This is honestly one of the most impressive things I've seen. This is sci-fi levels of technology. It's very cool, inspiring, and refreshing to see such ambitious projects.
Dude, where's my fuel?
51–60 of 191 posts
Re: Dude, where's my fuel?
#52This all sounds amazing but it also gives me Theranos vibes. While I understand the general science around this has been around a long time (the aforementioned Fischer Tropsch process) I would love for this to get some independent scientific validation before I'm willing to buy in to their dream here. It just "feels" too good to be true. Even with the Faraday Reactor considerations Seems much more scientifically plau…
The theranos vibes you're feeling I believe is from a "flaw" they make an assumption solar is 1 or 2 cents a kilowatt-hour. This isn't true (maybe with subsidies IDK) but it costs more to ship solar panels, and the wiring, fuses, breaker box, charge controller, adds a huge significant cost. You can't just take a panel cost and divide it by the watts without this in consideration. And the land cost. And unless you liv…
I think the other tradeoff over the long run is long-run lifetime costs of replacing "solar panels, and the wiring, fuses, breaker box, charge controller" under the assumption that these aspects do have lifetime costs and are at best rebuildable and at worst produce waste (e.g. think about how Vaclav Smil calls wind turbines 'the perfect embodiment of fossil fuels' - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkj_91IJVBk&feature=youtu.be... ).
It's important to ask these questions of what the tradeoffs really are when thinking about Energy Returned on Energy Invested, whether e-fuels would actually decrease new car production (i.e. older cars get used longer if e-fuels really make sense), the political economy ramifications if these things really worked, etc.
In prior waves of interest of things like algae-based fuels (see https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/lessons-from-th... ), my rough understanding is that they could be done but the numbers just didn't work out.
Finally, it's really worth pointing out the concern of any of these things falling under solutionism when also thinking about the state of our planet from a more integrated framework such as the planetary boundaries: https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-bound...
Re: Dude, where's my fuel?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
$3.00 / gallon is our v 1.0 (before taxes)
Wow. If you hit that you're sorted in Europe. https://www.tolls.eu/fuel-prices European prices seem to average about ~ EU 1.8 / litre or ~7.2 EU / Gallon or $US 7.6 / gallon. For C02 neutral fuel it would just work at that price.
A very large portion of what Europeans pay for gas is tax.
Re: Dude, where's my fuel?
#54To be honest, it doesn’t matter how much it costs if you can get to a point where you can deliver the American contract without going bankrupt. At that point, airlines should offer carbon neutral first class by default and optional carbon neutral economy, regardless of cost. Unlike BEV/carbon neutral ICE cars, the longer it takes to go to market, the more of a moral imperative it becomes for airlines to offer a carbon-neutral product.
Re: Dude, where's my fuel?
#55I see carbon nanotube tech and become immensely skeptical. I am under the impression that anything carbon nanotube still cannot be done at scale, and the article is very light on that part of the process. Following the rabbit hole leads to http links (in 2022?) and various publications from science journals I am unfamiliar with. Does anyone else get the smoke and mirrors vibe from this or am I just being overly skept…
Depends whether he actually delivered the thing in 2018.
Re: Dude, where's my fuel?
#56This is neat and all (sincerely!), but what we really need much more of than this, and fast, is bulk anhydrous ammonia synthesis. It takes a lot less energy to produce ammonia, ammonia burns where natural gas is used today, and many places burning oil (such as ships and trains) can switch to ammonia with only tankage and plumbing retrofit. Burning electrically-synthesized ammonia displaces entirely as much fossil CO2 as does burning captured carbon. I would rather see captured carbon sequestered instead.
A GW-scale ammonia plant is under construction in Norway. We will need thousands of them in short order. They need to be made cheaper.
Another concern competing with this is called Terrapower Industries. They are maybe less far along, but their web site is actually readable: https://terraformindustries.com/
If they could sequester, say, half their captured carbon, that would be a good look.
Re: Dude, where's my fuel?
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Re: Dude, where's my fuel?
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