Scientists have discovered a cheap way to convert CO2 into gasoline

[madville]

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/07/carbon-engineering-and-harvard-find-way-to-convert-co2-to-gasoline.html

Scientists at a company part-owned by Bill Gates say they've found a cheap way to convert CO2 into gasoline

Canadian clean energy company Carbon Engineering, in partnership with researchers from Harvard, used little more than limestone, hydrogen and air for the process, which can remove one metric ton of CO2 for as little as $94, the scientists say. It cleans up the environment, and produces eco-friendly liquid fuel at the same time.

The technique has been removing CO2 from the atmosphere since 2015 from a small pilot plant in Squamish, British Columbia. Carbon Engineering is seeking funding to build an industrial-scale version of the plant, which Keith told the Atlantic the company can complete by 2021.

Carbon Engineering is owned by several private investors, including Bill Gates.

[Goodheart]

1. How much gasoline is produced for $94?

[madville]

3. I tried reading their paper

But I'm way too dumb to figure it out

https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30225-3

[HeartachesNhangovers]

6. None. The costs of $94 to $232 per ton of CO2

removed from the atmosphere are simply the costs to produce concentrated CO2:

Depending on financial assumptions, energy costs, and the specific choice of inputs and outputs, the levelized cost per ton CO2 captured from the atmosphere ranges from 94 to 232 $/t-CO2.

The paper speculates that the concentrated CO2 could be used to produce fuels, but provides no costs for this step or even a process to do it:

CE is developing methods to integrate the DAC and fuel synthesis, but for simplicity of analysis, here we show (Table 2) the inputs for a plant that receives O2 and produces atmospheric pressure CO2.

Remember that conventional fuels (like gasoline) are "hydrocarbons" which means that they need a lot of hydrogen to add to the carbon from the CO2. That whole process of producing or providing hydrogen, and reacting it to combine with the CO2 is not shown, presumably because it is already technically feasible and understood.

EDIT: Nowhere does this paper claim that the process will be "cheap". The complete process of taking atmospheric CO2, providing a source of hydrogen, plus other necessary fuel additives, and cooking all those raw material streams into transportation fuel would require a facility that would look a lot like a modern oil refinery. The only entities with the resources and expertise to actually pull something like this off is "Big Oil".

[madville]

2. This is very cool

They say it would come in somewhere around $3-4 a gallon, that's not terrible.

I wonder how much electricity the process uses though?

[njhoneybadger]

4. Over 40 billion tons of CO2 pumped into the air per year.

I wonder how much CO2 one of their proposed plants could remove in a year?

[bitterross]

5. Good thing a Gates-type is involved. Otherwise this would disappear.

Something like this would totally disappear if there weren't a person like Gates involved. The big oil would kill people to keep this technology off the market.

[BSdetect]

7. We can expect a two cents per gallon reduction from this. Ha ha

[bitterross]

9. ANYTHING that puts pressure on big oil is good.

Even if it's only 2 cents per gallon. That could widen out if OPEC decided to be more profitable.

[Hugin]

8. Plants do it for free.

Pesky plants.

[hunter]

10. It may become practical with nuclear power and the banning of fossil fuels.

The U.S. Navy is doing similar work, so that nuclear aircraft carriers could make fuel for their aircraft and support vessels from the carbon dioxide in sea water.

Bill Gates has also invested in nuclear power reactors that burn unused uranium and thorium that's already been mined, used nuclear fuel from existing reactors, and weapons grade plutonium and uranium. (Existing light water nuclear reactors use a very small percentage of the potential energy in nuclear fuel, something like 5%.)

These reactors would be built in factories, delivered to site, and run 40-60 years without refueling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraPower

The first thing we humans have to do is quit fossil fuels, after that all sorts of innovative technologies, nuclear and non-nuclear, become desirable.

[roamer65]

11. It's a big step in the right direction, but...

The most effective way to curtail CO2 emissions is through population reduction.

We need to stop all governmental subsidies for having children and also give tax incentives for not having them.

Less people on the planet means less carbon footprint.

[hunter]

13. An affluent two-child U.S.A. family uses far more energy, and causes more CO2 emissions...

... than a much larger family living in a small space someplace like Cairo or Kolkata, eating a vegetarian diet.

If you own cars or have flown away for vacation, you're part of the problem. If you eat factory farm meat and dairy products every day, then you are part of the problem.

Reducing the human population, as most affluent participants in the high energy industrial consumer economy see it, is hypocrisy. They're the ones disproportionately spewing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. (Compared to most of the world, I'm affluent.)

In any case, the political and economic empowerment of women, along with universal access to birth control, is the most ethical way to limit population growth.

Here in the "developed" nations we probably ought to be paying people to experiment with lifestyles having very small environmental footprints. For most people that would probably be an urban lifestyle without automobile ownership and a predominantly vegetarian diet.

This thing we now call "economic productivity" isn't productivity at all, instead its a direct measure of the damage we are doing to the earth's remaining natural environment and our own human spirit. This destructive economy is powered by fossil fuels.

[hunter]

12. Another thought... extracted carbon dioxide could be used to enhance growth of food grade algae.