Posts

Arctic Leaf

Audi tries synthesizing fuel

/in , , /by

Tesla is trying to convert the world to the electric car. The Japanese are pushing hydrogen. But Audi, the German carmaker, has a different idea. It’s trying to synthesize fuel from the simplest of elements – water, carbon dioxide and solar energy.

Audi’s research facility in Dresden has produced what the company calls an e-diesel – a net-zero-carbon-footprint fuel made from carbon dioxide and water. The company announced the project to great fanfare on April 21. In May, it unveiled another advance – e-benzine, a fuel that acts just like gasoline.

The two are the latest of a suite of six fuels developed by Audi that behave just like traditional gasoline or diesel, but burn without releasing any sulfur or aromatic hydrocarbons, the stuff that produce air pollution. The fuels also can be labeled as carbon-neutral, since the carbon dioxide they’re removing from the atmosphere perfectly matches the CO2 they put back in when they burn. E-benzine currently derives its carbon from organic material – biofuels made from rapeseed, sunflower oil or corn. But Audi officials say they soon hope to switch to atmospheric carbon dioxide.
“To me, this is a historic moment,” said Marc Delcourt, CEO of Global Bioenergies, the French company that is partnering with Audi on the e-benzine project. “It is the first time that we have produced real gasoline from plants.”

The e-diesel process works like this: Audi begins by splitting water by electrolysis into hydrogen and oxygen. The electricity is provided by wind or solar energy, which makes it completely fossil-fuel free. The oxygen is released into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, Audi filters carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. The C02 is stripped down to carbon monoxide, and the CO and hydrogen are then mixed together under high pressure to produce a long-chained hydrocarbon that Audi calls “blue crude.” It has all the properties of crude oil and can be refined down to commercial fuels like e-diesel. “We’re thinking we’re bringing green-ness to a field that desperately needs green-ness,” said Rick Bockrath, vice president for chemical engineering at Global Bioenergies. “It’s basically how we’re moving away from an oil-based economy towards something that has a renewable, sustainable future to it.”

Johanna Wanka, Germany’s Minister of Education and Research, attended the ceremony at which the first batch of Audi e-diesel, five liters’ worth, was put into her official car, an Audi A8 3.0 TDI clean diesel Quattro (that’s her in the photo above). “This synthetic diesel, made using CO2, is a huge success for our sustainability research,” she said. “If we can make widespread use of CO2 as a raw material, we will make a crucial contribution to climate protection and the efficient use of resources, and put the fundamentals of the ‘green economy’ in place.”

The product has a 100 octane rating and can be used either as an additive or as a stand-alone fuel. Audi says cars run much smoother on the product because of the lack of aromatic compounds, sulfur and other impurities. It also converts to energy at 70 percent efficiency, which is much better than regular diesels.

Audi’s pilot project in Dresden is currently producing 160 liters of e-diesel per day. Obviously, that isn’t enough to shake the world. But the long-term plan is to scale up to a level that will make the product available to the public. The estimated price will be 1 to 1.5 euros per liter, which comes to about $3.75 per gallon. This would not offer any price advantage in the United States, where diesel is selling at $2.88 per gallon, but it would be competitive in Europe, where diesel currently sells for about 1.4 euros per liter.

The problem with all such inventions, of course, is whether they can scale up at a price that remains competitive. Robert Rapier, the highly respected energy analyst, is skeptical. In a lengthy piece in GreentechMedia, Rapier did a step-by-step analysis, including all the chemical reactions. He concluded that the price is going to be $3.76 per gallon, which would put it above the current price of diesel in the United States, but perhaps not in Europe. But that doesn’t include any price increases that may come with scaling up the process. In addition, several critics have wondered whether solar and wind electricity will be available on a scale capable of supporting such a commercial operation.

“To sum up, can Audi produce fuel from thin air? Sure. There is no question about technical viability,” Rapier wrote. But “The question boils down to economic viability, which appears to be challenging given what has been released about the process.”

All this doesn’t mean Audi shouldn’t continue experimenting. There’s always room for improvement, and there may be other breakthroughs down the road. A carbon tax would also benefit the process, particularly if Audi could be given credit for the carbon it takes out of the atmosphere. There is also the possibility of combining the procedure with a carbon-capture and storage operation at a fossil-fuel plant, where carbon dioxide is currently regarded as a noxious waste material.

A system that would manufacture automotive fuel out of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be like the philosopher’s stone of the transport sector. Audi should keep trying.

(Photo credit: Audi)

Arctic Leaf

Robert Rapier loves methanol

/in , /by

Robert Rapier – “R2” as he calls himself in good scientific notation – is one of the smartest people out there when it comes to energy. A master’s graduate in chemical engineering from Texas A&M University, Rapier is chief technology officer and executive vice president for Merica International, a renewable energy company. He also writes a regular column at EnergyTrendsInsider.com.

And he is a big enthusiast of methanol.

In a series of recent columns, Rapier has made a strong case that methanol is our best option for replacing foreign oil. He believes it can be done cleanly and in a way that also reduces carbon emissions. Unfortunately, one of the biggest impediments, according to Rapier, is the huge political momentum behind corn ethanol, which he regards as an inferior fuel. He is also highly critical of the biofuels effort, which has attracted so much attention in the form of venture capital from Silicon Valley.

“You can buy methanol today for around $1 per gallon,” he said. “This is a big, well-established business that does not receive heavy subsidies and government support as ethanol does. On a per BTU basis, unsubsidized methanol costs $17.61 per million BTUs. You can buy ethanol today – ethanol that has received billions in taxpayer subsidies – for $1.60 per gallon. On a per BTU basis, heavily subsidized and mandated ethanol sells for $21.03 per million BTUs.”

Yes, you read that correctly. We are paying 20% more for ethanol, enabled via highly paid lobbyists, heavy government intervention, taxpayer funds and protectionist tariffs than we are for methanol that has long been produced subsidy-free.

Unfortunately, the decision to mandate ethanol consumption while ignoring methanol has been based much more on politics than on the two fuels comparative advantages. “The fact is, methanol simply has not had the same sort of political favoritism, but is in [Rapier’s] opinion a far superior option to ethanol as a viable, long-term energy option for the world.”

Where biofuels are concerned, Rapier states that the effort has always been predicated on the assumption that we will eventually switch from corn ethanol to much more abundant, non-food cellulosic feedstocks such as switch grass. We just have to wait until somebody comes up with a way to break down cellulose. What investors do not seem to realize is that techniques for breaking down cellulose have been around since the 19th century. They just have proved to be too expensive.

But “high costs have never been a deterrent for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who wielded Moore’s Law as the solution to every problem. In their minds, the advanced biofuel industry would mimic the process by which computer chips continually became faster and cheaper over time. But advanced biofuels amounted to a fundamentally different industrial process that was already over 100 years old. A decade into this experiment it is clear that Moore’s Law isn’t solving the cost problem.”

(Actually, if you read George Gilder’s latest book, “Knowledge and Power,” you would realize that mathematicians such as Claude Elwood Shannon and John von Neumann have determined that information as an entirely separate entity from energy and matter. Moore’s Law applies only to information, not matter and energy.)

Rapier says biofuels will never succeed until the effort at developing them is redirected into producing methanol rather than ethanol once again:

For methanol, we can produce it from biomass via a similar process to how it is produced for $1 per gallon today. There are numerous biomass gasifiers out there. Some are even portable. They do not require high fossil fuel inputs and they utilize a much larger fraction of the biomass. They aren’t limited to cellulose. They gasify everything – cellulose, hemicellulose, lignin, sugars and proteins – all organic components. And if there is also a heating application, the combined heat and fuel or power efficiency of a biomass to methanol via gasification route is going to put cellulosic ethanol to shame. In any case, the efficiency of biomass gasification to methanol is going to put cellulosic ethanol to shame, because it doesn’t have to deal with all of that water present in the ethanol process.

Altogether, Rapier argues that methanol has a much broader potential feedstock, is easier and cheaper to produce and could be manufactured in much larger quantities than corn ethanol. And this doesn’t even consider the possibility of synthesizing it from our superabundant supplies of natural gas. The problem is that “methanol doesn’t have a big lobby and 42 senators from farm states it can count on for perpetual support.”

At Fuel Freedom Foundation, we believe we should pursue all these options – ethanol, biofuels, compressed natural gas (CNG), liquefied natural gas (LNG) and electric cars. They all offer the possibility of reducing the $350 billion we shell out each year for imported oil. But we can’t help but admire Rapier’s observation that the methanol option is greatly underappreciated. The reasons are: 1) the EPA restrictions that make it illegal to use in car engines and 2) the lack of any large constituency such as the farm lobby that stands to gain from it. For that reason alone we’re very encouraged by Rapier’s writings and look forward to more in the future.