- cross-posted to:
- science@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- science@beehaw.org
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Finally a way to turn clean solar into something I can burn.
It takes twice as much electrical energy to produce energy in the form of gasoline.
We lose money on every sale, but make it up on volume!
Sustainable energy is the key to making the Aircela machine practical and cost-effective. Running it on the grid from coal or natural gas power plants defeats the purpose of removing carbon from the air, and the electricity will cost more, too.
The company themselves even state that this is supposed to be driven by solar/wind, otherwise it makes no sense. This is regular PtX but in SFF for modular small scale deployment.
Even then, the value prop is questionable.
It treats sustainable energy dedicated to this purpose as “free”, ignoring the opportunity cost of using that energy directly.
For example, let’s say I dedicated my solar exclusively to making gasoline. I could get about 14 gallons a month of “free” gasoline… Except my home power bill would go up about 150 dollars a month… opportunity cost would be over 10 dollars a gallon…
Sure, for a homeowner it doesn’t make sense. But what about at grid scale when there isn’t enough demand for that electricity?
What opportunity cost is there to NOT do it when the power would otherwise be wasted or generation capacity reduced? If anything, I’d say the opportunity cost is of not doing this with over generation on the grid/plant
How much do we have an over generation problem in general though? I suppose the argument would be that solar is curtailed because they don’t want to deal with the potential for overgeneration, but we already have a number of approaches for energy storage. Their pricing for generating at most a gallon a day is a price exceeding a battery system of LFP that could do a lot more than a gallon of gas. This is ignoring the rather significant potential of Sodium batteries.
So this doesn’t look to be cheaper than battery systems, it looks to be way less efficient than battery systems. The biggest use case as energy storage in general seems to be if you want it to spend a few months (but not too many months, fuel degrades in the tank after all). The more narrow use case is to cater to scenarios where you absolutely need the energy density of gasoline, so boats and airplanes critically so, maybe some heavy equipment. I’ll grant that, but if particularly sodium batteries will be an acceptable approach, it’ll be better than this solution in that very wide variety of circumstances.
Over generation is very big. I agree batteries are better, though.
We need to be able to support peak winter heating and peak summer cooling and we need to do that with excess margin.
Everything in between we have excess power, unless it’s something like hydro dams which are easy to control and aren’t a big extra cost and part of how they naturally operate.
We generally use gas peaker plants to help which we can turn off or on, but it’s more efficient to not do that, and those are expensive.
It would also make it easier to build big nuclear plants if we could manage the off peak load into batteries for the day.
Eh, not quite.
Sometimes electricity is so cheap that we could be giving it away for free. This and other techniques could be used to store excess energy for when we need it later.
Also it’s a carbon sink if you barrel it up and bury it
What’s the alternative? Turning down production when demand is lower than supply or try to out it into batteries.
So you can either do nothing, or use the capacity you’d otherwise waste. Then it comes down to which is a better / cheaper storage method: building batteries, or something that turns that extra power I to some that can be easily stored/used later.
And that’s just their target, not actual.
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Plastic is already made from the residues of gasoline production.
Sure we can extract a bit more gasoline from it but it’s not going to replace drilling oil.
insert Adam Something’s “shitting in the living room” metaphor here
Kind of pretty important and relevant:
The main reason why this process isn’t “something for nothing” is that it takes twice as much electrical energy to produce energy in the form of gasoline. As Aircela told The Autopian:
Aircela is targeting >50% end to end power efficiency. Since there is about 37kWh of energy in a gallon of gasoline we will require about 75kWh to make it. When we power our machines with standalone, off-grid, photovoltaic panels this will correspond to less than $1.50/gallon in energy cost.
So basically juat imagine a gas powered generator hooked up to this to power the process of pulling gasoline out of the air.
Ok, see how that’s silly?
Right, now, if you do run it off solar power, then sure! That makes more sense.
Hate hyrdocarbon fuels all you want, they are very good at being dense, portable, and exist in the vast majority of pre-existing logistics infrastructure.
But the thing isn’t magic, it takes energy to convert air into basically a form of liquid energy.
And… you’d probably have to refine it or chemically treat it at least somewhat.
I’m not a chemist, but I am guessing this is the case, if you want gasoline that is just equivalent to what your car would expect.
This would actually provide me enough gas each week with my hybrid in office schedule.
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So power to x, basically
But smaller
Reusing the co2 in the air. Its a good idea.
I imagine this as a system that uses spare renewable energy like solar to generate gas that can be used to smooth the curve that is a renewable power source. It’s real value is that it reduces infrastructure needs, allowing its use in remote environments. But it does add a lot of additional failure points.
The machine also traps water vapor, and uses electrolysis to break water down into hydrogen and oxygen instead of destroying your car’s cooling system.
what the fuck does this even mean
All the catches
