Just saw this news article trending on facebook which already makes me think its too good to be true…
But hey this could be the solution to a lot of the Worlds problems,
This stuff is fantastic.
It's going to solve global warming, world hunger and the mystery of what's in the briefcase in pulp fiction I bet.
I'm going to bathe in it and drown the people I don't like in it and have my children christened with it even though I'm not religious (well, that might change, I could decide to worship this stuff).
More importantly, I'm going to run my bicycle on it.
Oh wait.
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Basic thermodynamics and engineering sense would tell us that it takes more energy to make that fuel than the energy that the fuel would provide.
There's a lot of hare-brained "green" projects out there that are at best publicity stunts, or at worst a means of extracting money from dumb investors or government programs.
This doesn't violate thermodynamics. What this process does is essentially use the bio-fuel as an alternative to a Li battery. It takes energy to produce it, but they are currently using renewable energy in order to make that happen. Instead of sending that electricity through the grid to charge batteries, they are using that energy to make fuel which can fill the infrastructure for cars that is already in place, thereby reducing the cost of running cars on renewable energy. You have to think about the energy densities of both batteries and bio-diesel. For the same amount of weight, you can carry much more energy in the form of "gas" (previously fossil fuels, etc) than you can with a lithium ion battery. Less weight yields more efficiency in the cars. Not only that, but lithium is becoming more and more scarce. If this process becomes a viable alternative, we wouldn't run out of our battery material. Instead, we would simply produce more with more renewable energy. Besides all of this, electric cars are expensive. Diesel, less so.
EDIT: The two things that I am really concerned about with respect to this production process is the amount of energy lost (vs traditional batteries or a grid method) and the source of the carbon. They say that they use CO2 from the air (piped from some CO2 producing source, I believe), however I don't know if that is the only source and if they can use the levels of CO2 that is typically found in the atmosphere, thus relying on CO2 production in order to produce this bio-fuel, potentially keeping the problem of CO2 emission around longer than if they could use CO2 straight from the air.
This is backed Audi, one of the largest and most successful companies in the world (not to mention the VW group they're part of) there is nothing "hare-brained' about it. Read further into how the process works, this is an idea that has been kicking around for a long time just know one was able to make it cost effective in the past, that problem appear to have been solved (probably by a few billion on Audi's part).
Federal Minister of Education and Research Prof. Dr.
What a title.
In all seriousness, this could be interesting.
edit:
This is from Ars Technica comments by the user jevandezande:
As someone who works on CO generating catalysts, which are necessary for this process, I have to be the party-pooper and say that this is not going to save the world, at least not yet. Audi is presumably using the Fischer-Tropsch process1, as it is currently the most efficient method for alkane production. It was first discovered in 1925 and can convert CO (generated from CO2) and H2 into various alkanes (including diesel and gasoline). The problem with this process is the need for a large amount of energy to overcome the barrier for initially reducing CO2 to CO without also reducing H2O to H2 + O2. There are a variety of catalysts out there that can do this, but they all suffer from a combination of the following problems:
* inefficiency (large excess amounts of energy are needed compared to the energy of diesel produced, and thus wasted)
* low turnover frequency (i.e. speed)
* high cost (due to the use of rare earth elements like Rhenium, ~ $3,000/kg)
* short lifetimes (meaning the catalyst must be thrown out or recycled, which can be expensive)Unfortunately, Audi did not release the specifics of of diesel production, but I expect it is highly inefficient (and thus why they are only doing it small scale for the publicity). This is a field of active research and will hopefully one day become cost effective (it is currently more costly than using an electric car). Hopefully in the future this process will become much more efficient, as it is a very convenient, carbon-neutral, dense energy source and it could also reduce or eliminate our dependence on foreign oil.
I could understand this process being used in the future when fuel reserves are close to non-existant and we need to synthesize it ourselves. As of right now, I'd rather see wider use of Emulsifiers to literally water down diesel to reduce consumption and emissions.
As interesting as this may appear, this project brings nothing new to the table. All of the major processes involved in the making of this fuel are quite old actually, with the newest one (Fischer-Tropsch) being now 90 years old. This just basically uses a renewable energy as one of the energy components in one of it's processes. They use solar energy to convert electrical energy into hydrogen (electrolysis) and then use the hydrogen + CO2 to make CO + H2O...CO, ya know that thing that kills people with old radiators..
The thing is, if they stopped at making hydrogen and used it as the fuel source, this whole thing would actually be somewhat efficient in the way that we would wave a liquid fuel instead of a battery that is easily carried wherever needed, instead they want to make a fuel that is compatible with current engines (witch is understandable) and that leads to additional processes where in each step you end up loosing both economical and energy efficiency when summarising the initial energy gathered vs the energy produced in the final product.
Oh and this kind of fuel was pretty much the same Nazi Germany used during the war because they had their oil trade supplies embargoed :P
I'll chime in on this... Its interesting that most of our most least polluting fuel types in the world requires a lot of energy to make (hydrogen fuel cell... Kind of interesting that the cleaner we try to go the more waste energy we use making the fuel... Guess technology is gonna need another leap