Canadian scientists are building a system that could turn atmospheric Co2 into fuel

[WillParkinson]

http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-are-building-a-system-that-could-turn-atmospheric-co2-into-fuel

Scientists are building a system that could turn atmospheric CO2 into fuel
Suck it up and store it for later.


Scientists in Canada are developing an industrial carbon dioxide recycling plant that could one day suck CO2 out of the atmosphere and convert it into a zero-carbon e-diesel fuel. Developed by tech start-up Carbon Engineering and partly funded by Bill Gates, the system will essentially do the job of trees, but in places unable to host them, such as icy plains and deserts.

Just like these new solar cells that are designed to split water into a hydrogen fuel, the CO2 recycling plant will combine carbon dioxide with hydrogen split from water to form hydrocarbon fuel. The plan is to provide the technology that could one day produce environmentally friendly fuel to complement the renewable energy systems we have now. "How do you power global transportation in 20 years in a way that is carbon neutral?" Geoff Holmes, business development manager at Carbon Engineering, told Marc Gunther at The Guardian. "Cheap solar and wind are great at reducing emissions from the electricity. Then you are left with the transport sector."

[Gman]

1. As it is right now it requires a great deal of energy

To break the H_{2[\sub]O bonds and even more to break the CO2[\sub] bonds.}

[jonno99]

2. Cool (er)...

[kristopher]

3. The approach isn't new and it isn't a good idea.

In addition to the energy required for the manufacturing process itself - which is considerable in light of alternative storage technologies - the extremely low concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere requires the processing of vast quantities of air to extract enough CO2 to be usable. That too requires a lot of energy. They'd be better off setting up an artificial environment to grow fish. You can the harvest the fish and use the dirty water from the fish to grown a strain of algae that is about 70% oil. The algae clean and oxygenate the water for the next batch of fish after you harvest the algae and press it to extract the oil. You can feed the remainder of the algae to the fish and use the oil in any diesel engine.

[Duppers]

4. Doesn't burning oil in diesel engines

Put carbon into the atmosphere.
And isn't that our main problem?

[kristopher]

5. Putting carbon that has been sequestered in fossil fuels into the air is the problem.

You'd do something like this is to obtain stored energy in a portable form and if the energy input into storage is derived from fossil fuels, then it isn't acceptable.
The OP doesn't provide enough information to know what is envisioned but the chance that coal or nuclear would be the source is fairly high since such a large amount of energy would probably be required.

The fish/algae loop is basically self sustaining and is primarily a means of harvesting solar energy via the algae. The carbon pulled from the water by the algae is put there by the fish "exhaling" so there is no net atmospheric carbon increase when you burn the lipids made by the algae.

[csziggy]

6. Another approach has been to grow that algae on sewage

That was tried in small scale and worked but the grant ran out before the people testing it were able to scale it up. Read about it in a National Geographic a decade or so ago.

[kristopher]

7. Yep, it's the same concept

Human sewage vs fish sewage would be determined by the economics of the situation I suppose. The remote use application stipulated in the OP might well make the human waste stream a better bet. Then again, maybe fresh fish would be a welcome addition to their diet.

[hunter]

8. Carbon "neutral" isn't enough.

To fix anything, we'd have to put the carbon back into the ground.

And it's a lot of carbon.

The only way to quit smoking is to quit smoking. The only way to quit fossil fuels is to quit fossil fuels.

Simple, right? Just quit making new gasoline or diesel fuel powered vehicles, quit building fossil fuel power stations, quit building oil refineries, then push beyond that to scrapping these fossil fuel machines, quit drilling for oil, quit digging for coal.

The solution to this problem is staring us in the face, we just don't like it.

Really? Shut down the fossil fuel industry, and all the industries that depend on fossil fuels? Who thinks that's ever going to happen?

The "market" has no good mechanism for dealing with the required changes.

Anyone with money or a decent credit rating can still buy a new fossil fueled car, anyone with money can still fuel their vehicle with fossil fuels. Anyone with money (and under no suspicion as a "terrorist&quot can buy a ticket to travel by fossil fueled jets.

Thus this civilization will end prematurely, just as smokers often end prematurely, when nature says "times up!" and vital organ systems fail.

I like to think this fossil fuel civilization can fail gracefully, people adapting to change without the usual panoply of horrors, but it's not going to be any "alternative" technology that keeps people alive and fed, it's going to be the people who are most creative in establishing very adaptable largely self-sustaining communities using existing technologies.

Some of these new communities will be violent fundamentalist hells; that's a traditional human way of doing things, and we already see it happening in places now suffering the twin pressures of overpopulation and changing climates. (Torturing women is a common theme of these societies...)

In other places things may not be so bad, the people experiencing freedoms they've never enjoyed in our current very rigid economic systems where "productivity" is a direct measure of the damage we are doing to both the earth and the human spirit.

The habitable parts of this planet, deserts to jungles to arctic wilderness, were all populated by humans on foot and by sail, without fossil fuels. That's how powerful we humans are. The era of "fueled" vehicles of any sort will by nature end; a brief nightmare of wars and environmental catastrophe.