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[BigD145]

This is certainly very Dwarfy. So much energy being used to do very little.
Petrol for the Petrol God!
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/01/2013110111039373166.html

"The bottom line - making very optimistic assumptions about their efficiency, if this company was to scale up to produce enough gasoline to meet demand in the USA, it would require half the world's energy consumption every day," he said. "That is clearly unacceptable.”

[Lagslayer]

This is certainly very Dwarfy. So much energy being used to do very little.
Petrol for the Petrol God!
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/01/2013110111039373166.html

"The bottom line - making very optimistic assumptions about their efficiency, if this company was to scale up to produce enough gasoline to meet demand in the USA, it would require half the world's energy consumption every day," he said. "That is clearly unacceptable.”

Oh crap, I clicked the link! If you don't hear from me again, I didn't go down without a fight!

[BigD145]

I'm so sorry I provided you a look into reality abroad. I will weep for your imaginary friends and all the pixies you left behind.

[i2amroy]

There was a thread on this same topic a while back in the General Discussions forum, and that new article fails to mention one very important detail. It's the simple fact that right now the "cost to pull CO₂ out of the atmosphere" > "amount earned by selling petrol". Right now we only have a few highly inefficient and expensive ways to pull large amounts of CO₂ out of the atmosphere, none of which are efficient enough to actually make money off of this. So while the people doing this are planning to generate some actual factory sized petrol plants, their actual business plants (as opposed to their "show it to the media" one) are all planning to use piped in CO₂ from other sources, not to pull CO₂ out of the atmosphere.

[miauw62]

But what would have happened to that Co2 else? I'm guessing released into the air.

[Sheb]

Yeah, if it's CO2 from a coal plant, it'd still be pretty cool.

Also they're using methanol as an intemrediate. I wonder how efficient it'd be to use... plants to scrubs the CO2 and just refine the methanol, compared to their methanol-producing step.

[MonkeyHead]

Anyone noticed the potential for plumbing the top of a volcano into this process?

[Lagslayer]

I'm so sorry I provided you a look into reality abroad. I will weep for your imaginary friends and all the pixies you left behind.

Wow, you didn't get the joke? It's the Aljazeera site, and I was implying the government was going to come after me.

[BigD145]

I'm so sorry I provided you a look into reality abroad. I will weep for your imaginary friends and all the pixies you left behind.

Wow, you didn't get the joke? It's the Aljazeera site, and I was implying the government was going to come after me.

"The Government" doesn't care about Al Jazeera. Certain members of a certain party do and have. Think tanks are what you have to worry about.

There was a thread on this same topic a while back in the General Discussions forum, and that new article fails to mention one very important detail. It's the simple fact that right now the "cost to pull CO₂ out of the atmosphere" > "amount earned by selling petrol". Right now we only have a few highly inefficient and expensive ways to pull large amounts of CO₂ out of the atmosphere, none of which are efficient enough to actually make money off of this.

I think the quote I pulled out pretty much encompasses what you just said. It would take all American energy production plus that of a bunch of other large countries just to meet the gas demand of the US. There's a huge loss in the conversion of energy to petrol AND you'd then only get petrol which converts energy at about 20% efficiency. It's a huge loss and you're still putting CO2 into the atmosphere.

[Sheb]

So the world's using 517 exajoules (1 exajoules of power = 10^18 joules) of power per year. The US use 507*10^9 liters of gasoline a year, or 18 exajoules.

Now, your quote wasn't clear, because that scientists spoke of the world's energy consumption, but didn't specify a time period. So either 1/2 day of worlds energy production = 1 day of gasoline for the US, or 1/2 year of energy production=1 day of gasoline for the US.

In the first case, we have an efficiency of 36/517~6%. Which is terrible, but with some tuning and improvment could make this a valid use (by turning cheap, night-time lectrical energy into more exensive fuel for exemple). Now, if it's half a year of energy production=> 1 day of fuel, we got a pitiful 0,01% efficiency, and they better get a few orders of magnitude of improvement before they do anything.

Now, as I said, maybe using a concentrated CO2 source (from a power plant, or cement factory or something) increase their efficiency, but as of now it's useless.

[WealthyRadish]

I doubt that it's the concentration of CO₂ that's making this unfeasible. There's little point to this technology, since the energy required is always going to be more than is yielded from the oil produced. So at this time, that'd mean burning coal to produce electricity to produce oil to... power cars? What's the point? Any carbon removed from the atmosphere is drowned by the carbon released in powering the thing in the first place, and since CO₂ is hardly the only emission released when burning oil and other complex hydrocarbons, even a 99% efficiency would still not be close to carbon neutral.

The only time when this would be reasonably useful would be in the example mentioned, where renewable energy sources use it as a kind of battery. But for that to happen, we'd need renewable energy to be the dominate supply, and by that time we'll probably not even be using oil to power vehicles.

But yeah, in dorf world, just slap a DWR on that and you'd have barrels of valuable trade goods for the magmaless humies.

[BigD145]

Electric cars is too elven.

[Uthric]

What's the point? Hydrogen is simple to make, needs power aka solid wind, and water, a bit of know how and BAM your good.

There's a man in town the runs all his gas burning utility's off hydrogen, he uses his solid panels to get the power to run his reactor, compress the gas in storage tanks and all that.

He did all this JUST to prove a point.

And I forget what his point was.

[Rowanas]

Unfortunately, we've developed better methods of using green energy, so this is kinda useless. It would've had to come... 100 years earlier. I dunno, maybe 50 years. We had electric engines in 1899, but they might not've been as efficient as this new, inefficient process.

[Sheb]

Well, hydrogen is hard to stock in large enough quantities to power a car. And is highly explosive too.