Sun to syngas: This prototype, known as the CR5, was designed by Sandia researchers to convert carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide, or water into hydrogen, using concentrated solar energy. The carbon monoxide and hydrogen can be combined later to produce syngas, a building block for most transportation fuels. The first working prototype, shown above, has demonstrated that the process works, but efforts are underway to make it more efficient.
Tyler Hamilton
Sandia scientists successfully test a machine that creates fuel from carbon dioxide.
Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have successfully demonstrated a prototype machine that uses the sun's energy to convert water and carbon dioxide into the molecular building blocks that make up transportation fuels. The "Sunshine to Petrol" system could ultimately prove a practical way to recycle CO₂ from power and industrial plants into gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, assuming the process can become at least twice as efficient as natural photosynthesis.
Until recently, the system had only been validated in a laboratory in small batches. A hand-built demonstration machine was successfully tested this fall. "This is a first-of-its-kind prototype we're evaluating," says Sandia researcher Rich Diver, inventor of the device.
"In the short term we see this as an alternative to sequestration," says James Miller, a chemical engineer with Sandia's advanced materials laboratory. Instead of just pumping CO2 underground for permanent storage, Miller says, the sun's abundant energy can be used to achieve "reverse combustion" that essentially turns carbon dioxide back into a fuel. "It's a productive utilization of CO2 that you might capture from a coal plant, a brewery, and similar concentrated sources."
The cylindrical metal machine, called the Counter-Rotating-Ring Receiver Reactor Recuperator (CR5), relies on concentrated solar heat to trigger a thermo-chemical reaction in an iron-rich composite material. The material is designed to give up an oxygen molecule when exposed to extreme heat, and then retrieve an oxygen molecule once it cools down.
The machine is designed with a chamber on each side. One side is hot, the other cool. Running through the center is a set of 14 Frisbee-like rings rotating at one revolution per minute. The outer edge of each ring is made up of an iron oxide composite supported by a zirconium matrix. Scientists use a solar concentrator to heat the inside of one chamber to 1,500 º C, causing the iron oxide on one side of the ring to give up oxygen molecules. As the affected side of the ring rotates to the opposite chamber, it begins to cool down and carbon dioxide is pumped in. This cooling allows the iron oxide to steal back oxygen molecules from the CO₂, leaving behind carbon monoxide. The process is continually repeated, turning an incoming supply of CO2 into an outgoing stream of carbon monoxide.
Miller says the same process can be used to produce hydrogen, the only difference being that water, instead of carbon dioxide, is pumped into the second chamber. The two separately retrieved gases--hydrogen and carbon monoxide--are then mixed together to make syngas, which can be used to make a "drop-in replacement" for traditional fuels, says Miller.
A New Zealand company uses microorganisms to convert carbon monoxide into ethanol and plastics precursors.
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A copper-based catalyst helps turn the gas into antifreeze and household cleaners.
Isn't the notion that we could somehow continuously fuel standard fossil-fuel burning power plants or vehicles by converting then re-burning the carbon in the CO2 emissions about as foolish as a perpetual motion machine? Once you have re-burned the created fuel you must re-convert it back - in perpetuity - or you end up with just as much CO2 in the atmosphere as without the process. How can using sunlight to heat a plate, that causes a reaction, that converts exhaust to fuel, which is then burned to generate heat, which is used to boil water into steam, which is then used to drive a turbine be more efficient than simply using the sunlight to heat the water directly? Granted, there is no sun at night. But isn't it still more efficient to heat some substance (with enough thermal mass, to a high enough temperature) and then draw heat from that overnight than to build all these expensive machines with touchy reactants that will have to be carefully maintained for decades to retain their efficiency? Plus, if the sunlight isn't available near where the CO2 is produced you would have to transport all that CO2 to where the sunlight is available. How is that easier than transmitting electricity generated where the sunlight is?
Finally, if you use this fuel in any vehicle or where the CO2 can't be sequestered, then it goes back into the atmosphere permanently. It might be a zero sum game if you could just use CO2 directly from the atmosphere, but since it relies on concentrated CO2 then it doesn't make sense to do this anywhere but right near the original source of the sequestered CO2. Otherwise you would have to transport the CO2 to the conversion plant and then transport the fuel back, which would be yet another huge inefficiency.
I can see using this technology to separate hydrogen from oxygen because the hydrogen can be transported and burned in other places or in vehicles with no further CO2 emissions. In addition, the excess heat from the process can then be used to pre-heat water for conversion to steam for spinning turbines.
Quite frankly, the fact that anyone considered this tail chasing endeavor for more than one drunk minute just boggles my mind. I am usually not so harsh but this whole thing really does seem more like grant chasing than real usable research as far as I am concerned.
Well no, this isn't perpetual motion, but, renewable energy in general can be considered virtually perpetual since it just keeps on coming for billions of years.
If we are going to deal with the problem of CO2 it will be necessary to lock up CO2, hydrogen alone is not enough. It is not possible to build very large reserves of pure hydrogen, but synthetic hydrocarbons can be stored in far larger amounts, which will be a good idea in the long run in order to provide energy security from renewables. Whether it is hydrocarbons produced by algae, trees or this technology, it is a good thing, better than letting CO2 go into the atmosphere or wasting energy pumping CO2 underground.
Of course lots of photosynthesising vegetation is already covering the earth, even if it works less efficiently, the scale of it is truly astounding. If we want to reduce CO2 levels all we have to do is carbonise a small percentage of that vegetation every year. The carbon can be used for various productive purposes, but mostly solid carbon provides the best means of storing renewable energy safely, in very large amounts, long term, without the need to any special containment.
Bad news: When you burn the fuel that this scheme creates, you're letting the CO2 into the atmosphere. Of course, this assumes that's really a problem, which I don't think has been shown. But I suppose you would be getting more energy out of the the original fuel source by using the sun's energy to convert a byproduct of the original fuel into another fuel.
I'm a little dubious about the whole spinning disk thing; it seems like something better could be devised by moving the fluids over an oxygen poor surface of some sort.
NOT Perpetual Motion as you input energy from the sun to make the fuel. To make a carbon-neutral solution you need to pull the CO2 from air to begin with.
Some people are doing this:
http://www.livescience.com/environment/071120-carbon-soak.html
Put the two concepts together with a big enough Solar thermal plant and you can pull fuel out of thin air! How much would it cost to build? IDK
Very large reserves of hydrogen are not needed.
It seems to me the simplest way to do this is to use solar to create hydrolyze water using that hydrogen as the base for methane. This is needed due to the storage problems of hydrogen leakage. Then the methane can be transported by pipe to where it is needed, much as we use natural gas today, and used to power fuel cells that provide transportation fuel. Excess methane can be used to provide peak power sources for the electricity grid.
Solar cells and other technologies already significantly outperform photosynthesis unless I am mistaken in terms of efficiency, so why mess around with something so inefficient?
While I agree that this technology has issues. H2O -> H2 has a has a big storage and transportation issue. And the syngas approach as fuel for cars makes carbon recapture an issue. I think this process or one like it for some of the newer metal-air batteries or the oxidation of some metals for the on the fly creation of hydrogen is where this sort of solar furnace could be usefull for recycling the metals as they are consumed.
Clearly, CO2 will be distributed and lost to the environment. The savings, short term, is that electricity is generated at the power plant with much less CO2 (or zero CO2 theoretically). In addition, fuel is produced using the sun's energy. The latter does not lessen CO2 but emissions savings is the CO2 equivalent fraction of electrical power generated by the coal plant divided by CO2 equivalent of BTU's generated by coal plant & solar.
It is not a perpetual motion machine at all. It is converting solar energy to fuel.
Won't heat be a significant by-product? Any projections for environmental net thermal gain of the use of this technology at the scales you imply over time?
No. The heat is generated by radiation from the Sun which would fall on the planet anyway. It's being diverted to this use, so there is no net increase in heat (to the planet anyway).
You would need efficiencies greater than 100% for Perpetual Motion (to make up for friction and acceleration). This machine sounds great to help rid the planet of some CO2 and derive more energy from your fuel. The best part is taking what had been useless and turning it into a valuable commodity. The guy that thinks ths will aid the airline industry hasn't thought things through at all. What would you do put a parchute behind the plane to catch the con-trail?
no no no, I think what he is saying is that it will provide a stable source of fuel for the airline industry, you wouldn't put one of these systems on anything besides a stationary or very large platform. (Factory power plant, ship?)
It wouldn't be "carbon free" but it would basically remove all of the CO2 produced by industry. It would drastically reduce the total CO2 emissions, and provide a renewable, high energy density, (hopefully low cost) fuel supply. Especially for those countries without their own domestic oil supply.
This will undoubtedly prove to be a great technology with a lot of promise. I assume that technically you could do this process using things other than solar power, such as the latent heat generated from the decay of high level nuclear waste?
If we can make enough power from sunshine, why not just use them for life and shutdown the coal plant?
The process is:
dig coal, burn for electricity , collect co2, use sun power to convert co2 to petrol, then burn the fuel release the co2 to atmosphere.
Why not use the sun power to make electricity directly?
The majority of renewable energy can be used to generate electricity directly, and so displace fossil fuels, but a large percentage also needs to be directed towards different forms of energy storage.
The reality is that fossil fuels are going to be used for a long time to come, so we need to make productive use of the CO2 in the meantime, plus we need to take carbon out of the atmosphere. If we want intermittent renewables to become a serious source of energy then we need to be able to store the energy in serious quantities, far larger amounts than batteries, pumped hydro or hydrogen can store, and the only realistic way of doing that is with solid liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons.
The idea here is to use harness solar as an energy source for the transportation industry while simultaneously reducing emissions. The fuels produced will be a very good storage medium with a high energy density, easy to transport and easy to handle.
Energy comes in a lot of forms, and is used for a lot of things, electricity is only a part of that.
While exploring the blogosphere elsewhere it hit me that the real use for this technology would not be for transportation fuel. That gives us an open CO2 cycle with it going back to the atmosphere. IF on the other hand, we used this to close the CO2 cycle at the plant, we would be perpetually able to keep CO2 emissions low by constantly reusing the CO2. Nothing in this article tells me how how efficient this process is, or what it can top out at. If we pretend that this can top out at over 90%, then instead of burning coal to produce electricity directly, we are burning coal to get the carbon input to keep the cycle going. The other part of this is that this seems to lend itself to being modular, i.e. you buy one module, save your plant some money in terms of fuel use, and use that money to buy the 2nd module. Rinse and repeat until your facility has hit the top efficiency possible.
I would have to think that once perfected, the possibilities of this kind of technology are endless. Imagine this, you have a home unit next to your garage, it sucks in atmosphere and separates out the co2, it performs its chemical process and viola, you have a ready supply of fuel for your car. Aside from an initial investment, and maintenance, you have free fuel. I could see this co2 capturing becoming so common that in a far fetched future, we'll have global cooling since all the co2 will be locked away for fuel. It's a stretch but I figured some forward thinking could be applied.
Great idea, I'd like to know where I could get one of these devices once they're ready.
On the www.innovationssale.com web page can find two other CO2 recyclers.
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
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karmadir
4 Comments
Help Avaition industry
This product can be a blessing for aviation industry since their economy is dependent on fuel.
It will help in moving out from heavy losses.
Reply
jorgent
4 Comments
Re: Help Avaition industry
I think you are right that this might help aviation. My guess is that air travel are the last form of transport that will be able to switch to coal- / nuclear- / renewable-electrical energy when the oil prices soar. Hence being able to use CO2 output from carbon power plants (possibly running on biofuels) to produce energy rich fuels might be a perfect solution.
Whether this will increase their profitability compared to today, only the future will show.
Reply
mountainlion
14 Comments
Re: Help Avaition industry
I really don't how this device could work for the Aviation industry. A device for two huge jet engines could be as large as the jet itself. When you went through a cloud you would loose the fuel processor. The device would be so large that air drag would probably eat up all gains.
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jim123
2 Comments
Re: Help Avaition industry
Would be nice to see the prototype actually working. Yes, they have a nice solar toy, whoopieeeeeee!
Why not use normal heat in a lab so it's more controlled, then show the conversion on a bench. We already know solar heat happens, but making this cycle work is the big thing. Like after days does it wear out? What needs to be replaced?
And why the complicated counter rotating rings? WTF? Why complicate matters more?
Why use only the outer edges? USE THE WHOLE DISK of material, you are already spending lots of energy heating it, but then you only use part of it?
Why not dip the lower part in a non reactive (to what you are doing) high temp liquid to cool it much faster and use the heat from that liquid (through an exchanger) to make steam and create power too?
See also
http://gas2.org/2009/11/26/scientists-make-fuel-from-co2-emissions-and-sunlight/
video
http://www.youtube.com/v/GJ5mpQqmZaM&hl=en_US&fs=1&
Reply