On Dec 21, 2014, at 12:23 PM, Peri Hartman via EV <ev@lists.evdl.org> wrote:
> For example, using CO2 from power plant emissions in fracking doesn't help > unless fracking has to use CO2 and the only other way would be to produce CO2 > specifically for fracking. That's why I didn't use fracking as an example. And, best I know, most commercial CO2 already comes from power plant emissions, so that's the CO2 that's already being used in the mining industry. > Second, CO2 can't be converted into fuel (liquid or not) without using energy. That's why I explicitly used the example of energy input from solar and wind to turn the CO2 into liquid fuels. > Anecdotally, regarding converting CO2 to diesel or other liquid fuel, it > seems that would be less efficient than simply generating electricity to > offset some other use of carbon based fuel for generating electricity. Yes...but only if you've already got the electric vehicle and associated infrastructure. Which of these options would you prefer? * A long-haul diesel truck powered by Saudi Arabian crude oil that costs $4 / gallon to refuel. * A long-haul diesel truck powered by oil refined from syngas made with solar electricity from CO2 emissions captured from an existing coal-fired power plant that costs $10 / gallon to refuel. * A short-haul electric truck that costs twice as much as the diesel variants and has a fraction of the range and load capacity that costs the equivalent of $0.50 / gallon to recharge. Now, there are certainly use cases today where the electric version wins...but only a small minority. And, equally certainly, no business today is going to go for the syngas-to-diesel version, save as part of a research project. However, we're not that far away from a time when the Saudi diesel is going to cost $8 / gallon and the syngas diesel $7 / gallon, at which point every business is going to prefer the syngas as a no-brainer. And that time is going to come before some trucks on the road today reach their useful end of life, as well as before we've got batteries that are at a price / performance parity with the diesel tank. During that transition period, doing double duty with that CO2 is going to make a lot of sense, _and_ it's much environmentally superior to what we're doing today. Cheers, b& -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 801 bytes Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20141221/3c642337/attachment.pgp> _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
