposals.

Places like germany, iceland, california would probably implement first. Get the price down, and there is a lot of wind in Texas and Oklahoma to mix with easier carbon dioxide from natural gas ccgt plants and mix with gasoline. You don't need the whole strong base (potasium hydroxide in the pilot) sucking co2 from regular air, and have some really cheap night wind electricity to extend the united states gas supply. Similar plants might crop up around canada's cheap hydro power.