Engineers develop an efficient process to make fuel from carbon dioxide::An efficient new process can convert carbon dioxide into formate, a material that can be used like hydrogen or methanol to power a fuel cell and generate electricity.

  • @[email protected]
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    477 months ago

    Very misleading title. This is not an energy efficient process (what we need for energy storage), instead it has a high chemical yield.

    • ∟⊔⊤∦∣≶
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      177 months ago

      That, and planting trees and never cutting them down. Although at least with potatoes you can make french fries… french wood sticks definitely aren’t so great in the air fryer

      • @[email protected]
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        87 months ago

        no, you can actually cut down grown biomass and process it to chemically stable biochar for soil improvement! for more potatoes for more fries! and a side of coleslaw.

    • @SkybreakerEngineer
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      367 months ago

      When they say it’s efficient, they mean at not letting CO2 go, not in energy cost. Looks like step one is capturing it which is already energy intensive, and step 2 is reacting it with a strong base. So it takes a lot of stuff as input.

      And they did this on a lab bench, not at scale in a plant.

    • @thisisawayoflife
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      67 months ago

      Burning it creates enormous clouds of Trioxin 2-4-5.

    • @pigup
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      37 months ago

      That it burns the shit back into the atmosphere.

      • @[email protected]
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        67 months ago

        Yes, but if it could provide as an alternative to digging up oil and gass, and get the energy needed to make the transformation from sun, wind or other sustainable sources. It could lower the amount of new CO2 being put into the atmosphere as well as work as a way to store excess energy from wind and sun.

        • @[email protected]
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          37 months ago

          Yeah, it would basically act as a battery except much better energy and power density, and faster ‘charging’.

          The downside is invariably that round trip energy efficiency (electricity in vs electricity out) is somewhere between ‘much worse’ and ‘terrible’.

  • @RoyaltyInTraining
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    7 months ago

    So we’re gonna spend a whole bunch of energy to capture carbon, then use even more to turn it into fuel, and then just burn it again? Yea sorry, I am not convinced.

    Edit: Unless if course they propose it for grid balancing, like we talk about doing with hydrogen. In that case, I wanna know exact energy efficiency numbers and equipment cost.