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CO2 turned into fuel: Japan’s scientists convert captured carbon into green fuel
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- Title
- CO2 turned into fuel with Japan's electrochemical cell breakthrough
- Authors
- Aman Tripathi
- Word count
- 32 words
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Hopefully this provides one piece of the complex puzzle. And every bit of knowledge we gain will help another team along to gain the next bit.
It's easy to give in to despair. Today I'm going to choose to be thankful for scientists working on this. They know better than I do how difficult carbon capture is, and how far away we are from saving ourselves, but they're nevertheless working on it. So as long as they're working on it, I'm going to try to give thanks for them.
Maybe one day, even if there's only a million of us left in an underground bunker / bio-dome, this research can help make survival + slowly expanding the compound a little easier.
Wow. I would have thought fuel made from CO2 would have been more exciting to people.
I find the prospect exciting.
There will never, ever, be less demand for air travel (arguably there will never even be the same demand, only more), and there are no apparent physically-reasonable alternatives to jet fuel.
Nor do I find the idea of artificially limiting peoples' mobility ethically palatable. We live in a connected world, and I want to see more people travelling and having international connections, and the gradual breakdown of national borders.
The options are neutral air travel emissions, from capturing the same amount of carbon, or the same/more emissions. There's no mathematical difference between n-n and 0, despite the dogma of some environmentalists. And "Lol just don't fly and live in a Keebler elf tree" isn't on the table.
Sure, if your proposition is that people are so self-centered that they couldn't possibly imagine reducing their carbon footprint by flying less, then we are of course left with science having to do the dirty work.
The only problems of course, which these environmentalists are very much needlessly concerned about, are that the current mathematical reality looks more like n-0, which also totally ignores x historical carbon and z climate feedback loop emissions.
Furthermore, this is a time sensitive issue and these inventions do not currently work on industrial scales in any significant manner. Until this changes, expect to hear more dogmas from environmentalists.
Ah, sorry … for my part, I’m on the side of folks who find discussion of non-emissions reduction tech to be a little exhausting. I can dig up some sources if it helps, but afaik the consensus is that effectively no amount of carbon capture can meaningfully offset our global emissions. Plus — iirc — we’ve known for a while how to pull combustible hydrocarbons out of the air, it’s just very inefficient due to the low concentration of carbon (and other factors).
Overall, research is still needed since all paths towards 2c now require deployment of as-yet undeveloped direct air carbon capture techniques, but it’s going to attract similar vibes as climate geoengineering. Ie some mix of defeat and sadness, ime.
Yeah, it's been used as a talking point for decades with nothing to show for it. The research might be legitimate, but I can't see it having any purpose beyond being used to delay actual climate change legislation.
There are no details in the article, but some engineers are claiming to have an efficient process for carbon capture. Using it for fuel, assuming wide adoption, would automatically be emission reduction.
No, capturing carbon for fuel would actually release that carbon again in the atmosphere when burned. Granted, it‘s still better than leaving it in the atmosphere in the first place and burn „new oil“, but still not as good as storing it underground and never burn it again.
That's not necessarily true. I tried to find more details but it's pretty scarce. The paper talks about the formate being used in a fuel cell in lieu of hydrogen, though, and hydrogen fuel cells only produce water as a byproduct, not CO2. Obviously the CO2 is still there, but presumably as part of the cell that can be buried or otherwise disposed of somewhere that isn't the atmosphere.
If the process provides for all of the fuel needs, there will not be the need to introduce more CO2 than already exists in the air.
The dream is pulling nearly all of the post industrial revolution carbon out of the atmosphere and storing them in super dense form, so effectively that we can outpace any re-emission we can do.
Eg, capture 1B carats worth of carbon in diamond storage, with peak capacity to capture 2B carats a year, and burning <1B carats a year. /Pipedream with made up idea and units
Agreed! The concern I (and others) have is that we already have technologies and practices which will dramatically reduce our carbon impact, and will already take a substantial amount of funds and community buy in to be successful. Given the timelines, my understanding is that folks want to downplay untested, unknown — but promising! — future technology, and to instead spend the time and energy we have on known good solutions (eg public transport rollout, reduced meat consumption, improvements in goods transport, etc.)
It’s definitely interesting, and it could definitely tip the needle! But we already know how to slam the needle hard in the necessary direction, and we’ve seen decades of “green coal”, “biofuels”, “algal oil” etc. come and go while the planet burns.
(edit) I’d also note that they’re not referring to off-the-lab-bench efficiency, afaik, when they say it has relatively high faradic efficiency.
What is different about this technology is it potentially offers an economic incentive to use it....harvesting CO2 to sell as fuel.
Agreed that it offers economic incentives! I’m not sure if it’s entirely unique, though: this line of reasoning also leads economists to promote carbon taxes. They shift the cost of cleaning up carbon from the air (super expensive, requires research that’s decades away) to the producer (comparatively easier to do in most cases, although avionics and virgin steel production are notable exceptions). In that scenario we see a large reduction in co2 emissions, as motivated by economic incentives, without relying on risky and unproven technology.
Overall it’s very neat, and is probably a solution to a problem we’ll (hopefully!) see in several decades. As noted though I don’t tend to engage with this sort of news for the same reason that I don’t do so with fusion research :3
I’m more excited by developments in ammonia engines and low energy ammonia production. It’s a fuel without any carbon and can be made with the abundant nitrogen in our atmosphere and hydrogen in our water.
What happens when the exhaust is combined with air?
The combustion primarily produces it's inputs, nitrogen gas and water. If incompletely combusted I suppose (I'm no chemist) you could get NOx. Basically it's a stable-ish liquid store of energy. If we can make ammonia with solar power it would be a perfect carbon-free loop of storing the sun in a flammable liquid.
There's a long history of exciting fuel and battery innovations that never leave the research stage. In the 1990s there was a car fueled by water all over the news. A lot of promising stuff never become viable products.
Cars fuelled by water are a scam, they were never genuinely promising in the first place.
I don’t get all that excited about scientific papers because there’s usually a long road to making them practical, if they ever are. It’s like, okay, sounds promising, but will we ever hear from them again?
If someone starts a company based on that research and their pilot project is successful then it seems more real to me, but companies fail too.
On that note, Terraform Industries wants to make natural gas by pulling carbon out of the air. They built an end-to-end demo and raised money. It sounds like a good approach. But we’ll have to wait to find out if they’re successful at it.