Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed a low-risk, transformational concept, called Green Freedomâ„¢, for large-scale production of carbon-neutral, sulfur-free fuels and organic chemicals from air and water. At the heart of the technology is a new process for extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and making it available for fuel production using a new form of electrochemical separation. Link. Carbon neutral. No reliance on imported oil. Too good to be true? Of course, it would require an underlying power source for the extraction / separation.
Saw this on GCC and it looks interesting but appears to be massively inefficient. Here's Rafael Seidl's (an author and active commenter on Green Car Congress) view on it, which I find interesting...
Even if the efficiency is not competitive for ground transportation, it may be required for aircraft if you have to have a carbon neutral fuel. The batteries are too heavy for planes. It's hard to beat the energy density of kerosene. (Hydrogen while very light is a lousy fuel for planes, since you have to take into account the mass of the tanks and the mass impact of their volume on the overall airframe.) About 10 kg of CO2 results from burning a gallon of diesel, so if this guy's numbers are right, we're talking 80 kWh per gallon. (I've heard lower numbers for other processes, but it's at least within a factor of two.) At current retail energy prices, that's less than $8 a gallon. A large scale operation to do this would be paying wholesale. $8 is within factor of two of the current aviation fuel prices. So in a world with severely constrained fossil fuel consumption, either due to regulation or resources or both, this might be a reasonable approach. Of course, it will probably be at least a few decades before we're in a position to have to synthesize our aviation fuel.
