Synthetic petroleum

[kerbiloid]

37 minutes ago, John JACK said:

Altogether wood gas engine is both less efficient than a good steam engine,

I'll just put it here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas#History

Wood gas vehicles were used during World War II, as a consequence of the rationing of fossil fuels. In Germany alone, around 500,000 "producer gas" vehicles were in use at the end of the war. Trucks, buses, tractors, motorcycles, ships and trains were equipped with a wood gasification unit. In 1942 (when wood gas had not yet reached the height of its popularity), there were about 73,000 wood gas vehicles in Sweden,[2] 65,000 in France, 10,000 in Denmark, and almost 8,000 in Switzerland. In 1944, Finland had 43,000 "woodmobiles", of which 30,000 were buses and trucks, 7,000 private vehicles, 4,000 tractors and 600 boats.[3] Although charcoal was preferred for cars in China during the oil shortages.

 

37 minutes ago, John JACK said:

For example miscantus or hogweed grow to several metres high in a single year.

I.e. they spend our energy for their needs?
We don't need them high, we don't need them delivering water and fertilizer to 3 meters height.
They must only appear, give us their remains and free their place for new cycle.
Also if they have flowers or fruits, it's just a crime of inefficiency comparing to algae.

Edited May 17, 2016 by kerbiloid

[John JACK]

16 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Wood gas vehicles were used during World War II, as a consequence of the rationing of fossil fuels.

Just like I said. Plenty of already existing ICE cars — check. Lack of petrol — check. Cheap skilled workforce to make and service generators — check.
To the beginning of WWII petrol cars already phased out steam cars, that were never popular in first place. So tinkering with tubes and barrels and breaking some furniture was the only choice for non-essential people.

Notice that no one bothered to convert ICE ships and locomotives to wood gas, but coal fired steamers hauled cargo on sea and on rail well after the war.
Ah, it said that someone did bothered. I still suppose that were one-off tests, presumably of Teuton genius origin. They even did tanks on a wood gas (for training).

Edited May 17, 2016 by John JACK

[todofwar]

@p1t1o @shynung What I meant was using plants as your atmospheric harvester would not necessarily be as efficient as something that harvests CO2 directly. So plants are not a carbon source, they are a method for harvesting carbon from the atmosphere. 

[insert_name]

using the 2nd law of thermodynamics, we can tell that any chemical process that requires us to input energy to create a fuel we will definitely lose energy so to answer the op's question no

[PB666]

14 minutes ago, insert_name said:

using the 2nd law of thermodynamics, we can tell that any chemical process that requires us to input energy to create a fuel we will definitely lose energy so to answer the op's question no

Fuel is by definition the conversion of other forms of energy into energy within the bonds of atoms, so called dissociation bond energy. Even fossile fuels got the by the addition of solar derived hv to the system (and the occasional heat induced reaction form the upper mantle). 

All conversions lose energy as the system moves toward entropy. Thats not the issue with fuel,mthe fuel logic is energy density as a energy density. IOW you pay an entropy tax to condense energy, but the consensation of thermodynamic potentials makes the energy more useful. 

And example is that if you stood at the south pole in the middle of SP winter and had a thermocouple to a heat sink you could generate a current, but you could not do much, if you replaced you with the same mass of oil and a 4-stroke diesil engine the therocouple could generate alot more energy, if we replace the diesel with the same mass of hydrogen and used a fuel cell we could generate even more electricity. If we removed the hydrogen and replaced it with pure tritium and a neutron absorbing tank we coukd generate even more energy. If we replaced all that with the same mass of exotic matter . . . . . .. 

 

[shynung]

43 minutes ago, todofwar said:

@p1t1o @shynung What I meant was using plants as your atmospheric harvester would not necessarily be as efficient as something that harvests CO2 directly. So plants are not a carbon source, they are a method for harvesting carbon from the atmosphere. 

Sure, but plants are self-powered. An atmospheric CO₂ harvesting plant needs to filter 2.5 tons of air for every kilogram of CO₂ they take. All these processes requires power from somewhere, either the electrical grid or onsite generators. With crops, all they need is plenty of water and sunlight, which can be supplied with far less effort than electricity, in terms of infrastructure and energy requirements.

[todofwar]

6 minutes ago, shynung said:

Sure, but plants are self-powered. An atmospheric CO₂ harvesting plant needs to filter 2.5 tons of air for every kilogram of CO₂ they take. All these processes requires power from somewhere, either the electrical grid or onsite generators. With crops, all they need is plenty of water and sunlight, which can be supplied with far less effort than electricity, in terms of infrastructure and energy requirements.

So get a solar powered pump and compressor. Or hope membrane research pans out so you can even let wind drive a fully passive system that separates your components for you. Plants aren't the most efficient, they need energy to run their own systems and the cellulose you get is not a good energy storage system because getting energy out of it is not trivial. The other issue no one talks about is water. You need tons of water to grow plants, most of which you lose as runoff. You can set up your CO2 harvester in the desert and pipe it elsewhere with access to water for reduction to methane or other products. 

[shynung]

 

6 minutes ago, todofwar said:

So get a solar powered pump and compressor. Or hope membrane research pans out so you can even let wind drive a fully passive system that separates your components for you. Plants aren't the most efficient, they need energy to run their own systems and the cellulose you get is not a good energy storage system because getting energy out of it is not trivial. The other issue no one talks about is water. You need tons of water to grow plants, most of which you lose as runoff. You can set up your CO2 harvester in the desert and pipe it elsewhere with access to water for reduction to methane or other products. 

And that solar panel costs more than a patch of land. And the factories producing the panels needs to be fed power as well. Even if we use clean energy sources, an air liquefier/separator facility takes a lot of resources just to set up. Setting up a farm involves marking/fencing off a patch of land and building garages/warehouses for tractors/farm machinery.

Also, farming in deserts are not impossible. The key is efficient irrigation and soil management, along with pest control. 

Yes, I get your point. Plants aren't the most efficient method of carbon extraction. It is, however, much more affordable logistically. Sure, in a heavily-industrialized locale where space is scarce and crude oil is fantastically expensive, atmospheric carbon extraction plants may make more sense than an energy-oriented farm. But we haven't reached that point yet, as far as I know.

[PB666]

7 minutes ago, shynung said:

 

And that solar panel costs more than a patch of land. And the factories producing the panels needs to be fed power as well. Even if we use clean energy sources, an air liquefier/separator facility takes a lot of resources just to set up. Setting up a farm involves marking/fencing off a patch of land and building garages/warehouses for tractors/farm machinery.

Also, farming in deserts are not impossible. The key is efficient irrigation and soil management, along with pest control. 

Yes, I get your point. Plants aren't the most efficient method of carbon extraction. It is, however, much more affordable logistically. Sure, in a heavily-industrialized locale where space is scarce and crude oil is fantastically expensive, atmospheric carbon extraction plants may make more sense than an energy-oriented farm. But we haven't reached that point yet, as far as I know.

Carbon is easy to extract, take salt water remove the chlorine and hydrogen in equimolar ratios, you have alkali run this over a water cooler and it sucks the Co2 right out of the air, take the resulting bicarbonate and heat it to near boiling and CO2 promptly comes off. It also sucks up NO, NO2, RNO, SO2, 

If you don't believe me take a glass of water and a teaspoon, next bring to boil the glass of water, while its still hot dump the teaspoon of baking soda into it, it immediately you will  see CO2 evolve, if you do this under pressure even more CO2 will evolve. If you then take that, remembering that sodium hydroxide has a very high solubility in water, and just let it sit out for a few days the CO2 will absorb agian and the bicarbonate will start crystallizing. 

So after several days air pollutants will degrade your soda, and eventually you will need more salt. 

The problem is not so much capturing CO2, the problem is that it is toxic much over current levels, and your typical greenhouse is kind of expensive to cool with the glass and CO2. And you cant really storeit cheaply.

Now if you really want CO2 fast and dont want to fiddle with big watercooler type equipment,

Pump seawater into a system degass it free of O2 and bubble hydrogen chloride along a counter flow gradient of heating the water, you can get out almost pure CO2 out  in a single step. Not very environmentally friendly. 

[JebKeb]

4 hours ago, John JACK said:

Nope yourself.

Wood gas generation process does yield only 1/3 of fuel energy, that's right. But a steam boiler (slightly more complex than a tin can on a candle) has efficiency of 80-90%. That's almost all energy of burning fuel goes to the energy of superheated steam.
The next step is an engine itself. Here ICE has efficiency of ~30% (in best case) and steam — of 5-10%, though steam turbines are much better, 40-50%. But. Wood gas is a poor fuel for an ICE, because it's not only hot and dirty, but consists mostly of nitrogen (generator intakes air, and only oxygen reacts with wood). Engine efficiency on a wood gas is several times worse than on a proper fuel. So engine efficiency is pretty much same.
Altogether wood gas engine is both less efficient than a good steam engine, AND needs better fuel. Gas generator cannot use waste, steam boiler can. The only reason that people use wood gas and not steam is sloth cost. ICE engines are mass produced for ages, and are dirt cheap anywhere. Gas generator is just a barrel with some tubes. And work cost nothing is you can not even afford petrol. Steam engines are not mass produced for ages, and never actually were. Thought you can make a steam engine, good efficient boiler is not just a barrel with some tubes, but a pressure vessel with high temperature. There are no cheap boilers, there are good boilers and there are bombs. And if you can afford a good boiler — you are rich and can afford petrol, steam is only a hobby.

Right. But plants are not even using a small percent of available anyway.
For example miscantus or hogweed grow to several metres high in a single year. There are plenty of CO₂ in air and solar energy for more, they use just a little percent of available. And there are deserts on Earth, where plants can grow great, but doesn't want to.
Algae basins, on the contrary, have a drawback of low surface area, you need to bubble air (with CO₂) artificially. Also replenish water, watch for contamination and whatever. Weeds grow by themselves, and do it on any unused land, just plant seeds in spring and harvest biomass in winter.

You don't need actual petroleum to carry or store energy. Hydrogen and methane are simpler (need less energy) to produce, and work just fine, and are even better for rockets.

Only reason to bother with making synthetic petrol is presence of Otto-engine cars and only solid fuels and need to make them work together.

Firstly, can we please stop talking about boilers and wood gas and stuff like that?! Wood gas is too inpure and boilers are useless for the applications I'm talking about. 

Next, ever seen a weed in the desert? True desert, not just some field where cows trampled all the grass to death. I don't want to use fertilisers because logistics and production. Plants are just not going to be as efficient as what mankind can do. I'm sure if we put our minds to it we could make self building houses and stuff. Algae are a bit better, but still require lots of water and nutrients. 

Hydrogen: evil and bulky. Methane: bulky. What's the point in switching over to these cars? Electric cars are far better, but I don't see 2 billion owners just deciding to scrap their car for something else overnight. The change has to be gradual. 

[Kerbart]

“Here is my proposal for making synthetic hydrocarbon fuel”

• I will dismiss any suggestions as of alternative energy sources over synthetic fuel, or why we need it in the first place
• I will dismiss anything that has a higher yield per area, energy input, money investment or feasibility, for reasons
• I will dismiss any suggestion that we don't need it right now, or that alternative solutions would me more attractive in the future.

“Within these constraints, is the proposed method the optimal solution?”

I'd say, absolutely, without any question (literally). If I were you, I'd invest your entire 401K, and that of your family, into developing this. After all, we can't come up with any sound argument against it.

 

[JebKeb]

This thread appears to still be evolving, so don't lock it.

Edited May 18, 2016 by JebKeb

[John JACK]

15 minutes ago, JebKeb said:

Firstly, can we please stop talking about boilers and wood gas and stuff like that?!

Wood gas and steam are (or at least were) viable alternatives to synthetic petrol, so they should be mentioned here. But I see you point.

There are weeds in most truest deserts. Iconic dunes make not all deserts, they don't even make most. And desert sand is a very fertile soil — if you add water and somehow fix it against wind until plants grow decent roots. Some plants' roots reach very deep, tens of meters, so watering is necessary only initially too. And best of all, after several years plants turn sand to a soil, and desert is not a desert anymore.
Algae are not good at all. Ponds need place, not some wasteland but good flat ground, where you can build other, more profitable stuff. Ponds need fresh clean water, that is scarce and precious. And pond need constant maintenance, when plants grow by themselves. Algae tanks may be better in space, but in space you don't need much petrol anyway.

Methane is bulky, but it's cheap, twice cheaper than petrol or diesel. It's common fuel for buses, that need to run constantly. Lower mileage and bulk of pressure cylinders (150 bar, industry standard for compressed gases) is not a concern, cleaner exhaust and longer engine life is a bonus.
Propane and butane, with other neighbour compounds, like in your gas stove cylinder, are even better. They have pressure lower than 16 bar, as low as 2 bar for pure butane so can be stored in a tin cans, and are only slightly less dense than gasoline. Minor drawback is that they do not evaporate well in cold weather, but it's not a concern for most climates and is solved with a simple preheater. Propane-butane mix is already commonly used in passenger cars and small trucks, with minimal modification of fuel system. It's less cheap than methane, but simpler to use, gives good mileage, and pays off on a long run. Bonuses as above.
Methane, propane and butane are simpler to make than petrol-like liquids, and only slightly less simple to use.

[JebKeb]

I wanted to make synthetic petroleum because it is something the world can use now. It's not the most efficient, it's not the cleanest, but it could be used now with no apparent infrastructure changes.

I am trying to make a replacement for oil. Something that can be used by the present system easily without change and is reasonably good for the enviroment.

Fuel cells are better. LPG and CNG are probably better. But it is very hard into action near-instanty worldwide. (It's probably time to admit this idea is hard, but only a few parties are involved, unlike the billions of car owners.)

I don't like my idea, but it is a viableish method of fuelling today's vehicles carbon-neutrally. The grand plan was, go carbon neutral and slowly replace the ICE fleet with electric and maybe turbine? It is probably too hard to suddenly switch over all cars to electric in only a few years. I hope it'll happen, but you still need a backup and intermediate plan.

 

Edited May 18, 2016 by JebKeb
Actually staying.

[shynung]

7 hours ago, PB666 said:

Carbon is easy to extract, take salt water remove the chlorine and hydrogen in equimolar ratios, you have alkali run this over a water cooler and it sucks the Co2 right out of the air, take the resulting bicarbonate and heat it to near boiling and CO2 promptly comes off. It also sucks up NO, NO2, RNO, SO2, 

If you don't believe me take a glass of water and a teaspoon, next bring to boil the glass of water, while its still hot dump the teaspoon of baking soda into it, it immediately you will  see CO2 evolve, if you do this under pressure even more CO2 will evolve. If you then take that, remembering that sodium hydroxide has a very high solubility in water, and just let it sit out for a few days the CO2 will absorb agian and the bicarbonate will start crystallizing. 

So after several days air pollutants will degrade your soda, and eventually you will need more salt. 

The problem is not so much capturing CO2, the problem is that it is toxic much over current levels, and your typical greenhouse is kind of expensive to cool with the glass and CO2. And you cant really storeit cheaply.

Now if you really want CO2 fast and dont want to fiddle with big watercooler type equipment,

Pump seawater into a system degass it free of O2 and bubble hydrogen chloride along a counter flow gradient of heating the water, you can get out almost pure CO2 out  in a single step. Not very environmentally friendly. 

Sounds like something the late John D. Clark would attempt doing.

[p1t1o]

13 hours ago, todofwar said:

@p1t1o @shynung What I meant was using plants as your atmospheric harvester would not necessarily be as efficient as something that harvests CO2 directly. So plants are not a carbon source, they are a method for harvesting carbon from the atmosphere. 

I'm not so sure thats a clear thing to judge, on the one hand, farming a large amount of biomass-of-whatever-kind takes a fair amount of labour, machinery, effort and time (and all related energy costs) but on the other, the "technology" that plants use to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere is far in advance of anything we could set up. Sow a few seeds, tend them nice and in a few months several hundred tons of solar powered biofactory has manufactured itself and are busy neatly packaging carbon for you.

Doing it industrially means that you don't waste energy manufacturing anything you don't need (any biomass related carbon is going to come in hundreds of different forms, which industrially, isn't that efficient) but you are going to have to spend precious energy for every milligram of carbon sequestration. And you are going to have to produce every single joule of that energy yourself.

So I couldn't say for sure which way is most efficient. But if you *are* going to do it industrially, I think you could compete with biomass much more easily if your carbon source was a bit more concentrated than atmospheric CO2.

 

Is there a possible source from oceanic carbonates?

[kerbiloid]

43 minutes ago, p1t1o said:

Is there a possible source from oceanic carbonates?

According to wiki, in seawater HCO3- concentration ~145 g/t.
So, CO2 from this HCO3 ~ 100 g/t = 0.0001.
To get 1 t of CO2 one must desalt 10000 t of seawater.

Air: CO2 ~0.046% = 0.00046.
To get 1 t of CO2 one must partially condense 2200 t of air.

To split fossil carbonates of course a powerful external source of energy is required.

Edited May 18, 2016 by kerbiloid

[p1t1o]

11 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

According to wiki, in seawater HCO3- concentration ~145 g/t.
So, CO2 from this HCO3 ~ 100 g/t = 0.0001.
To get 1 t of CO2 one must desalt 10000 t of seawater.

Air: CO2 ~0.046% = 0.00046.
To get 1 t of CO2 one must partially condense 2200 t of air.

Welp, thats that.

Cheers!

*edit*

Fun Fact: Just read that apparently, it is quite common for the CO2 captured by scrubbers in the smokestacks of coal fired power stations to be "sequestered" by using it to produce baking soda! Using Baking Soda is not carbon-neutral! 

Edited May 18, 2016 by p1t1o
terrible gramar

[John JACK]

1 hour ago, p1t1o said:

Is there a possible source from oceanic carbonates?

It would be fossil fuel all again. Whole point of going carbon neutral is taking carbon from atmosphere, where it matters. Mining everything (except short lived plants) for carbon will add to global warming, just as oil and coal. To help we need go backwards — grab carbon from air, solidify and bury it. And that's best done again with plants.

11 hours ago, JebKeb said:

It's not the most efficient, it's not the cleanest, but it could be used now with no apparent infrastructure changes.

Everybody loves oil not because oil is that great. Everybody loves oil because for every unit of energy spent in extracting and refining it, they get TEN units of energy back. That gives enough spare energy to support people and institutions not busy in making energy. Like workers, engineers, scientists, artists, game developers and so on. Otherwise they would have to mine coal or plow fields or scavenge fruits and seeds just to support themselves, not do anything nice they do now.
Also oil is great raw material for chemistry. But to make lubricants, plastics, food and everything else it's first split to components. And that components may be too harvested from plants or synthesised more or less directly. Actually, to make crude petroleum from hydrogen and carbon you'll have to synthesise it's components and mix them.

Synthetic oil will absolutely not return that much spare energy. Actually it will return less than was spent in it's production. So it may be profitabe only when produced by using even cheaper energy — nuclear or better fusion. Otherwise synthetic fuel is just a wartime erzatz — you spend expensive coal energy to power your war machines to get sources of cheap energy. Because tanks (or rockets) do not run well on wood and coal.

Switching over global fleet of cars isn't that hard. Modern cars are already made to serve five, maybe ten years, and than be replaced. If new generation of cars will use gas tanks of fuel cells, people would buy them. IF they are better and cheaper, of course. Electric cars are still much more expensive than LF ones, and cheap recharge is ruined by low mileage.
Through 20 century and still now, overall inefficiency of ICE engine is offset by cheap, handy and very energy dense liquid fuel. If it became not so cheap, people will switch to other fuels. Like they are massively switching existing cars to methane and LPG right now. It's simple and in a long run it's cheaper. Synthetic methane and propane also would be much cheaper than synthetic petrol. There already is infrastructure for gas stations and car manufacturers can modify design for gas tanks.

tl;dr: people need not synthetic petroleum, people need cheap energy. Any form is good — till it's cheap.

[Sereneti]

You dont need to liquifi the air, to get the CO2
you can use Ca to bind the CO2 -> CaCO2

[kerbiloid]

10 minutes ago, Sereneti said:

You dont need to liquifi the air, to get the CO2
you can use Ca to bind the CO2 -> CaCO2

The carbonate pyrolysis will require more energy after that.

And there's no need to liquify whole air, only until CO2 condensation, that's.why I've written "partially".

Edited May 18, 2016 by kerbiloid

[Sereneti]

6 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

The carbonate pyrolysis will require more energy after that.

there are some recources of natural-CO2 too...
Vulcanism is a natural source of CO2...
The increase of the % of CO2 in the air, decrease the amount of Liquifid air...

 

[p1t1o]

30 minutes ago, John JACK said:

It would be fossil fuel all again. Whole point of going carbon neutral is taking carbon from atmosphere, where it matters. Mining everything (except short lived plants) for carbon will add to global warming, just as oil and coal. To help we need go backwards — grab carbon from air, solidify and bury it. And that's best done again with plants.

Thats all well and good if reduction of atmospheric CO2 is your goal, but here it was to create synthetic hydrocarbons.

[kerbiloid]

16 minutes ago, Sereneti said:

there are some recources of natural-CO2 too...
Vulcanism is a natural source of CO2...
The increase of the % of CO2 in the air, decrease the amount of Liquifid air.

Vulcanism is just a part of global CO2 equilibrium. What they exhaust, bogs and ocean absorb.
So, volcanic CO2 is exactly that CO2 which some of them are going to capture for carbon.

36 minutes ago, John JACK said:

Actually, to make crude petroleum from hydrogen and carbon you'll have to synthesise it's components and mix them.

Why? Fischer-Tropsch give the already mixed "oil". One must separate them, as with the natural oil.

36 minutes ago, John JACK said:

If new generation of cars will use gas tanks of fuel cells, people would buy them. IF they are better and cheaper, of course.

And it's absolutely easy to make them cheaper. Just raise the environment pollution penalties against the old ones.

Edited May 18, 2016 by kerbiloid

[Sereneti]

1 minute ago, kerbiloid said:

Vulcanism is just a part of global CO2 equilibrium. What they exhaust, bogs and ocean absorb.
So, volcanic CO2 is exactly that CO2 which some of them is going to capture for carbon.

there are many of Natural-CO2 exhausts, that are put their CO2 into the air...
and, they are nearby of cheap energy (like Island...)
-