How Not To Learn About Synthetic Fuels
Here’s a video on synthetic fuels. This is an important topic for people to understand, but this particular presentation contains so many misleading claims, that it does more to confuse and misinform the viewer than to elucidate the subject.
• It starts with the question, “Why don’t we recycle energy?–and this response, “You’re hitting the nail on the head. They go on to “explain” that, with their carbon-neutral fuel, they’re recycling the energy in the carbon. Completely incorrect. The energy that goes to most hydrocarbons is supplied by an external source, the sun. With synthetic fuels, it could be the sun, i.e., off-peak solar, wind, biomass, etc., but it could really come from anywhere, say off-peak nuclear. The only requirements is that it has to be cheap. (More on this is offered here in our graphic: The Big Bang–The Origin of All Energy on Planet Earth.) The energy that was stored in the chemical bonds is released when the hydrocarbons are burned and those bonds are broken, and the energy is used for its intended purpose. After that, it is almost always dissipated as waste heat; except in the case of combined cycle gas turbines and a few other heat recovery technologies, exactly zero of it is recycled. It is certainly incorrect to say that there is energy in the carbon, and just as incorrect to say that recycling carbon from the atmosphere has anything to do with energy.
• The concept uses a large fan to blow air into the device that pulls out the CO2 . But because CO2 is only 0.04% of the atmosphere, this is an extremely inefficient process. The interviewer even asks if it would be good to find a point source of CO2 and is (erroneously) told that it doesn’t matter. For example, no one asks where the energy comes from to run the fan or perform the other process.
• The concept that synthetic diesel burns with zero emissions is completely untrue. Here’s a piece that describes the particulate matter and oxides of nitrogen that are emitted from any diesel combustion, regardless of its source.
• No mention is made of energy required to produce the hydrogen, which is either derived from reforming methane or electrolyzing water (both of which require energy).
• When Fischer Tropsch technology, soon to celebrate its 100th birthday, is deployed to synthesize fuel, you don’t get pure gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel; you get a column of different chemicals, most of them of very low value. When the spokesperson holds up a bottle of fuel and says that this is what comes out of the process, he’s not lying directly, but grossly misleading the viewer.
Again this process isn’t new, and it does work, as the Nazi’s proved 75 years ago in WWII, in their attempt to make more fuel than the allies’ B-17 bomber pilots (like my dad) could destroy by blowing up their oil refineries.
In fact, I’ve spent a great deal of time promoting WindFuels on my list of good clean energy investment opportunities. You’ll learn much more about synthetic fuels on their website (linked above) than you will from this video; moreover, it will be true and honest; there’s something to be said for that. 🙂
Thanks Craig!
I saw that video, and had the same reaction. It made me wince every time they referred to carbon atoms as “energy”. Something on that level is just painful.
I believe – though I’m not sure – that the process that they are using is direct hydrogenation of CO2 to methanol. If that’s the case, it’s not technically FT, and the flask of produced fuel that he showed off was probably methanol. Methanol can be easily converted to other fuels with reasonable efficiency, but if it was indeed methanol then that would explain why the flask was stoppered..
😉
I truly wish them luck, but I see no hope for their efforts unless they begin to think more critically about the economics of their efforts. As you said, the fact that they are harvesting CO2 from the dilute atmosphere absolutely destroys any chance that their system could plausibly be competitive. I suspect that the fact that they are going to methanol is probably a different showstopper as well. But we’ll see. I truly wish them luck, and even more I hope they can spark interest in the potential of recycling carbon for other (more competitive) processes.
Perhaps they’ll want to look through our patents and see if we can help them become more efficient and effective.
But they won’t be competitive unless they abandon the dilute atmosphere and turn to point sources (we can worry about harvesting from the dilute atmosphere in 30-50 years); and they cannot be respected unless they can get a better grasp on communicating. Undoubtedly the person conducting the interview was an angel investor or businessman CEO… but you don’t inspire confidence if you can’t keep 9th grade physical science concepts straight. They MUST do better on that front.
FWIW, they claimed that the contents of the bottle was syn diesel.
My reaction, as I tried to imply with my choice of words, is that this is not so much about ignorance of high school level chemistry and physics, though that’s a big part. It’s more more about deliberate deception, which is, in my mind, far worse.
What I tell would-be entrepreneurs who come to me with BS like this looking for investment dollars, which happens several times each year, is that they’re going to face two core and inescapable problems:
1) Their target market is people with lots of money but without even a junior high education in basic science, which is a tiny intersection of sets, and
2) They’re committing fraud and could wind up in prison.
Hmm.. Well, if they are using the direct CO2+H2->CH3OH reaction, then they could then further process the methanol into synthetic gasoline. ExxonMobile has a pretty efficient catalyst for that. It could be that they had gone ahead and processed the methanol into syn diesel, or they had methanol and were comfortable that the methanol could be processed into syn diesel. Either way could have resulted in that hapless interview if the people speaking don’t understand the difference between carbon atoms and energy.
It doesn’t matter. Their story is plausible, and I don’t have any reason to suspect that they are committing fraud. I think they just put someone who is unusually bad at interviews and somewhat hapless at the science in front of the camera and had that person interviewed by an equally clueless journalist. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t qualified scientists working real chemistry behind the curtain.
🙂
I just hope that this sparks enough interest that someone else might start looking for actual viable answers to their competitive viability problems.
🙂
Good point. Maybe I’m being too harsh.
Craig,
I think if you read the standard of discussion in the comments section, you might understand why these sort of presentations appear on ‘facebook’.
The idea of extracting synthetic fuel from atmospheric CO2 is currently neither economic or practical.
Faced with a fuel shortage unable to be met from internal resources the Germans in WW2 built astonishingly efficient synthetic diesel production that kept the war machine operating despite allied bombing.
Quirky little projects and amateur solution like this, have and will always, abound at the fringes of large scale industrial development advances and changes.
Mixing combinations of hydrogen, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide etc, will produce a range of products including what is commercially available as ‘Syngas’.
Although Syngas has a wide range of industrial purposes, especially in the Iron industry, it can’t really compete with natural gas or LGP for electricity generation.
Since traditional diesel fuel remains relatively cheap and plentiful, Syngas production remains restricted mostly to specialist industrial applications. The exceptions are the massive investments by countries like China, India and Indonesia where Syngas is becoming and integral part of Coal usage.
What is disturbing is why with all the really useful clean tech products arriving on the market that deserve attention and promotion, (or at least discussion) you seem to concentrate on obscure cranks.
I would have thought a bill introduced by Wyoming U.S. Senator John Barrasso, “The Fairness For Every Driver Act” aimed at repealing federal electric vehicle tax credits and imposing a federal highway user fee for alternative fuel vehicles, would be of more immediate interest.
Equally disturbing if you seem perfectly comfortable with European nations whom you admire using bio-mass imported from Russia at the expense of the world greatest, and most rapid, loss of forests (10,000 sq miles per annum) while still decrying efforts by the coal industry to deploy the latest advances in clean coal technology.
I’m still baffled how clear felling vast swathes of the world lasts great temperate forests and burning wood, is environmentally superior to mining coal ? !
Or maybe, it’s all about the “symbolism”, eh?
We seem to be living in a world of new definitions of “truth” or reality. The NYT times and CNN trumpet Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts DNA results verify her claims for special consideration as a Native American.
Between 1986 to 1995 Warren listed herself as a racial minority in the Association of American Law Schools Directory of Law Teachers.
At her insistence, Harvard Law School identified Warren as a “woman of color” after agitation about a lack of faculty diversity.
Warren claims were very specific, she identified herself as of Cherokee and Delaware Indian decent.
She even went as far as signing a plagiarized recipe book, “Elizabeth Warren — Cherokee.” (the recipe was taken verbatim from an article in The New York Times five years earlier).
Her supporter in the left media, particularly CNN, WP , NYT and Boston Globe are exultant that a very dubiously conducted DNA test revealed a possibility of being 1/1,024th ‘Native American”, but impossible any distinct type of native American race or tribe.
Naturally, the Cherokee Nation promptly released a statement condemning her claims, stating: ” Deliberately, using a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and wrong”, was ignored by the leftist media.
As was the leading Harvard University expert on DNA, who pointed out the accuracy of the test is far from certain and the result at best proves only a remote possibility.
This sort of thing would once have been considered ludicrous, and Warren dismissed as either dishonest or delusional, but in the current social atmosphere of “anything goes” we all seem to be in a race to the bottom.
“Winning”, has become everything, and an aim in itself. What is won, seems to be less important than simply beating the other side.
Craig:
You said “The only requirements is that it has to be cheap” and so I will point out once again that my technology is very well positioned for county scale biorefineries and when using municipal trash as a feedstock in a biorefinery the refinery is getting the fuel delivered to the facility for free and the facility is getting paid to take it – which is a lot better than cheap. Of course I realize this goes right over your head and I guess everyone else’s but if I keep repeating it often enough I think you will get it eventually.
I really hope that they aren’t deliberately trying to deceive people because, a) that could land them in jail, and b) that is definitely not the right thing to do.