The New York Times, is reporting a possible
exciting breakthrough: zero carbon gasoline.
Since we're already getting inquiries from people
who wonder if this doesn't mean that all of those
promoting electrification of transportation are
wasting their time, in an effort to put some kind
of damper on the excitement, we're sending around
the original article and a highly entertaining
and informative explanation/critique by one of
our favorite energy experts, Joseph Romm, former
DOE official, author of "Hell and High Water,"
and an influential blogger on the climate crisis,
who explains why batteries remain better.


Scientists Would Turn Greenhouse Gas Into Gasoline
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/science/19carb.html?_r=2&ref=science&oref=slog\
in&oref=slogin
By KENNETH CHANG, The New York Times, February 19, 2008

If two scientists at Los Alamos National
Laboratory are correct, people will still be
driving gasoline-powered cars 50 years from now,
churning out heat-trapping carbon dioxide into
the atmosphere -- and yet that carbon dioxide
will not contribute to global warming.

The scientists, F. Jeffrey Martin and William L.
Kubic Jr., are proposing a concept, which they
have patriotically named Green Freedom, for
removing carbon dioxide from the air and turning it back into gasoline.

The idea is simple. Air would be blown over a
liquid solution of potassium carbonate, which
would absorb the carbon dioxide. The carbon
dioxide would then be extracted and subjected to
chemical reactions that would turn it into fuel:
methanol, gasoline or jet fuel.

This process could transform carbon dioxide from
an unwanted, climate-changing pollutant into a
vast resource for renewable fuels. The closed
cycle -- equal amounts of carbon dioxide emitted
and removed -- would mean that cars, trucks and
airplanes using the synthetic fuels would no
longer be contributing to global warming.

Although they have not yet built a synthetic fuel
factory, or even a small prototype, the
scientists say it is all based on existing technology.

"Everything in the concept has been built, is
operating or has a close cousin that is operating," Dr. Martin said.

The Los Alamos proposal does not violate any laws
of physics, and other scientists, like George A.
Olah, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist at the
University of Southern California, and Klaus
Lackner, a professor of geophysics at Columbia
University, have independently suggested similar
ideas. Dr. Martin said he and Dr. Kubic had
worked out their concept in more detail than previous proposals.

There is, however, a major caveat that explains
why no one has built a carbon-dioxide-to-gasoline
factory: it requires a great deal of energy.

To deal with that problem, the Los Alamos
scientists say they have developed a number of
innovations, including a new electrochemical
process for detaching the carbon dioxide after it
has been absorbed into the potassium carbonate
solution. The process has been tested in Dr.
Kubic's garage, in a simple apparatus that looks like mutant Tupperware.

Even with those improvements, providing the
energy to produce gasoline on a commercial scale
-- say, 750,000 gallons a day -- would require a
dedicated power plant, preferably a nuclear one, the scientists say.

According to their analysis, their concept, which
would cost about $5 billion to build, could
produce gasoline at an operating cost of $1.40 a
gallon and would turn economically viable when
the price at the pump hits $4.60 a gallon, taking
into account construction costs and other
expenses in getting the gas to the consumer. With
some additional technological advances, the
break-even price would drop to $3.40 a gallon, they said.

A nuclear reactor is not required
technologically. The same chemical processes
could also be powered by solar panels, for
instance, but the economics become far less favorable.

Dr. Martin and Dr. Kubic will present their Green
Freedom concept on Wednesday at the Alternative
Energy Now conference in Lake Buena Vista, Fla.
They plan a simple demonstration within a year
and a larger prototype within a couple of years after that.

A commercial nuclear-powered gasoline factory
would have to jump some high hurdles before it
could be built, and thousands of them would be
needed to fully replace petroleum, but this part
of the global warming problem has no easy solutions.

In the efforts to reduce humanity's emissions of
carbon dioxide, now nearing 30 billion metric
tons a year, most of the attention so far has
focused on large stationary sources, like power
plants where, conceptually at least, one could
imagine a shift from fuels that emit carbon
dioxide -- coal and natural gas -- to those that
do not -- nuclear, solar and wind. Another
strategy, known as carbon capture and storage,
would continue the use of fossil fuels but trap
the carbon dioxide and then pipe it underground
where it would not affect the climate.

But to stabilize carbon dioxide levels in the
atmosphere would require drastic cuts in
emissions, and similar solutions do not exist for
small, mobile sources of carbon dioxide. Nuclear
and solar-powered cars do not seem plausible anytime soon.

Three solutions have been offered:
hydrogen-powered fuel cells, electric cars and
biofuels. Biofuels like ethanol are gasoline
substitutes produced from plants like corn, sugar
cane or switch grass, and the underlying idea is
the same as Green Freedom. Plants absorb carbon
dioxide as they grow, balancing out the carbon
dioxide emitted when they are burned. But growing
crops for fuel takes up wide swaths of land.

Hydrogen-powered cars emit no carbon dioxide, but
producing hydrogen, by splitting water or some
other chemical reaction, requires copious energy,
and if that energy comes from coal-fired power
plants, then the problem has not been solved.
Hydrogen is also harder to store and move than
gasoline and would require an overhaul of the world's energy infrastructure.

Electric cars also push the carbon dioxide
problem to the power plant. And electric cars
have typically been limited to a range of tens of
miles as opposed to the hundreds of miles that can be driven on a tank of gas.

Gasoline, it turns out, is an almost ideal fuel
(except that it produces 19.4 pounds of carbon
dioxide per gallon). It is easily transported,
and it generates more energy per volume than most
alternatives. If it can be made out of carbon
dioxide in the air, the Los Alamos concept may
mean there is little reason to switch, after all.
The concept can also be adapted for jet fuel; for
jetliners, neither hydrogen nor batteries seem plausible alternatives.

"This is the only one that I have seen that
addresses all of the concerns that are out there right now," Dr. Martin said.

Other scientists said the Los Alamos proposal
perhaps looked promising but could not evaluate
it fully because the details had not been published.

"It's definitely worth pursuing," said Martin I.
Hoffert, a professor of physics at New York
University. "It's not that new an idea. It has a
couple of pieces to it that are interesting."


Turning CO2 into gasoline -- A new way to waste energy
http://climateprogress.org/2008/02/19/turning-co2-into-gasoline-a-new-way-to-was\
te-energy/
Climate Progress February 19, 2008
Tip o' that hat to Earl K. [That's EV advocate
Earl Killian, who has written for Climate Progress]

Last week, NYT climate Andy Revkin blogged about
a federal laboratory that says it can take
atmospheric carbon dioxide and turn it into gasoline:

>One selling point with Los Alamos's "Green
>Freedom" concept, and similar ones, is that
>reusing the carbon atoms in the captured CO2
>molecules as a fuel ingredient avoids the need
>to find huge repositories for the greenhouse gas.

The only problem with that exciting statement is
that it is almost certainly not true, a point I will come back to.

Now the NYT has published an article on the
subject that also overhypes the technology:

>There is, however, a major caveat that explains
>why no one has built a
>carbon-dioxide-to-gasoline factory: it requires a great deal of energy.
>
>To deal with that problem, the Los Alamos
>scientists say they have developed a number of innovations….
>
>Even with those improvements, providing the
>energy to produce gasoline on a commercial scale
>-- say, 750,000 gallons a day -- would require a
>dedicated power plant, preferably a nuclear one, the scientists say.

Hmm. Let's see. Problem one: Motor gasoline
consumption in this country is almost 400 million
gallons a day. So we would need more than 500
nuclear power plants … just in this country … and
just for gasoline (you'd have to more than double
that to displace all the other petroleum products
we consume, like diesel fuel). And that would
probably require another 5 Yucca mountains just
to store the waste, although I'm not sure the
word "another" is right 'cause this country can't
even agree on one friggin' storage site in the middle of nowhere.

Problem two: According to the Los Alamos
"Overview of Green Freedom," each 750,000 gallon
a day plant (with accompanying nuclear reactor)
costs $5 billion. So cutting under half of all
petroleum use in this country would cost over
$2.5 trillion (not counting this cost of uranium or disposal)!

This supposedly yields a gasoline price of $4.60
a gallon, though the authors say with a couple
more technological breakthroughs, that could drop
to $3.40. How about if instead of assuming more
breakthroughs, which hardly ever happen in the
energy sector, we apply Romm's Rule of Costs for
Future Energy Sources." Romm's Rule says that for
any new energy technology that is not yet
commercial (and in this case we have a "concept"
for which the patent was still pending in
November), take the inventor's highest projected
cost and double it. Also flip a coin and if it
comes up heads, the technology will never be
commercialized -- think fusion. And that's
generous -- in reality, if the coin comes up head
or tails (i.e. doesn't land and balance on its
edge) it will probably never be commercialized --
remember the fuel cell was invented in 1839 and
commercial fuel cells are just a tad more common
than time machines. [Please note this rule does
NOT apply to technologies that are already commercial.]

Problem three: Romm's Rule of Energy
Transformation. This rule, developed for
analyzing hydrogen cars, says: You can probably
make a sow's ear from a silk purse if you try
hard enough, but why would you do that?
Zero-carbon electricity is arguably the most
premium energy carrier you can make in a
carbon-constrained world in part because electric
motors are so efficient. Electricity can directly
run a motor to move your electric car or plug in
hybrid for under $1.00 a gallon, even using
expensive nuclear power. You lose maybe one-fifth
of the original electricity in the process. The
entire Green Freedom process is so inefficient it
probably throws away more than three-fourths of
the original nuclear power (if not much more).
Basically, after spending all that money and
wasting all that premier power you are stuck with
a low-grade (but conventional) fuel that has to
be run through an inefficient gasoline motor. Why would you do that?

[Yes, we don't quite yet have commercial plug
ins, but they are straightforward extension of
already commercial hybrids, we don't need any
technology breakthroughs, and multiple
manufactures will almost certainly be selling
them within three to five years. EVs will be
common in other countries within the same time
frame, as I've written. All of this will happen
decades before "Green Freedom," assuming it even proves feasible.]

Before coming to the last problem, let me
complain about the NYT article, which, while
skipping happily over the myriad problems with
Green Freedom, bizarrely says of other alt fuels:

>Hydrogen-powered cars emit no carbon dioxide,
>but producing hydrogen, by splitting water or
>some other chemical reaction, requires copious
>energy, and if that energy comes from coal-fired
>power plants, then the problem has not been
>solved. Hydrogen is also harder to store and
>move than gasoline and would require an overhaul
>of the world's energy infrastructure.
>
>Electric cars also push the carbon dioxide
>problem to the power plant. And electric cars
>have typically been limited to a range of tens
>of miles as opposed to the hundreds of miles
>that can be driven on a tank of gas.

Yes, if the energy comes from coal, neither
hydrogen or electric cars make sense. But the
same exact thing can be said of Green Freedom: It
makes no sense if you use coal plants, but the
NYT never mentions that fact. That's why the Los
Alamos inventors go the nuclear route. But if you
can assume, say, 500 nuclear plants for Green
Freedom, surely you can live with maybe 100 nukes
for electric cars, which brings us to ….

Problem four: We are going to need a vast
quantity of zero-carbon electricity in this
country just to reduce emissions 80% in the
electricity sector while supporting population
growth and increased living standards. In the
very unlikely event we would build 500 nukes and
5 Yucca-sized storage sites (and find the
necessary uranium, given that, presumably, ever
other country is going to be doing the same
thing) to make carbon-neutral gasoline, it is
safe to say that's all the nuclear power plants
we will be building this century. So the
electricity will have to come from renewable
power and … yes, coal power with carbon capture
and storage (CCS). And if we keep dawdling, we
are going to overshoot the safe level of carbon
dioxide concentrations, and need to pull carbon
out of the air and then NOT burn it. So Green
Freedom does not save us from "the need to find
huge repositories for the greenhouse gas." If
coal with CCS is practical and affordable, which
strikes me as much more likely than Green Freedom
achieving both of those goals, we are going to be
doing as much CCS as we possibly can.

The scale of the climate solution is enormous --
so great you would never contemplate it if the
result of doing nothing were not so irreversibly
catastrophic. That's why, in spite of all these
problems, in spite of the fact that it is
exceedingly unlikely we would choose to use much
Green Freedom by 2050 even in the equally
unlikely event it is actually feasible on a
large-scale in that time, it probably deserves
some exploratory funding. Although that assumes
we have a President who triples federal clean
tech funding -- no I wouldn't waste much money on
it at current federal R&D levels. It certainly
shouldn't be hyped by the media (or anyone else
-- this means you, Roger Pielke, Jr.), it is
certainly no silver bullet, it probably isn't
even one of the ten silver bullets we need -- but
we can't afford to ignore any solution that has
even some microscopic chance of working.



While we're at on the subject, we also want to
point to a posting by The NYTimes' Andrew Revkin
at his "dot earth" blog, raising the issue of
what to call Global Warming/Climate Change. Some
of the more effective names, it seems to us, are
Al Gore's Climate Crisis and Planetary Emergency,
and John Holdren's Global Climate Disruption.

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/18/global-heating-atmosphere-cancer-po\
llution-death-whats-in-a-name/


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Felix Kramer fkramer@...
Founder California Cars Initiative
http://www.calcars.org
http://www.calcars.org/news-archive.html
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