[SeaGypsy]

Did you read the thread Dino? Tanada brought the topic up before the Fukushima disaster, with the idea being about the potential to use nuclear power to keep going with ICE vehicles.

(Also the oil we currently burn as liquid fuels is a 'storage device' containing billions of years of solar energy.)

[kublikhan]

Yes. Biofuels have additional inputs: free solar and free photosynthesis. The plants take solar, CO2, to synthesize carbohydrates, starch, and sugars, the inputs into fermentation/distillations processes.

I think you forgot a few inputs there.

Many environmentalists know that the way most corn is grown in our country is very hard on soil and uses enormous amounts of water and chemicals. In fact, a recent report for the Department of Defense acknowledged that, "Current biomass-to-fuel methods of production present a significant environmental burden GHGs, soil depletion and erosion, waste water, etc.)"

To maximize the subsidies agribusiness receives, the corn producers use monocropping that makes the crop more susceptible to insects and disease. To overcome these threats to their yield, the corn producers apply enormous amounts of fertilizers and pesticides. Although atrazine has been banned in Europe, it is the most commonly used pesticide by US corn producers. The soil erosion caused by corn monocropping creates runoff and this chemical seeps into the drinking water in many communities. EPA has established a safe level in drinking water [6], but tests have discovered 75 times that amount in some Midwestern streams.

Ethanol proponents are now claiming that there is not enough corn to "feed" ethanol plants and want to put some of the 37 million acres enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program back into crop production. "The Conservation Reserve Program reduces soil erosion, protects the Nation's ability to produce food and fiber, reduces sedimentation in streams and lakes, improves water quality, establishes wildlife habitat, and enhances forest and wetland resources."

Increasing corn-ethanol gives you MORE pesticide contamination, MORE drilling for gas, MORE air pollution from E85 & refineries, MORE greenhouse gasses as they move to coal to power refineries, MORE demand on our water system, MORE water and air pollution, MORE soil erosion, and LESS land protected in the Conservation Reserve Program.

Environmentalists Need to Help Fight Bush's Ethanol Surge

There will be a major and significant increase in the amount of fertilizer nutrients farmers annually mine from the soil substrate.

Potash demand in particular is likely to soar to unprecendented levels as this particular mineral fertilizer is essential for plant structural integrity. If you remove 3 tonnes per hectare of straw (an average global yield) that is a cumulative potash export of 36kg /ha on top of what is removed in the grain. Can our global potash resources stand up to such a major ramp up in demand?

The story for nitrogen is somewhat similar. Again if we look at quantifying nutrient removal. 1 tonne of cereal stubble will contain the nitrogen equivalent from 13kg of urea. So a cumulative removal of 39kg/ha of urea on top of that removed in the grain portion in a 3 tonne yield. Are our global natural gas resources up to this gearing up of the demand base?

For phosphate there is also bad news as we see additional phosphorus units being lost from the cropping system. 3 tonne of stubble removed sees the equivalent phosphorus export of around 33kg of superphosphate.

With these figures in mind, there is the potential for fertilizer prices to soar to levels not ever seen nor even imagined as this demand base kicks in. Yet again we saw more significant rises in the last week with DAP surging past the US$700 per tonne mark.

What happens to our soils as they are left exposed to the vagaries of extremes in weather with no physical defences from erosion? I shudder to think. Soil organic carbon levels will likely plummet as the practise of straw retention becomes a major short term opportunity cost.

Quite clearly cellulosic ethanol is likely to push agriculture to the brink of its true sustainability limits. And it is likely to stretch demand for fertilizers to a new level where existing and planned new capacity may struggle to satisfy the hunger of nutrient cleansed soil profiles from the Pampas of Argentina to the Prairies of the United States.

Cellulosic ethanol to power fertilizer demand

Yes. But the CO1/H20/Energy system requires concrete, steel, fossil fuels, and electricity.

Concrete and steel can (and are) recycled at the end of their life(steel is one of the most recycled materials in the world). The creation of synthetic fuels to replace/augment fossil fuels is the entire point here. As is consuming surplus electricity created by solar & wind.

My point is not that one is better than the other, but really both are loosers, not solutions. Neither will maintain our entropic, planet-destroying, consumer system, because either solution has untended consequences such as AGW, ozone depletion, erosion, water depletion, etc. etc.

Solar is a source of negative entropy to our planet and is harnessed by this process(assuming the electricity came from solar or wind sources like in the articles I linked to above). So entropy is actually addressed by this solution. This process is CO2 neutral. All of the CO2 burned during combustion is the same CO2 that was bound during the gas's creation. So AGW is not an issue. The water consumed during the gas's creation is recreated when the gas is combusted. The process is water neutral. Erosion is not an issue here, but it is for ethanol production(see above). I don't see how ozone depletion is a factor here. I am not seeing anything that would persuade me that this technology is a loser. Sure synthetic fuels are not a primary energy source, they are merely energy carriers like electricity is. No one has argued otherwise. That doesn't make it a looser anymore than electricity is a loser.

Primary energy
Primary energy is an energy form found in nature that has not been subjected to any conversion or transformation process. It is energy contained in raw fuels, and other forms of energy received as input to a system. Primary energy can be non-renewable or renewable.
The concept of primary energy is used in energy statistics in the compilation of energy balances, as well as in the field of energetics. In energetics, a primary energy source (PES) refers to the energy forms required by the energy sector to generate the supply of energy carriers used by human society.

Primary energy sources are transformed in energy conversion processes to more convenient forms of energy (that can directly be used by society), such as electrical energy, refined fuels, or synthetic fuels such as hydrogen fuel. In the field of energetics, these forms are called energy carriers and correspond to the concept of "secondary energy" in energy statistics.

Conversion to energy carriers (or secondary energy)
Energy carriers are energy forms which have been transformed from primary energy sources. Electricity is one of the most common energy carriers, being transformed from various primary energy sources such as coal, oil, natural gas, and wind.
According to the laws of thermodynamics, primary energy sources cannot be produced. They must be available to society to enable the production of energy carriers.

Primary energy

[Ulenspiegel]

You guys seem to be missing the point. The point of synthetic fuels is to efficiently convert solar energy into a liquid form. If you can do that even close to a 1 to 1 you have a HUGE winner, as it makes solar power an extremly powerful industry.

This makes little sense.

--close to 1 to 1 is not good enough. The industrial process should have a positive EROEI, or why bother. Throwing good energy away for bad energy makes no sense. Unless the process is incredibly cheap. Fischer-Tropf has been around for almost a century, yet has never panned out except in time of war.

--Unlike the this CO2 + H2O-perpetual-energy scheme, corn ethanol production has an positive energy return of 1.34 to 1. Yet it is not a HUGE winner, but rousing failure.

Ethanol production leads to a direct competition of food production and energy "production" as it is not really scalable due to the relatively poor energy yield of photosynthesis, here a PV system gives you two orders of magnitude more and can be run in deserts. The combination of PV with P2G is even with 40% conversion losses 60 times efficient per surface unit than ethanol production.

BTW: the 1:1.2 EROEI for ethanol is very optimistic and becomes pointless, when the input is done with oil or oil products.

The real disadvantage of P2G is simple economy: The chemical plant causes costs of around 5-7 cent/kWh in addition to the electricity (Fraunhofer), this means that this procedure is not relevant in the next two decades as long as crossborder transmission lines, pump storage, or compressed air storage are much cheaper. Only when long term storage is essential, this would be in a 80-100% renewable scenario, the P2G approach would perhaps makes sense.

However, most (mainstream) studies in Germany work without this technology. The field where I see the best chance of industrial scale application is the "upgrading" of bio gas, i.e. conversion of the CO2 into methane.

[Tanada]

The whole point of manufacturing synthetic fuel isn't to have a storage form for diffuse sources, it is to gather diffuse sources into a usable product that can be integrated into the existing system for delivery and productive effect. You can have a TerraWatt Solar power plant but that won't deliver a semi load of frozen pizza's to my local grocery chain box store. If you convert that TW of electricity into X number of gallons of diesel fuel and put it in the network suddenly your solar power CAN fuel the delivery of the truck load of goods to the grocery store.

[kublikhan]

There's a company in Texas that has a process to convert NG to gasoline which they claim is much cheaper and more efficient than Fischer-Tropf. They've had a successful demo plant up and running for awhile now and are currently trying to raise funds for a full scale commercial plant. If it takes off, maybe it would become economical to convert NG to gasoline?

A Texas company has developed gas-to-liquids (GTL) technology designed to convert methane to ethylene without using the Fischer Tropsch (FT) process. The firm claims that its GTL system can perform at a level of efficiency rivaling conventional methane conversion technologies. Synfuels' technology stems from a 1998 invention by researchers at Texas A&M University that converts natural gas to acetylene and then to ethylene.

"We can offer a service ... to 'handle' gas by converting it into gasoline." According to Synfuels, the gasoline blendstock boasts a research octane rating from 90 to 95.

Better Economics than FT?
Synfuels also contends that its technology overcomes a much lower economic threshold than FT. FT installations need natural gas feed rates of at least 300 million standard cubic feet per day (MMscf/d) to achieve cost-effectiveness, which suggests why there are only four GTL plants in the world built by Shell and Sasol, two in Qatar, and one each in South Africa and Malaysia, Peterson said.

"To be cost-effective, Synfuels installations must have gas feed rates of about 15 MMscf/d and on an equal product output basis, cost about one-third as much as an FT plant," Peterson noted. "Synfuels plant sizes can exceed 300 MMscf/d."

Raising Money for Commercial-Scale Plant
Synfuels International has deployed the GTL technology at its 35,000-SCFD demonstration plant near Bryan, Texas. The facility has operated continuously for two weeks as a fully integrated process. Peterson said the Dallas-based technology assessment engineering firm Baker and O'Brien has vetted the process technology. Although none of the technology has been deployed commercially to date, Synfuels is raising funds for a 140 MMscf/d GTL plant in Texas.

GTL Tech Converts Methane to Ethylene without Fischer Tropsch

[Ulenspiegel]

Wind Power-to-Gas (P2G) doesn't make a liquid fuel, only gas/storage material. See problems with NG. Hydrogen specifically has its own set of additional problems: the gas is diffuse and atomic, not molecular, in size. It wants to leak. I always liked Jeremy Rifkin's Solar Economy based on hydrogen fuel cell, local/distributed solar electrolysis of H2, Hypercars etc. but now I understand that the infrastructure is the chicken that the solar egg depends on. We would need to redesign and rebuild our gasoline/diesel infrastructure for these alt. energy plans. We don't now don't have the poltical will or money to attempt anything remotely useful. So sad

Sorry, that is wrong. There is no problem to power almost all kinds of ships, locomotives, cars or trucks with NG, in addition, the existing infrastructure (storage volume, pipelines) is already sufficient for this or can quite easily be improved, that is exactly the reason why in some discussion papers P2G got traction. Huge NG infrastructure is already there, hydrogen infrastructure not.

The basic problem is, that P2G is simply to expensive to substitute oil 1:1 in transport due to the inefficiency of ICEs. Therefore, the substitution of oil with electricity makes IMHO much more sense, it avoids the high losses due to carnor cycle, even if the hardware is still under development. An alternative could be to burn NG in fuel cells, this may be a quite clever idea as heating system for larger buildings (as first step).

[Ulenspiegel]

The whole point of manufacturing synthetic fuel isn't to have a storage form for diffuse sources, it is to gather diffuse sources into a usable product that can be integrated into the existing system for delivery and productive effect. You can have a TerraWatt Solar power plant but that won't deliver a semi load of frozen pizza's to my local grocery chain box store. If you convert that TW of electricity into X number of gallons of diesel fuel and put it in the network suddenly your solar power CAN fuel the delivery of the truck load of goods to the grocery store.

That assumption is questionable:

1) The alternative to P2G is the direct use of electricty (with batteries) in cars. To produce NG or liquid fuel from electricity and burn it in ICEs with 20% efficiency is IMHO very stupid and we should foget this as soon as possibel.

2) The discussion of P2G in Germany IS about long term storage in order to bridge the 15-20 foggy days in winter without wind and sun in a 100% renewable scenario because the German biomass potential can not cover both, the needed feedstock for chemical industry and electricity production.

[SeaGypsy]

Ever done the maths on what sort of battery it will take to push an 18 wheeler weighing 40 tons at highway speeds all day? Not much room left for anything else but batteries, then there are the materials involved- rare earth metals and lead.

Some years ago now Tanada converted me to a nuclear advocate. I know she has been pretty quiet on the topic since Fukushima, but I think her approach is still valid. Fukushima was an obviously utterly stupid place to put a reactor.

[Ulenspiegel]

Ever done the maths on what sort of battery it will take to push an 18 wheeler weighing 40 tons at highway speeds all day? Not much room left for anything else but batteries, then there are the materials involved- rare earth metals and lead.

But your argument is a strawman. First you have to check, which percentage of the fuel really goes into long range hauling. All the short range stuff can easily be substituted.

Then the question is, how much of the remaining milage could be substituted by trains. Then we get the percentage that has to be done with methane or P2G. A 40 tons truck with battery will very likely not work, a fuel cell may.

My point is, that the current level of transport with vehicles that have an ICE is not sustainable if we want to replace oil products with P2G or products from biomass.

BTW: Some of the demand that was created in the last decades was a product of cheap oil, i.e. long rang transport became cheaper than local production, and open borders. With higher oil prices I expect that the pendulum swings back and we will see some kind of demand destruction.

[cephalotus]

Yes. Biofuels have additional inputs: free solar and free photosynthesis. The plants take solar, CO2, to synthesize carbohydrates, starch, and sugars, the inputs into fermentation/distillations processes.

Efficiency of photosynthesis (real world) is around 0,5-1%. Efficiency of liquid fuel extraction from biomass is around 30%, so you end up with an efficiency of around 0,2% from sunlight to biofuels. Use this in a combustion engine with an average efficiency (real world) of 20% you have a cobersion rate of less than 0,05% from sunlight to power at your cars wheels.

This would not be aproblem if we would only have few cars in the world or unlimited space. In reality we have neither.

Yes. But the CO1/H20/Energy system requires concrete, steel, fossil fuels, and electricity.

My point is not that one is better than the other, but really both are loosers, not solutions.

Efficiency of a PV solar power plant is 10%. Efficiency of electricity transportation to batter charging to electric drive is 50% or better. So for the solar-electri path you have an efficiency of 5%, a hundred times better than the biofuel conversion process.

If you use your 10% PV power plant and make methane with 50% efficiency and use that in a combustion engine with 20% efficiency you end up with 0,5% efficiency from solar energy to power ta your wheels. 10 times worse than the pure lectric path, but still 10 times better than the biofuel path.

Solar methane or batteries need raw materials, but that imput is not a problem. Solar PV EROEI is now 10:1 to 20:1 and the other systems are irrelevant to the material use of the cars itself (no matter how they are powered)

So a combined solar-electric + solar-methane-combustion engine system will be doable and will provide 10-100 times more power per m² of area.
In a country like Germany without unlimited farmland and lots of energy /fuel needs this is very important.

because either solution has untended consequences such as AGW, ozone depletion, erosion, water depletion, etc. etc.

The solar-electric and solar-methane path is much, much, much better than the biofuel path in that regard. Solar PV in the deserts is no problem. Try that with biofuels... Erosion?Zero problem (solar PV plants even prevent erosion)

[Graeme]

From sunlight to jet fuel: EU project makes first "solar" kerosene

An EU-funded research project called SOLAR-JET has produced the world's first "solar" jet fuel from water and carbon dioxide (CO2). Researchers have for the first time successfully demonstrated the entire production chain for renewable kerosene, using concentrated light as a high-temperature energy source. The project is still at the experimental stage, with a glassful of jet fuel produced in laboratory conditions, using simulated sunlight. However, the results give hope that in future any liquid hydrocarbon fuels could be produced from sunlight, CO2 and water.

European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science Máire Geoghegan-Quinn said: "This technology means we might one day produce cleaner and plentiful fuel for planes, cars and other forms of transport. This could greatly increase energy security and turn one of the main greenhouse gases responsible for global warming into a useful resource."

europa.eu

[basil_hayden]

[url]
www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmDSKIoz0Yg[/url]

[Graeme]

More here and here.

With the first ever production of synthesized "solar" jet fuel, the SOLAR-JET project has successfully demonstrated the entire production chain for renewable kerosene obtained directly from sunlight, water and carbon dioxide (CO2), therein potentially revolutionizing the future of aviation. This process has also the potential to produce any other type of fuel for transport applications, such as diesel, gasoline or pure hydrogen in a more sustainable way.


Although the solar-driven redox cycle for syngas production is still at an early stage of development, the processing of syngas to kerosene is already being deployed by companies, including Shell, on a global scale. This combined approach has the potential to provide a secure, sustainable and scalable supply of renewable aviation fuel and more generally for transport applications. Moreover, Fischer-Tropsch derived kerosene is already approved for commercial aviation.

[Graeme]

From wiki:

This program is part of the Department of Defense Assured Fuel Initiative, an effort to develop secure domestic sources for the military energy needs. The Pentagon hopes to reduce its use of crude oil from foreign producers and obtain about half of its aviation fuel from alternative sources by 2016.[34] With the B-52 now approved to use the FT blend, the C-17 Globemaster III, the B-1B, and eventually every airframe in its inventory to use the fuel by 2011

This new process may help achieve this goal.

[basil_hayden]

From wiki:

This program is part of the Department of Defense Assured Fuel Initiative, an effort to develop secure domestic sources for the military energy needs. The Pentagon hopes to reduce its use of crude oil from foreign producers and obtain about half of its aviation fuel from alternative sources by 2016.[34] With the B-52 now approved to use the FT blend, the C-17 Globemaster III, the B-1B, and eventually every airframe in its inventory to use the fuel by 2011

This new process may help achieve this goal.

Heartwarming to hear that the military-industrial complex will carry on. The rest of us would be better off flying into the sun.

[Graeme]

Future Planes Might Run On Just Sunshine, Water, And CO2 Sucked From The Air

In the future, airplanes might start running on CO2 that is sucked from the air and transformed into jet fuel using nothing but sunshine and water.

Researchers at the EU-funded SOLAR-JET project recently proved that at least the second part of the process is possible: A super-hot solar reactor can convert CO2 into synthetic gas, and then the gas can be turned into kerosene to fly a plane.

The machines could actually use CO2 from any source, like the emissions captured from a power plant. But the researchers think the best source might be the air.

fastcoexist