Peak Oil News and Message Boards

I watched tv news and there was a story about new technology, where co2 is sucked from air and hydrogen is taken from water and they are combined to crude oil. News said resulting oil is more expensive than traditionally produced oil. They didn't tell how fast the machine is. How many of those things are required to statisfy world's hunger for oil. There's a good introduction in English in the link below.

http://soletair.fi/

Yes, the production of liquid fuels from atmospheric carbon dioxide requires more energy than is released by burning those fuels.

The ultimate fate of this process is to produce $100 per gallon fuel for the 1% to burn in their pristinely and extravagently restored ICE powered cars, as they whiz by the bicyclists and slow-crawling solar-fuelled BEVs driven by the Vermin class people.

pstarr wrote:Awesome. Perpetual-energy. You use energy to make energy. Like Permian shale!

Awesome. Strawman arguments yet again.

asg70 wrote:

pstarr wrote:Awesome. Perpetual-energy. You use energy to make energy. Like Permian shale!

Awesome. Strawman arguments yet again.

No, the real point being that the capture and sequestration of atmospheric carbon as liquid fuel is EXTREMELY energy-intensive.

TANSTAAFL.

Being able to turn energy into liquid fuel is useful, liquid fuel is required for some applications.

But it's not sequestration if you're going to immediately turn around and burn it and the round trip from CO2 and H20 to fuel and back to CO2 and H2O is very energy inefficient.

And until there's a commercial scale pilot project underway for at least 6 months to confirm the economic model there is really anything else to discus IMHO.

diemos wrote:Being able to turn energy into liquid fuel is useful, liquid fuel is required for some applications.

But it's not sequestration if you're going to immediately turn around and burn it and the round trip from CO2 and H20 to fuel and back to CO2 and H2O is very energy inefficient.

Correct in one sense: the whole process ends up being carbon-neutral as far as the liquid fuel is concerned, and the net carbon emissions from the entire capture/fuel/burned effluents are only the losses in the processes.

But it's not any process with wide application in an energy-constraned, "after the power down" future, either.

Oh, pharaoh will always need liquid fuel for his lear jet.

Even if the peasants are living in mud huts and practicing hand agriculture with machetes.

pstarr wrote:

KaiserJeep wrote:

diemos wrote:Being able to turn energy into liquid fuel is useful.
. . .

Correct in one sense: the whole process ends up being carbon-neutral as far as the liquid fuel is concerned

you have no way of knowing this.

If it's pure solar powering the thing then it's glorified electrolysis. Separate the hydrogen from the oxygen and reconstruct the carbon-chains. Guess what? The carbon's coming from the air, so it is (temporarily) sequestering it. It's effectively carbon-neutral just as fuel cell cars would be (if powered from water and not natural-gas). Whether it's a lot less efficient than drilling for new oil, it would not be adding more carbon to the atmosphere because all the carbon would be sourced from the air. It's a closed-loop system.

Another write up on the trial...https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finn ... on/9661164

As with all trials it is small scale

As an experimental facility, Soletair will produce about 200 litres of renewable fuels and chemicals for research purposes during the summer. By contrast, global consumption of fossil fuels is roughly 100 million barrels per day.

And an estimate of prices once the technology is more mature.

Understandably, Soletair’s end product will be more expensive than traditional crude oil. The research team has estimated that if the price of the solar power used in the process is 25 euros per megawatt hour, then Soletair oil would cost approximately 140 US dollars a barrel between 2030 and 2040. That is on par with the price of crude oil from back in January 2008, but today’s prices are less than 50 dollars a barrel.

So it converts solar energy, much of which falls on the planet totally unused by anyone, and converts it to something that is usable, that being crude oil. I'm not understanding the hostility towards the process. It may not produce crude oil in enough quantities to be worth the effort but the process itself is nothing to be angry about.

Even if we reach the point where our entire civilization is powered by solar or wind, we will always need some carbon based fuels for other things since they are very energy rich.

Regarding perpetual motion machines. Is not the sun and wind perpetual motion machines, at least from our point of view, for the next few billion years? Might as well put them to work so we can continue happy motoring.

Isn't the Navy putting these on nuclear power ships now to refuel without tankers?