Not your Daddy’s Bio Diesel
Posted on Feb 23, 2008 - 8:35pm by Everitt Mickey in Alternative Fuels
Bio-diesel is probably NOT the right word, since it has nothing to do with anything “Bio”.
There’s this little outfit in New Mexico called Los Alamos National Laboratory. You may have heard of them? They KNOW energy. They’ve done “stuff” in regards to energy…..lots and lots of stuff.
They’ve come up with what they call “Green Freedom”. Believe it or not the idea is to make fuel from air.
Riiiiiight!
Actually it’s for real. Conceptually it’s no big deal. Motor Fuel, be it gasoline, alcohol or diesel is basically long carbon chains intertwingled with hydrogen. Usually this combination of carbon chains and hydrogen ,(and other less desirable stuff), is “mined” in the form of crude oil and then refined into various types of petroleum products including gasoline and diesel.
Crude oil is not the only source of those carbon chains though, not even the only fossil source. There’s also coal. The US has a LOT of coal. There’s a process to convert coal to diesel. It’s not a new technology. The bad guys used it in WWII. It’s just currently more expensive than crude oil.
Carbon chains can also be grown (corn, etc) and then converted into biodiesel. Anything organic can be converted to an alcohol which can then be used as a fuel or converted to another form (diesel or gasoline) which is THEN used as fuel. With the one of the cellulose to alcohol processes even grass can be turned into fuel. Some of those processes might actually be economically viable.
Were not about to run out of fuel. It’s abundant. The only question is how “messy” are we willing for it to be and how much do we want to pay for it.
Fuel-from-air is NOT messy. According to the article if put into commercial operation today with a nuclear reactor for the prime energy source then the resultant gasoline would retail for about $3.40 a gallon.
……and the bad news is?
Biodiesel - What's Up with THAT?
What is being DONE about the high price of fuel
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Fuel from air? Okay, this one I have never heard of, but $3.40 per gallon of gasoline is pretty close to what we’re paying now, so if they manage to get this into production and crude oil prices stay high, it looks like this could work as a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels. The only problem might be some public skittishness because of the word “nuclear” being associated with it. But they could probably come up with a “politically correct” cover for this, much like NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) turned into MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) before the process and its terminology were fully released for public consumption.
Fuel from air.
Best I can tell the concept is to extract Carbon Dioxide and Water Vapor from the air. Energy from an external power source is then used to disassociate the component atoms. The Carbon and Hydrogen are then reassembled into a motor fuel.
Potentially carbon neutral depending on which power source.
Theoretically possible? yes.
Doable? dunno.