Startup Wants to Run Your Car on CO2
Talk about your good ideas.
Scientists have long bandied about the notion of creating transportation fuels from atmospheric CO2, but the economic and technological constraints have made it impossible.
Now, a California startup called Carbon Sciences claims it’s found a way to make the process cost-efficient. It says that, over the course of the next several months, it will demonstrate that it can make a profitable liquid fuel from carbon dioxide.
How would it work? Carbon Sciences envisions CO2-recycling plants set up side-by-side with coal- and other fossil fuel-burning power plants. The purveyors of the ancient, crushed plant matter and dinosaur juice will then redirect their emissions directly to Carbon Sciences' plant, which will reprocess it into fuel for cars and airplanes.
The particulars of this breakthrough get all science-y, so we saved them for after the jump.
If you recall high-school chemistry, our fuels are called hydrocarbons, and they get their energy content from carbon atoms. Burn a hydrocarbon, and you get carbon dioxide. In theory, this carbon dioxide could be captured and broken up to create more hydrocarbons.
However, CO2 is very stable, so it takes a lot of energy to break it up, at which point the process becomes more trouble than it’s worth. What Carbon Sciences has done is use a process called biocatalytic hydrolysis to split a water molecule, leaving the hydrogen in water to run off and form a hydrocarbon with the carbon atoms. What's left over from the water is hydroxide ions, which help fuel the process with only a small amount of external energy.
Too much? The important part is that if it works and can be ramped up to a large scale, CO2-to-fuel conversion could become the key to slowing climate change and lessening the country's dependence on oil.
Startup Turns CO2 Into Fuel (Autopia)
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the big question in terms of saving the environment might actually be whether this is something that can be incorporated into cars.
this is an impressive and potentially very important breakthrough, but i think that only once it becomes possible for this process to be carried out in every single CO2-emitting car will it be able to really make a massive impact.
So where is all the water going to come from? hasn't California been in a dought for the past 10-15 years?
Speaking as a chemist, I'm pretty sure this claim is bogus. Thermodynamics says it will not work. They are essentially talking about reversing the process of combustion. Combustion releases energy so reversing the process is going to require energy. Thermodynamics says you will have to invest more energy than you will get out. Too bad, but this just won't work. Plants can do it, but they get the energy from the sun and it is not a particularly fast process.
Kent