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Post by Barry Brook on Jan 16, 2013 19:42:46 GMT 9.5
A new post has been published on BraveNewClimate. Link here: bravenewclimate.com/zero-emission-synfuel-from-seawaterDoes the concept of cheap synfuel to replace oil-based products, that is created using carbon dioxide dissolved in seawater (so potentially also helping to relieve ocean acidification), sound too good to be true? Read the post, and let us know your feedback on this exciting concept, described and elaborated (with a well-justified costings model) by Dr John Morgan. This BNC Discussion Forum thread is for the comments related to this BNC post.
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Post by anonposter on Jan 16, 2013 20:05:01 GMT 9.5
The end cost seems pretty good to me but lack of aromatics might be a problem for petrol engines (knocking, I'd rather not go back to leaded petrol myself), though not using aromatics would have some public health advantages.
Jet engines will be fine on alkanes (or anything that doesn't destroy the engine really) so the US Navy shouldn't need to do too much.
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Post by cyrilr on Jan 16, 2013 22:10:36 GMT 9.5
If the electricity to synfuel process is 50% efficient (rough estimate) and a liter of synfuel has 10 kWh embedded energy, it follows that you need 20 kWh of electricity per liter of synfuel.
If that electricity comes from a low cost low carbon source, of 5 cents per kWh, then the cost is $1/liter just in electricity costs. Then you add capital, operations personell, maintenance equipment, replacement, etc.
I have very serious doubts about the cost of this idea. What is more it is a major energy sink, in fact energy hog. We can't spare the clean energy capacity for this until more efficient solutions such as electric vehicles, etc. have saturated the market.
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Post by John Morgan on Jan 16, 2013 22:53:06 GMT 9.5
Cyril, in Table 1 I consider the cost of synfuel made using electricity at a cost of 5.4 c/kWh (the median cost of established nuclear electricity from Nicholson, Biegler & Brook's review). The synfuel cost is $1.47 /litre. Most of this is electricity. From my cost model (really the Navy's cost model), the electricity component is $1.04. The balance is in capital, O&M, etc. This is in complete agreement with the cost you suggest.
It gets interesting if you can run the process with electricity costs corresponding either to the low end of current Chinese builds, or what the US navy could charge itself (see Table 1 again).
I agree with your last point. As I wrote in the conclusion "for a long time the most environmentally effective application [of clean energy] will be to displace coal power, and gas".
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Post by singletonengineer on Jan 16, 2013 23:00:13 GMT 9.5
Cyrilr, what you say makes sense but is not the final word. In a finite world under extreme challenge, there is no need to adopt only a select range of preferred options - in fact, such an approach leaves unmet need which must be considered. Aviation fuel must come from somewhere, and this author has demonstrated that this could very plausibly be from the oceans.
It is easy to say that electric cars are better and perhaps they are, from an either/or point of view. But you have entirely failed to consider that both targets are essential.
"We can't spare the clean energy" you say. I say that we cannot afford to manage only the vehicles whilst ignoring air transport, heavy road transport, unelectrified rail (where this exists), ocean freighters and, in a world where resource wars are an increasing possibility, defence purposes.
That's far too much liquid hydrocarbon usage to ignore or to place in the "too hard basket".
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Post by totterdell91 on Jan 16, 2013 23:33:28 GMT 9.5
The concept of harvesting CO2 from seawater is based in seawater's ability to concentrate CO2 to a higher degree than air, prior to the CO2 being harvested. If we apply the same logic, it should be possible to further concentrate CO2 in an alkali brine solution, making the harvest process more efficient. Jim Holm of coal2nuclear.com came up with this idea some time ago. www.coal2nuclear.com/Nuclear%20Oil.pdf His costing for CO2 capture come in at $22/ton for a 2.5M ton/year plant. He also came up with the idea of converting coal fired electricity generators to nuclear, and using their coal storage area to construct a series of brine canals to do the CO2 capture direct from air. Jim was using waste heat from high temperature nuclear in a kiln to harvest the CO2 from the brine, but if the US Navy membrane method is more efficient, I imagine it could be adapted to process alkaline brine. The real secret would be in getting the cost of the electricity down, to power the process, and in this regard the molten salt reactor with its high temperature and high fuel burn up of cheap thorium would be in a league of it's own. Robert Hargraves estimates the cost could be as low as 2c/KwH and I believe that David LeBlanc has a similar projection for the denatured molten salt reactor. This is why I think Jim's costing is so low. Bringing this into an Australian context, Port Augusta would be the perfect place to replace the current furnaces with heat from a D-MSR, re-use the yards, switching gear and connections which are already in place, use the ample flat land to implement carbon capture from either sea water or a brine lake sequence, or both, while creating a new carbon neutral syn-fuel industry and supplying desalinated water to the local area [rather than pumping it in from the murray]. The fuel produced would also have a positive impact on the Australian balance of trade Estimates I have seen for desalination through multi stage flash distillation with thermo vapour compression, using waste heat from the heat rejection process, use 0.8KwH /m3 as a guide. This is much cheaper than MIA irrigation water, and might easily be used for agricultural purposes in the area, or returned down the pipe to Tailem Bend, back to the Riverland. The spent nuclear fuel from a single CANDU EC6 is sufficient to fuel 3 similarly sized D-MSRs according to David LeBlanc's paper, or as I said above, they can be run on Thorium. www.coal2nuclear.com/MSR%20-%20Denatured%20-%20CNSLeBlanc2010revised.pdf
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Post by cyrilr on Jan 17, 2013 0:07:36 GMT 9.5
Cyrilr, what you say makes sense but is not the final word. In a finite world under extreme challenge, there is no need to adopt only a select range of preferred options - in fact, such an approach leaves unmet need which must be considered. Aviation fuel must come from somewhere, and this author has demonstrated that this could very plausibly be from the oceans. It is easy to say that electric cars are better and perhaps they are, from an either/or point of view. But you have entirely failed to consider that both targets are essential. "We can't spare the clean energy" you say. I say that we cannot afford to manage only the vehicles whilst ignoring air transport, heavy road transport, unelectrified rail (where this exists), ocean freighters and, in a world where resource wars are an increasing possibility, defence purposes. That's far too much liquid hydrocarbon usage to ignore or to place in the "too hard basket". Once we get most of global electricity supply plus much of transport on nuclear-electric, we'll be in a much happier position. Moreover, we can develop synfuel tech whilst switching mostly to nuclear-electrons. So by the time we've exhausted the electricity supply, heat pump electric heating, and electric cars, we may find a much better, higher efficiency synfuel production method. In the meanwhile, using 20 kWh of electricity to make a liter of synfuel to drive a car 20 km, when that same amount of electricity can power an electric car 200 km, is not a good way to tackle our predicament. It is to be hoped that we one day not too far in the future find ourselves with such abundant clean energy that the last bastions of fossil fuels can be brought down to the history books of our children.
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Post by edireland on Jan 17, 2013 3:01:12 GMT 9.5
The price of electricity to be used in a project like this is effectively the price of the generation of the electricity when your alternative is to shut down your nuclear power plant as they are often forced to do in France.
This brings you to a production price on order of 1-2 US cents per kWh, not the 5 cents many others claim. (Carbon dioxide is relatively easily storable over the diurnal cycle and thus you can use the electricity whenever you like even if your carbon dioxide source, whatever it is, cannot be turned off).
The cheapest route I am aware of involves using the recently emerged technology of Solid Oxide Electrolysis Cells to directly process steam and carbon dioxide gas into syngas containing carbon monoxide and hydrogen. This cuts out any steps involving intermediate storage and handling of pure hydrogen gas which has its own problems. Thanks to the relatively high temperatures of this process supposedly efficiencies on order of 70% can be obtained. (~300 celsius or so, and we know what is very good at producing steam in that temperature range right?).
Once you have your syngas stream you can do one of several things.
Diesel and Kerosene is probably most efficiently produced using something like a modified Shell Middle Distillates Synthesis which directly consumes the syngas, so this process should have first call on any syngas being produced to reduce the need to throttle this plant. (Buffering inside the SMDS process itself should be possible however, between its Fischer-Tropsch step and its product upgrading step).
The other major products, olefins and light petroleum (petrol/gasoline and LPG chief amongst them) can be produced via methanol and thus all surplus syngas should be reacted to form methanol, a process that is extremely widely used in industry.
As methanol is a water-like liquid it can be stored extremely cheaply in huge amounts which would permit buffering of the downstream stages of the system from variations in electricity availability.
Methanol could be converted to products like medium-high octane petrol/gasoline through Mobil's "Methanol to Gasoline" process and to Olefins like ethene and propene via the "Methanol to Olefins" process, both of which have operating experience at small production plant level.
Finally there is a process not often mentioned in the literature.... The bacteria Methylophilus Methylotrophus has been shown to grow extremely well on methanol and has been proven to be a very useful protein rich animal feed supplement broadly comparable or superior to Soybean meal. Although previous attempts at commercialisation were upset by rising oil prices and falling prices of soybeans the decoupling of its price (known as "Pruteen") from that of oil and rising prices of agricultural staples may change this is in the relatively near future.
This means off peak electricity is now animal feed as well as fuel.
All of this certainly changes the economics of pumped storage I imagine, as a nuclear power plant can now be used 100% of the time, even if you only charge manning and fuel expenses to the off peak user rather than full commercial costs including capital.
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Post by Asteroid Miner on Jan 17, 2013 3:56:54 GMT 9.5
You have found a use for intermittent electricity from renewables. Since the synthetic fuel can easily be stored in tanks, the intermittency doesn't matter. Use the nuclear power for the grid because intermittent power cannot be tolerated on the grid. We have uses for both nuclear and renewables.
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Post by edireland on Jan 17, 2013 4:30:08 GMT 9.5
You have found a use for intermittent electricity from renewables. Since the synthetic fuel can easily be stored in tanks, the intermittency doesn't matter. Use the nuclear power for the grid because intermittent power cannot be tolerated on the grid. We have uses for both nuclear and renewables. Perhaps, but even without the intermittency issue Wind still has issues in that its LCOE is only marginally better than nuclear as it is. Once you include the fact that the price of teh electrolysers is not trivial then you see a big difference between a ~40% load factor on them and a ~20% load factor. Far better to forget the windmills and spend teh capital on more reactors.
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Post by John Morgan on Jan 17, 2013 11:41:38 GMT 9.5
edireland, great comment, some very interesting ideas.
I did mention SOFCs in passing for hydrogen synthesis, but thought a high temperature gas reactor driving the sulfur-iodine water splitting cycle made more sense - energy is both produced and consumed in the thermal domain, without incurring losses from conversion to electricity, or the cost of turbines & generators.
But if the reverse water gas shift can run more efficiently in an SOFC then there may be cost savings in the fuel synthesis. I thought these ceramic electrolytes required temperatures around 800 C, which is hotter than a conventional LWR, hence the HTGR. There seems to be a lot of opportunity for integration of an HTGR with sulfur-iodine water splitting and syngas production.
The idea of running the process on excess production capacity, like desal, would certainly bring the cost down, even in the more expensive civilian electricity scenarios.
And the bacterial protein production from syn-methanol, well, that just blows my mind. There's the base of a food chain that is entirely decoupled from solar energy, like the extremophile communities feeding off sulfur from submarine ocean vents. Maybe we could call it soylent green and feed it to people.
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Post by David B. Benson on Jan 17, 2013 12:20:52 GMT 9.5
If the NPPs are new build in the USA, figure an LCOE of US$0.08--0.11/kWh until the 30 year loan is paid. After that the LCOE drops considerably.
If it is economic to run on interruptible power then the cost of the electricity is very low, say US$0.0275/kWh or possibly even less.
I note with considerable pleasure the idea of using brine. This suggests combining the operation with a desal unit using the reject brine as the source for the CO2. Would that work?
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Post by John Morgan on Jan 17, 2013 13:24:38 GMT 9.5
David, I'll refer you to the PARC paper I linked in the article. Those researchers ran experiments with RO brine, I assume for just such reasons. It worked fine.
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Post by geoffrussell on Jan 17, 2013 21:32:52 GMT 9.5
John, fascinating post. But after the carbon is taken out of the seawater, the syn fuel is burned and the carbon is back in the atmosphere ... okay, it will eventually taken back into the ocean, but in the mean time isn't it still a positive forcing? Consider the section "Bonus for non-co2 forcing reductions" in: www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16109.fullHansen's pretty clear that carbon in the ocean is better than carbon in the atmosphere ... acidification not withstanding.
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Post by edireland on Jan 18, 2013 4:09:48 GMT 9.5
There are other sources of carbon dioxide available that don't require extraction even of the relatively simple kind required for seawater.
The output from a cement kiln, for instance, is dominated by carbon dioxide, especially if this was some sort of future electrically fired kiln which did not use coal or spent tyres to fire it. (A fossil fuel fired kiln would require nitrogen to be seperated but still....)
Since we are going to need cement for the forseable future there is potentially large amounts of carbon dioxide available in an easily processable form even once the kilns have been converted to some sort of electric firing (probably some sort of arc).
And yes, roughly half the carbon dioxide from cement manufacture is inherent to the process, but much of that will be recaptured by concrete and mortar produced using the cement so it effectively turns buildings into an atmospheric carbon dioxide scrubber.
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Post by trag on Jan 18, 2013 8:30:44 GMT 9.5
This is such a promising technology. There really is no certainty that we will ever fix the issues with energy storage in electric cars. Even if we get the energy storage density high enough, the energy flux during charging is a huge problem, which may not be surmountable -- at least not without huge infrastructure changes.
But if we could produce affordable hydrocarbons using atmospheric CO2 that would close the loop on transportation CO2 emissions.
It would be nice to build a series of reactors in the Galveston, Houston, Beaumont, Port Arthur strip. Initially they could be there to supply electricity and process heat to the refineries and chemical processing industry, but they'd be conveniently located for conducting hydrocarbon synthesis experiments and ultimately, where they would need to be to go into production. And then if the synthetics needed additional cracking or other processing, they'd be right there at the refineries.
Heck, Texas City blows up about once every ten years. I don't know why they'd complain about having nuclear reactors in the neighborhood.
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Post by darryl simer on Jan 18, 2013 8:59:53 GMT 9.5
This scheme is totally unrealistic in any context other than that which the US Navy’s infinitely “deep pockets” & very special needs renders semi-plausible. The reason for this is that it’s based upon the notion that the carbon from which the (jet) fuel is to be made will be recovered from seawater. This assumption is “questionable” because the concentration of carbon in seawater is extremely low, about 42 ppm (0.0023 moles/liter HCO3-/55 moles water & salts/liter) – almost an order of magnitude lower than it is in air (~390 ppm). This, of course, means that even more energy must be put into recovering carbon from seawater than from air. How much energy? A subsequent report www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA544072 (2011) from the same (Naval Research) laboratory gives some actual experimental figures. Equation 9 in that report indicates that the Navy’s electrolysis cell required a (minimum) electrical current of 3.7 amps to convert the bicarbonate in one liter of seawater (0.0023 mole) to a form (solvated carbonic acid) from which the carbon dioxide could, in principle, be recovered if additional energy were to be input (e.g,. to operate a “Roto Evaporator”). Table 2 in that report indicates that the voltage required to push that much current through their “real” cell was ~6 volts - about three times “theoretical”. Consequently, the energy input required to convert one gram mole of seawater carbon to a theoretically recoverable form (solvated carbonic acid) was: 3.7 amps*6 volts *60 sec/min/0.0023 moles/liter/minute/1000 J/kJ= 579.13 kJ/mole Let’s compare this with the heat of combustion of one gram mole of carbon’s worth of jet fuel. First, since the “molecular weight” per carbon of any long chain hydrocarbon (n*CH2) is ~14, burning one mole of carbon translates to burning ~14 grams of jet fuel. Next, the heat of combustion of any long chain hydrocarbon is similar to that of “fat” or roughly 9 kilocalorie (38 kJ) per gram. Consequently, burning one gram mole of carbon’s worth of seawater-derived jet fuel would generate 38*14 or 532 kJ’s worth of useful heat energy – significantly less than what the Navy’s real electrolysis cell required just to convert bicarbonate to solvated carbonic acid (not to completely separate the CO2) I don’t know how efficient the rest of the proposed scheme (recovering CO2 from a 0.0023 M carbonic acid–in-seawater solution and then turning it into a hydrocarbonaceous fuel via Fisher Tropshe) would be, but I suspect that it’s unlikely to be much over 30%. The cost/difficulty of recovering carbon from either air or water is why I’ve recommended that the carbon dioxide utilized for any future large scale synfuel synthesis scheme be derived from electrically “fired” cement kilns close-coupled to breeder reactor power plants.
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Post by Darryl D Siemer on Jan 18, 2013 9:03:45 GMT 9.5
I must have spelled my name wrong in my last "comment". Sorry.
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Post by Paul Ebert on Jan 18, 2013 11:06:45 GMT 9.5
This might be an interesting tidbit in this train of thought and research: pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2013/NR/C2NR31718DIt seems to me that pulling CO2 out of the ocean would help avoid acidity induced phytoplankton die-off thereby avoiding that particular positive feedback loop.
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Post by John Morgan on Jan 18, 2013 12:32:08 GMT 9.5
Darryl, the Navy paper cites the seawater concentration of CO2 (or its dissolved species equivalent) as 100 mg/L, two orders of magnitude higher than the air concentration of 0.7 mg/L.
The energy cost for pulling CO2 from seawater by the PARC process was measured as 242 kJ/mol, which is more than twice as efficient as the Navy process. I didn't really talk about the Navy process, the PARC extraction system is better and is the basis of the costings I gave, which look pretty good.
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Post by John Morgan on Jan 18, 2013 13:37:48 GMT 9.5
I got a nice email from Matthew Eisaman, the lead author on the PARC article, which I thought I would reproduce here:
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Post by darryl siemer on Jan 18, 2013 15:19:14 GMT 9.5
Darryl, the Navy paper cites the seawater concentration of CO2 (or its dissolved species equivalent) as 100 mg/L, two orders of magnitude higher than the air concentration of 0.7 mg/L. The energy cost for pulling CO2 from seawater by the PARC process was measured as 242 kJ/mol, which is more than twice as efficient as the Navy process. I didn't really talk about the Navy process, the PARC extraction system is better and is the basis of the costings I gave, which look pretty good. In discussions involving the separation of gases (e.g. CO2 ) from other stuff, the most relevant definition of "parts per million" is generally 10^6 times the moles of gas divided by the moles of stuff that it's mixed/dissolved in (in the case of carbon from seawater, that's 0.0023 moles CO2/55 moles water plus salt or roughly 42 ppm (vs about 390 ppm forCO2 in air)), not the mass of gas divided by either the mass or volume of whatever it's mixed with. My critique's example used figures published by the Naval Research Laboratory because 1) they are "raw" numbers generated by the same outfit responsible for the earlier report that your posting had provided a link to & 2) the "Federal employees" who work for the NRL probably aren't as highly incentivized to "fudge" their reports/conclusions/summaries as are scientists who are constantly forced to "sell" whatever they're currently studying in order to keep bread on the table. The US Navy's decision-making isn't driven by the same long term economic/practical considerations that the "real world's" political leadership should be considering - that's why Rickover's "converters" make much more sense for powering warships than they do for powering everything else that Mankind requires.
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Post by John Morgan on Jan 18, 2013 16:22:52 GMT 9.5
Darryl, the mass concentration of CO2 (and the dissolved carbon species in equilibrium with it) in seawater is about 140x the mass concentration in air. Your NRL figure, the figure cited by the Navy paper, and by the PARC researchers are all in agreement. They're all in the range 97-110 mg/L.
I hold a particularly dim view of insinuations of scientists "fudging results to keep bread on the table", and the individuals who make them. Prove it or retract it.
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Post by edireland on Jan 18, 2013 18:45:00 GMT 9.5
John, fascinating post. But after the carbon is taken out of the seawater, the syn fuel is burned and the carbon is back in the atmosphere ... okay, it will eventually taken back into the ocean, but in the mean time isn't it still a positive forcing? Consider the section "Bonus for non-co2 forcing reductions" in: www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16109.fullHansen's pretty clear that carbon in the ocean is better than carbon in the atmosphere ... acidification not withstanding. That assumes that all recovered carbon will be almost immediately released into the atmosphere again through the combustion of whatever product we produced (be it fuel or microbial protein). However there will be significant amounts of the recovered carbon used in things which will retain the carbon for significant amounts of time. Plastics used in buildings or in durable products (like the "plastic plane" 787 or even things like washing machines) will retain the carbon for atleast a decade and probably far more in the case of buildings. We would have to calculate the effet of significant amounts of carbon being removed from circulation when considering the net effect on the atmospheric equilibrium. (Since the entire ocean becomse our carbon dioxide scrubber once we start removing carbon from it as it wants to stay in equlibrium with the atmosphere)
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Post by cyrilr on Jan 18, 2013 19:04:23 GMT 9.5
You have found a use for intermittent electricity from renewables. Since the synthetic fuel can easily be stored in tanks, the intermittency doesn't matter. Use the nuclear power for the grid because intermittent power cannot be tolerated on the grid. We have uses for both nuclear and renewables. I'm sorry but this is wrong. These synfuel plants are industrial high temperature installations that must operate at full bore as much of the time as possible. Otherwise the reaction kinetics don't work well, you either end up with poor energy efficiency or poor reaction completion. They are not good at throttling up and down at the vagaries of the wind. Nor are they cheap, so you don't want to run them at 20% capacity factor even if you could. Certainly not when you could run the thing on coal or nuclear at industrial capacity factors (>70%).
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Post by cyrilr on Jan 18, 2013 19:21:24 GMT 9.5
Taking a hint from reverse osmosis membrane technology to desalinate seawater, can't we use membranes to allow the CO2 to pass through whilst leaving a depleted stream on the other side?
This type of process is typically much much more efficient than electrolysis. If you're going to use electricity anyway...
Membranes are typically quite high-learning curve technologies. Development of reverse osmosis membranes over the last 30 years has been astronomical.
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Post by John Morgan on Jan 18, 2013 20:01:28 GMT 9.5
cyrilr, agree about high temperature synthesis or SOFC electrolysis. Cycling that stuff doesn't work, and capital utilization requires maximum throughput.
I don't like the idea of using direct membrane separation of CO2. That implies high pressure forcing of very large volumes of seawater through molecularly tight membranes. The energy cost would be enormous.
The reason the PARC membrane process looks feasible is that that is not what is going on. In that process, an electric field across the membrane produces H+ on one side and OH- on the other. The seawater is merely passed past the membrane, not through it. Much lower power requirements, low pressure operation and higher throughput than a desalination plant.
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Post by cyrilr on Jan 18, 2013 23:30:35 GMT 9.5
cyrilr, agree about high temperature synthesis or SOFC electrolysis. Cycling that stuff doesn't work, and capital utilization requires maximum throughput. I don't like the idea of using direct membrane separation of CO2. That implies high pressure forcing of very large volumes of seawater through molecularly tight membranes. The energy cost would be enormous. The reason the PARC membrane process looks feasible is that that is not what is going on. In that process, an electric field across the membrane produces H+ on one side and OH- on the other. The seawater is merely passed past the membrane, not through it. Much lower power requirements, low pressure operation and higher throughput than a desalination plant. I'm no more than novice on chemistry (and less than novice on organic chemistry) but my understanding is that any membrane process, if feasible, will be much more efficient than any electrolytic or electrochemical approach. Certainly you need a lot of pushing, but breaking down molecules one for one always requires more electricity than a physical pumping process. And it seems that the membrane process would possibly be more suitable to air capture of CO2. It is a lot simpler to deal with dust than to deal with all that biological gunk, salt, sand (water is much more of a debris transporter than air).
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Post by edireland on Jan 19, 2013 4:27:12 GMT 9.5
You don't have to do anything to the temperature of a high temperature solid oxide electrolysis cell (and indeed many will function best at around the 850 degrees celsius mark) to throttle its output.
They have trouble in many mobile applications because it is impossible to keep them hot when they are not in use and thus they have to be put through thermal cycling to warm them up for operation rapidly after they have already cooled down.
With fixed industrial installations like these, they could be kept running at a few percent of rated maximum power demand which should be sufficient to keep the operating temperature up, or if you got really desperate to keep them hot you could put more insulation on them and resort to simply bleeding off a small amount of power for resistive heaters.
As to the capital problems of running them intermittently, if they are run at smoething on order of ~50% (which would allow the replacement of all current British electricity generation with 98% available nuclear) they will stil have decent economics since the solid oxide cells don't require anything particularily expensive in them
Its only when you get to the range of ~20% power factors that are required by renewables that things start to get hairy. Although if we do manage to reach the current densities that many are aiming at, we will be able to make it beat current light fuels (gasoline) prices even at 20% load factor, which is when teh fun begins.
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Post by totterdell91 on Jan 19, 2013 11:23:45 GMT 9.5
This is a post from David LeBlanc on the level of activity in India regarding high temperature reactors [molten salt cooled pebble bed, and also fueled reactors] which lend themselves to this type of 'synfuel from CO2' and hydrogen production. This Molten Salt activity in India has been rumored for some time, but the recent MS conference in Mumbai has outed it to a wider community. www.the-weinberg-foundation.org/2013/01/18/india-a-hotbed-of-molten-salt-2/
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