The DOD angle also explains the emphasis on air-capture, which would have to be less efficient than flue-gas capture.

@ Rafael,
If the numbers are correct, (we'll never know) but as your calcs show the capture stage requires ~1/3 KWH per Kilogram. This is only the 55Kj/Kg It does not include the other ~2/3 KWH in "waste heat" or the rather more substantial 465Kj captured hydrogen bonus which could be used for fuel feedstock or as in this example it is consumed in removing the carbon.

When the article describes this as supplying 33% of the required Hydrogen it is plainly misleading.

The 8.5 KWH of energy that is used gives us captured Carbon Dioxide nothing more and that will not work in any motor I know of.

The schematics don't show energy input or the energy required to "separate the waste Potassium"
At best this is an oddity dressed as saviour for the gullible. Sorry if this offends anyone, but you should know by now the world is full of ... (to be filled in by reader).

3KWH would have looked much better in the above, It's 930am here, so the day can only get better
arn

I see the point that the amount of energy required so make the synfuel is quite high and would be better spent sent to plug in vehicles. But I tend to think that and EV dominated system is very far in the future, if ever, wearas theere is much room for improvement within the current liquid fuel system. Batteries will get better but so will gasoline/diesel/designer fuel engines and hybrid powertrains.

Just ditching current liquid fuel based trasnportation will not be possible and even down the road there will always be a need for it; airplanes are the best example. Fruthermore, I think this type of approach could have a larger impact faster on actually reducing carbon emissions without too much pain, than jsut wishing for EVs to be made available.

Note: I think GM and others promote EVs and hydrogen so much precisely because they know they won't work, at least any time soon...

It has long been the objective of Alchemists to turn substances into GOLD. In the mid-20th century we learned how to do exactly that.

The Recipe?

To make a pound of Gold, first start with a pound of Platinum, and then prodigious amounts of added energy in an accelerator...

This is another such project to getting Gold by starting with Platinum.

To make electrolysis practical, to provide the hydrogen, you need not waste heat but high-grade heat with a huge enthalpy. But we don't work with 850 degree C temperatures as that is only two hundred degrees or less, than the melting temperature of high grade steel, and long after most common steels have become as strong as stiff putty as it glows white hot.

Any current Nuclear or Coal Plant does not deal with such temperatures, except in the hottest area of the burners or fuel bundles.

Interesting but not practical.

This "GreenFreedom" thing looks like hype to me.

I read the entire LLNL PDF.  I found several disquieting things:

• The 410 kJ/mol electric energy requirement figure is soft-pedaled.
• The ratio of CO2 to H2 production is not given.
• Figures for e.g. acid production are bandied about, without specifics.

While I normally have good vibes about stuff from our national laboratories, this one makes me suspicious, like some smarter colleague of George Deutsch had his hand in pitching it just so to achieve a political objective.

The heat of formation of carbon dioxide is -393.51 kJ/mol, so this process requires more energy (as electricity!) to capture a molecule of CO2 than is produced by burning the carbon in the first place.  A great deal of this is offset by hydrogen production if you need hydrogen, but it's obvious at first blush that this holds exactly zero possibility for carbon capture from fossil-fired plants; its only prospects are to use excess power from carbon-neutral energy sources, such as wind and nuclear.  We'd make much better use of those with PHEVs than production of any kind of liquid fuel.

Engineer-Poet,

You read wrong.

Only 55 kJ/mol CO2 goes toward CO2 recovery and regeneration of KHCO3 to K2CO3. The rest of 410 kJ/mol is used up by the H2 production.

But fifi, the h2 production amounts to the grand total of 0 by the time The whole 510KJ of energy flow is utilised to the carbon capture. And we are still 1/3 of a killowatt hour down.

Definately an interesting dance.
this equates to *? litres fuel?
next calc.

Fifi, if you could get back the other 355 kJ/mol as electricity, this wouldn't be an issue.  The problem is that there is no way to separate this process from the electrolytic production of hydrogen (a very costly process), and the figures themselves are vague (hydrogen yields about 295 kJ/mol, so we're not even given the ratio of hydrogen produced to CO2 captured).

Again, this is *not* intended to clean up coal-burning power plants. The energy input to the process will certainly come from non-fossil sources, otherwise there would be negative benefit (both in total energy used and in CO2 produced) and no point to the exercise.

even if the energy cost is 8 Kwh (or even higher) to create a gallon of gasoline using this process, and a gallon of gasoline stores 35Kwh, doesn’t that imply a net positive? in other words, the process is pretty efficient at converting electricity into a transportable liquid fuel, no? (if these numbers are wrong, perhaps someone out the can provide me a simple analysis of the energy cost in Kwh using the process, to create 1 gal of gasoline)

So, think of all of the location in the world where "stranded" renewable energy exists. geothermal in Iceland, wind in the trade winds, solar in the deserts, major hydro capacity in remote rivers in Siberia/canada, etc. by "stranded renewable energy" i mean renewable energy that could be efficiently developed except for the fact that it is located somewhere where the transportation costs make it impractical to develop (ie because of transmission line losses, cost of high power lines, etc). Why not use that energy to create transportable liquid fuel using this process??

at what point would it be cost effective is you had $0.015/Kwh clean new hydro energy available?

even if the energy cost is 8 Kwh (or even higher) to create a gallon of gasoline using this process, and a gallon of gasoline stores 35Kwh, doesn’t that imply a net positive? in other words, the process is pretty efficient at converting electricity into a transportable liquid fuel, no? (if these numbers are wrong, perhaps someone out the can provide me a simple analysis of the energy cost in Kwh using the process, to create 1 gal of gasoline)

So, think of all of the location in the world where "stranded" renewable energy exists. geothermal in Iceland, wind in the trade winds, solar in the deserts, major hydro capacity in remote rivers in Siberia/canada, etc. by "stranded renewable energy" i mean renewable energy that could be efficiently developed except for the fact that it is located somewhere where the transportation costs make it impractical to develop (ie because of transmission line losses, cost of high power lines, etc). Why not use that energy to create transportable liquid fuel using this process??

at what point would it be cost effective is you had $0.015/Kwh clean new hydro energy available?

Engineer-Poet, Arnold

I maintain you read wrong.

It would not be a good process just to capture CO2. The point of the LANL exercise is not just to recover CO2 but to create syngas for liquid fuel synthesis. This is why electrolysis is a good approach. They are trying to figure out the cost of creating liquid fuel from non-carbon electricity, water and quite literally thin air.

If you read the LANL overview report, they get 1/3 of the hydrogen needed for methanol synthesis from that step. MeOH synthesis from CO2 requires 3 H2 per CO2 :

CO2 + 3 H2 --> CH3OH + H2O

So they get 1 mol H2 per captured mol CO2 on this step and they need to generate 2 mol H2 per mol CO2 on the side using more conventional electrolysers.

The CO2 recovery process takes 410 kJ/mol total.
- 55 kJ/mol CO2 for 2 KHCO3 --> K2CO3 + CO2 + H2O
- 355 kJ/mol H2 for H2O -> H2 + 1/2 O2

355 kJ/mol H2 is in line with typical electrolysers. A Norsk Hydro type 5040 electrolyser operated at 5150A per cell uses 4.3 kWh/Nm3 H2 that is 352 kJ/mol (1 Nm3 = 44 mol of gas). It's kosher. No hand waving there.

Tom deplume, where do you get your $10 billions plant for 18,000 bbl/d gasoline? The overview report says $5 billions for the gasoline plant and "only" $4.6 billions for just 5,000 t/d methanol (essentially, removing the MTG step).

Where is the 100% increase coming from? Inflation? I know the dollar is a bit shaky but the report was released just 3 months ago. I didn't know we had already become Argentina or Peru.

http://www.lanl.gov/news/newsbulletin/pdf/Green_Freedom_Overview.pdf

A point I do not see anyone addressing is where the ~3 tons of K2C03 (potassium carbonate) per ton of atomospheric C02 will come from and cost.

Wikipedia says most of this material comes from electrolysis of KCl, which can be obtained from sea water, but that means more input energy, chlorine (in some form) as a waste, and a whole other infrastructure.

2KCl + 2H2O -> 2K0H + H2 + Cl2
2KOH + CO2 -> K2C03 + H2

To get the potassium carbonate, energy is needed and there are hydrogen and chlorine byproducts.

So this is not fuel from air and water. Potassium carbonate (or potassium chloride) is also needed in large quantities.

even if the energy cost is 8 Kwh (or even higher) to create a gallon of gasoline using this process, and a gallon of gasoline stores 35Kwh, doesn’t that imply a net positive?

Only if it's better (cheaper, cleaner, faster to market) than the alternatives.

Here's a quote from the GreenFreedom pdf:The analyses estimated a capital cost of $5.0 billion for an 18,400-bbl/day synthetic gasoline plant.... For those keeping track, this is about $270,000 investment to get 1 bbl/day of product, or nearly 3 times what Alberta tar-sands cost.

Nuclear powe accounts for more than 50% of the total plant capital investment.

That would be in the neighborhood of $3 billion then, or about what we'd expect for a 1 GWE plant (the reactor power is not specified in the PDF).  If operated via the GreenFreedom process and feeding a vehicle fleet getting 30 MPG, its energy generation would allow 23.2 million vehicle-miles/day.  If it instead supplied 1 GWE to PHEV's using 300 Wh/mile, you'd get 80 million vehicle-miles per day for perhaps 60% of the capital investment.  Other benefits would include less air and noise pollution.

This is like the H2CAR scheme which I ripped apart last year; it appears aimed at preventing public sentiment from getting behind electric propulsion and sealing the fate of the oil companies and exporters.

@ AWB -

My back-of-the-envelope guesstimate of 8kWh energy input referred to 1kg of CO2 input.

1kg CO2 + 0.41kg H2O -> 0.27kg HC + 1.14kg O2

Yes, oxygen atoms really are that heavy. The HC would most likely be synthetic diesel, which has a density of ~0.83kg/liter. A US gallon is equal to 3.754 liters. So that 8kWh input would yield

0.27 / (0.83 * 3.754) = ~0.09 gallons

Put another way: producing a full gallon of diesel would require a much higher electrical energy input, on the order of 92kWh!

Quoth Fifi:

It would not be a good process just to capture CO2. The point of the LANL exercise is not just to recover CO2 but to create syngas for liquid fuel synthesis.

And what is the purpose of the liquid fuel?  There is no point in making synthetic gasoline except to run vehicles.  18,400 bbl/day is 773,000 gallons/day; at $5 billion per plant, you'd spend about $6500 to get one gallon per day.  At 30 MPG, that's about $220/mile/day.

Li-ion cells are down around $620/kWh (18650 cells, qty 50, retail).  At 200 Wh/mile, that's $124 to get 1 mile/cycle; that's $124/mile/day at 1 cycle/day, $62/mile/day at 2 cycles/day.  A 1 GW nuclear plant at $3 billion and 90% capacity factor costs about $46/mile/day.  Electric propulsion costs as little as half the nuclear-synthetic gasoline system, plus it's quieter, cleaner and adds to the stability of the electrical grid through V2G.

Batteries are only going to get cheaper.  There is no point in wasting nuclear power on complicated electrochemistry to run internal combustion engines.  If we need to capture carbon for e.g. plastics, we can probably get it more cheaply from plants than nukes.

Engineer-Poet,

You need liquid fuel because your Chevy Volt has a 16 kWh battery, which is more than enough to achieve 100% EV daily commute between night-time recharges. But on long distance travels, the battery runs out of juice and the range extender kicks. Said range extender runs ... on liquid fuel.

I agree that with falling costs, batteries can get larger but battery limitation is not just a matter of cost but also of weight. You quickly reach a point where adding batteries doesn't get you more range as you expend more energy to move a heavier vehicle. So for a general use vehicle within foreseeable technology, you still need a range extender that gives access to the very high energy density and long range of liquid fuel.

Similarly, planes also are not going to fly on batteries. They need liquid fuel no matter what.

That's why you still need liquid fuel even in a Li-Ion world. You need a lot less - may be 20% or 30% of the current demand - but you still need some.

.

The other thing to consider is the physical footprint of the whole thing. 5,000 t/day methanol = 1,875 t/day carbon = 684,000 t/year carbon. So one plant can capture and transform 684,000 tonnes of carbon each year. Looking at typical nuclear power plants and GTL plants, I'd say the plant would physically use around 100 acres, safety perimeter and tankage included.

In land-constrained countries like Japan or Europe, the plant would use about that, 100 acres. In the US, the plant would typically stand on a larger domain of a few hundreds acres. Palo Verde in Arizona has a huge 4,000 acres domain. Most of it is just free land. The 3.75 GW generating station proper takes about 10% of that and the installations are very spread out.

To compare with biomass, a very generous estimate of dry biomass/acre/year yield is around 10 t/acre for grass or wood crops. Dry biomass is around 50% carbon so 5/t carbon/year. So it would take about 136,800 acres to match the capture capacity of one LANL plant, more than 210 square miles. If you take 100 acres for the LANL plant, that's a 1 to 1,368 ratio...

The bonus of biomass is the energy - 10 MJ/kg usable - that that you don't get through direct capture but the land use is enormous. It's possible to reduce that footprint and boost the biomass yields but it requires fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation, increases the risk for soil erosion and depletion and water table pollution.

Nuclear vs. "soft" renewables is always the same story : intensive vs. extensive. Nuclear concentrates the power and the nuisances in one place. "Soft" solutions - biomass, wind, etc. - spread over large spaces.

on long distance travels, the battery runs out of juice and the range extender kicks. Said range extender runs ... on liquid fuel.

We'll have plenty of liquid fuel for the short term, and the PHEV will be replaced by the EV in the long term.  There is a serious danger of investing in plants with a 60-year lifetime to serve needs which may only exist for 20... or not at all.

If the PHEV cuts fuel requirements by 80%, a full replacement of the US fleet would cut gasoline consumption from ~140 billion gallons/year to ~28 Ggal/yr, or about 77 million gallons/day.  The question is if you can get that for less than $6500 to produce one gallon/day (roughly $500 billion total capital cost).  If we made 42 Ggal/yr of ethanol, it would require the carbon from roughly 140 million tons of biomass.  This is a relatively easy amount to get; figures I've seen say the USA generates about 245 million tons/year of municipal waste alone, and we produce ~160 billion tons of corn stover per year.  I doubt very much that Vinod Khosla would be investing in any ethanol schemes with capital costs anywhere close to $270,000/bbl/day.

There is also the question of time frame.  Gen III reactors won't be coming on-line until 2016.  Nobody has built even a pilot-scale plant to demonstrate this carbon-capture scheme (I'm assuming the chemistry is prior art), so figure the first production-scale plant no sooner than 2020 (grafted onto a plant already permitted today).  But is there a point to this?  Bio-fuels will be highly advanced by then, and GHG considerations will push more toward replacing coal than displacing the remaining fossil motor fuel.

batteries can get larger but battery limitation is not just a matter of cost but also of weight. You quickly reach a point where adding batteries doesn't get you more range as you expend more energy to move a heavier vehicle.

The tzero tripled its range and cut its battery weight in half when it went to Li-ion.  Increase the pack size by 50% and you have 400 miles range.  There are Li-ion chemistries which can be charged in minutes.  This is a full replacement for liquid fuels.  Other possibilities include zinc-air fuel cells.

hat's why you still need liquid fuel even in a Li-Ion world.

The question is if it makes sense to produce it by splitting atoms.

Make that 160 million tons of corn stover per year.

Engineer-Poet,

We'll have plenty of liquid fuel for the short term

And with brown coal, in-situ gasification and tar-sands, we have centuries worth of liquid fuel if we insist on dumping as much CO2 as possible in the atmosphere. Getting rid of fossil fuel is the problem. Not running out if. Don't move the target.

I doubt very much that Vinod Khosla would be investing in any ethanol schemes with capital costs anywhere close to $270,000/bbl/day.

Well, I'm afraid you are very wrong again.

Vinod Khosla and Range Fuels Inc. are plonking $225 millions in their Soperton Georgia plant, which will produce 20 millions gallons of ethanol a year.

And 225 10^6 USD / 20 10^6 gal/yr * 365 day/yr = 4106.25 USD/gal/day. Accounting for the fact that ethanol has 34% less energy per volume than gasoline and that there are no engines on the market to actually use the better compression that E100 or E85 could offer, the capital cost in equivalent gasoline = 4106.25 / (1-0.34) = 6221.59 USD/gal/day.

Or if you prefer 261,306.82 USD/bbl/day

So, to my own surprise (and thanks a lot to you, for pointing that out to me), the LANL plant is actually quite competitive with cellulosic ethanol in terms of capital investment. On top of that, the LANL proposal has the added benefit of not using biomass and has 0 land impact and very low sensitivity to fuel cost, contrary to biomass which will not come for free if cellulosic ethanol becomes widely deployed.

There is also the question of time frame. Gen III reactors won't be coming on-line until 2016. Nobody has built even a pilot-scale plant to demonstrate this carbon-capture scheme (I'm assuming the chemistry is prior art), so figure the first production-scale plant no sooner than 2020 (grafted onto a plant already permitted today).

It'd be really nice if you actually read the report. Really.

The LANL report is not a new discovery assuming any new technology. It's explicitly a feasibility study based on components which are all available today.

All parts are known and in use. K2CO3/KHCO3 cycling is well known for low pressure gas scrubbing in place of MDEA for certain types of highly reactive mixes. But it wasn't used to recover CO2 but rather to get rid of it: that's the novelty. The carbonate thermo-cycle used in the back-end is also known quantity. Electrolysers have been around for a century. Methanol synthesis from syngas has been practiced on industrial scale for more than 50 years. The MTG conversion has been used on an industrial scale in NZ in the 80s. And nuclear power reactors have been around in large scale for 40 years and doing relatively fine in the West, except for some bizarre reason in the US.

Also, the LANL proposal explicitly excludes any optimization or optimistic cost assumption. In particular, you can read that electrolysers are costed using the current offer and account for 20% of the capital expense. I'm ready to bet they assume Norsk Hydro type 5000 electrolysers, which are very expensive. There's a lot of cost margin on the way down.

There is always risks and operational issues in every new chemical plants, even those which use well known technologies or even perfect replicas of other plants. But that's not specific to this one. It's true of any plant of any sort. It's always 10% more expensive and 10% late, no matter what the initial estimates were. That's one of the grand rules of chemical process.

As for the time frame of Gen III reactors, it's really purely a US issue.

For some reasons, it seems that nothing can get done in the US without enormous delays, gigantic cost overruns and loads and loads of hand-wringing and over-the-top histrionics. The US can't rebuild New Orleans. The US can't rebuild the World Trade Center. The US can't have a functional health care systems while spending twice as much as everybody else. The US can't prevent its bridges from collapsing in broad daylight. The US can't get anything done. USA, the can't do nation.

Meanwhile, in countries that have not yet been overrun by idiots and amateurs, things are going pretty well. Reactors are build in Japan on time and on budget by Toshiba, MHI and Hitachi. In Europe, Areva took its lump in Finland with an overbearing regulator and incompetent sub-contractors but the Flamanville EPR is going ship-shape (and may have a shot at going on-line before Finland, LOL). On the chemical plant side, the Oryx GTL plant in Qatar, a much more complex plant than what is proposed by LANL, is finally going on-track after one year of problems related to particulates in the syngas.

Plus, added benefit, if liquid fuel really becomes useless (fat chance), you still get 50% of the investment to generate electricity the old fashioned way while a cellulosic ethanol plant would be a 100% loss.

The tzero tripled its range and cut its battery weight in half when it went to Li-ion. Increase the pack size by 50% and you have 400 miles range. There are Li-ion chemistries which can be charged in minutes. This is a full replacement for liquid fuels. Other possibilities include zinc-air fuel cells

The tzero is a ultra-light concept car. Double its battery and you nearly double its mass. I'm not sure the frame is gonna take it nicely. And I would point to you that charging a 40 kWh battery in 2 minutes at 100% efficiency (let's be generous) takes a 1,200 kW connection to the grid. Just for the connector on a 1200V circuit, that's 1000 amperes. I know what a 1000 A medium voltage circuit looks like. I'm not gonna like it and the local utility neither :)

.

But now, I would point to you that large centralized thermal solar plants (the so-called utility-scale CSPs) have the same cooling requirements as nuclear power plants and same capacity for CO2 capture through cooling towers. So, the LANL proposal would also work for those and it would be all Mother-Nature, no evul nucular.

Is that ecologically-correct enough for you?

It'd be really nice if you actually read the report. Really.

Maybe you should read it yourself, then you'd know what it doesn't say.  It doesn't state the reactor power, among other details I was looking for.

nuclear power reactors have been around in large scale for 40 years and doing relatively fine in the West

A point I've made many times.  I just fail to see the value of the detour from work, to chemical energy through carbon capture followed by carbon release, and back to work in a heat engine.  The capital expense is exorbitant and the efficiency is lousy.

Vinod Khosla and Range Fuels Inc. are plonking $225 millions in their Soperton Georgia plant, which will produce 20 millions gallons of ethanol a year.

Must be a prototype, because they sure aren't going to make money that way.

Getting rid of fossil fuel is the problem.

We've been around this circular claim of yours before.  Let me list the questions you beg:

• Why is it important to use nuclear electricity to make chemical fuel, instead of using the electricity directly at 4-6 times the efficiency?
• Why should we pursue a program which has approximately twice the capital costs of pure EV's... even at today's ridiculous prices for batteries?
• How do we eliminate fossil fuels by maintaining a vehicle fleet which is built around the use of fossil fuels?
• Once we've dealt with the use of fossil fuels for electric generation and ground transport, what is the advantage of harvesting carbon from the atmosphere using nuclear power instead of taking it from e.g. garbage, where it is already fixed?

Those are pretty reasonable and pertinent questions.  I was going to ask you to have at them, until I read this:

The tzero is a ultra-light concept car. Double its battery and you nearly double its mass. I'm not sure the frame is gonna take it nicely.

Obviously you don't care about the truth.  Here are the before-and-after figures on the tzero.  Facts:

• The tzero's original lead-acid battery weighed about 1300 pounds (derived).
• The new Li-ion battery weighs 770 pounds (stated).
• Adding 50% would bring the weight up to 2355 pounds (calculated), still 150 pounds short of the original weight.

I don't know whose lapdog you are, Fifi, but you should go back to your trainer until you can stop making crap up.

Engineer-Poet,

Ohhhhh, "lapdog". You forgot "shill".

Quoteth Asimov, "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."

I wish you a good day.

"what is the advantage of harvesting carbon from the atmosphere"? To get it out of the atmosphere, of course! Have you not been paying attention? Carbon left in the ground does not contribute to global warming.

Well, duh, Richard.

Now address the second half:  why it's so much better to get it from nukes than tapping our garbage.