They don't use the collected CO2 to make diesel fuel, they make methane. Some trucks may use methane as fuel.
IIUC they don't expect every gas station to have a converted from CO2 to fuel, but to have the conversion in the operational bases of the trucks, or collect it and send it to a specialized facility.
They use the heat from the exhaust gases to power the device, the calculations are in the paper.
They say that in other projects, they use the same heat of the exhaust gases to improve the efficiency of the fuel in a 10%. So this is not totally "free".
How does this compare to releasing the CO2 (and getting a 10% of efficiency) and collecting the CO2 from the air in a central location?
How does this compare to using Hydrogen as fuel? I guess the difference is that most of this technology is buildable now, but Hydrogen storage is too difficult for now.
How does this compare with a electric truck? I guess this system gives more autonomy, but all the chemical reactions to convert the CO2 to methane are less efficient that good batteries.
One reason why it should be much more efficient in energy expended for CO2 captured is that the concentrations from the truck exhaust is so much higher than in the atmosphere.
On the other hand, a central facility can often be more efficient (other things being equal) than a bunch of small facilities. (A central generating facility, for example, is more efficient than a bunch of car engines.)
That said, my money is on the higher concentration of CO2 winning by far.
> They use the heat from the exhaust gases to power the device, the calculations are in the paper.
Wouldn't this effect the efficiency of catalytic converters? As I understand it, those need to be hot to work well. Or is the heat taken out of the exhaust after it passes through the cat? Skimming through the paper, I don't see mention of this.
Maybe it would make sense to shrink the engine's radiator and use some of the engine heat instead of exhaust heat.
No doubt an electric truck is better than a diesel truck, but the diesel truck already exists. Consequently any comparison needs to include the impact of scrapping all the existing trucks and replacing them with electric ones.
Ideally you'd do that slowly to maximize the utility of the emissions from building the diesel truck in the first place, so add-on technology to make them more environmentally friendly is a very good thing.
Or go 100% renewables power and EVs (keep it in the ground), no carbon capture + sequestration needed for emissions. For net negative GHG emissions, sequestration using bio-remediation such as ferrous oceanic seeding and kelp bloom capture/sequestration makes infinitely more sense (cheaper/easier) than direct emissions or atmospheric capture. Phasing-out ICEs and FF extraction must be global goals if we are to survive.
Syn-fuels are never carbon neutral, you always have CH4 Emissions when producing, transporting,storing or burning fuel (and N2O too if you burn the fuel using air and not pure oxygen). CH4 is not only a rather potent GHG, it also oxidizes to CO2. Obviously the emissions are a lot lower than using fossil fuels but they are still there.
Building an electric car emits a ton of CO2 as well. The figure that is often used is that building your car generates just as much CO2 that what it will generate during its lifetime of driving.
So even if your truck runs 100% on renewable energy (and that's a big if, not to mention that creating this system also generates pollution before becoming green), retrofitting existing vehicles with technologies such as this one should be studied seriously.
Some retrofits will happen. I would guess, though, that 90% of electric vehicles will be manufactured as electric vehicles, rather than as retrofits. So to focus only on retrofits to make the argument is rather misleading.
I haven't claimed that electric cars are bad for the environment, just that replacing a perfectly working vehicle by another one is not necessarily a win.
Cars don't appear out of thin air and that manufacturing process ? it pollutes a ton.
It sound like a tough sell to me if the vehicle can be retrofitted to capture 90% of the CO2 it emits.
To be fair, once it is captured, I am guessing (e.g. no data) that using it as fuel would release CO2 as well, so we would be somewhere below these 90%.
Still, the new vehicle won't appear out of thin air, and the electricity it uses won't either (hopefully it is nuclear or renewable).
Either way, I don't see why such a tech gets rejected outright. I hate gas cars as much as everybody and can't wait to see them replaced by good public transit systems, LMV and yes electric cars.
In the meantime, we have an enormous pool of gas car in circulation, anything that can help reduce their environmental impact is a win in my book.
Well because it's 90 percent efficient vehicles will emit 10% the amount of CO2, but the thing is all the CO2 eventually gets emitted, just more slowly. That might be ok if we weren't already at the world's carrying capacity for CO2, instead we need to be drastically reducing our emissions this is just an expensive stopgap measure that keeps us digging up carbon.
As others have pointed out we're not just burning the Amazon, we are burning all the Amazons back through geological time.
>As others have pointed out we're not just burning the Amazon, we are burning all the Amazons back through geological time.
I agree 100% and it disturbs me very deeply, along with the hundreds of other insane things going on these days, climate grief is definitely a good way to describe how many people feel about the magnitude of these issues.
>but the thing is all the CO2 eventually gets emitted, just more slowly
Not necessarily, we could (and should) sequester CO2.
Thermodynamics: the energy produced by the engine comes from forming CO2 and heat in the first place. Capturing 90% of it without using all the energy produced by the combustion doesn’t make sense, it defies the laws of physics because entropy is being reversed.
They're bad because the world isn't producing nearly enough electricity for us all to go electric. And producing more electricity IS going to be bad for the environment.
The numbers in this report compare the emissions cost of a new BEV to that of a new ICE. But I don't see anyone seriously arguing that people should buy new ICE's; rather, the claim seems to be that people should keep modern ICEs on the road as long as possible before replacing them (with something better than an ICE). This analysis says it takes 19,000 miles of driving to make the acquisition of a BEV emissions-neutral compared to buying a new ICE; how many miles do you have to drive to make it neutral compared to holding on to your Honda?
It's questionable whether keeping your car longer seriously affects how many new cars get made. If you buy a new car and sell it in three years then somebody else can buy it. If you keep it for six years then the person who would have bought it still needs a car for those three years, so now they have to buy a new car in your place. Selling your completely functioning car just puts it in the hands of someone else. What really takes them off the road is wrecks and unjustifiably expensive repairs.
So how long your car lasts isn't really a question of how long you personally own it, it's a question of whether you maintain it well so that it stays on the road for the next guy and don't get into a wreck.
If you can afford to do it, it would actually help to buy a new electric car, keep it for only a short period of time and then sell it and buy another new one. Because then you're the one buying new cars and you're choosing a BEV, and every one you sell into the used market is someone who then doesn't have to buy a new car that might have been ICE.
That... doesn't sound right to me. Cars are manufactured in numbers to satisfy demand. Buying new cars fuels demand. We'd all like new cars --- we like new everything! --- but this sounds like rationalizing.
Sure, they'll make as many cars as people will buy. And if you were buying new cars and crashing them, that would cause them to have to make more new cars. But if you're buying new cars and then selling them, your demand is offset by you satisfying the demand from the person who bought your old car.
If everybody did that then it wouldn't work -- nobody would be buying the used cars. But there are more than enough people who would never do that anyway because they can't afford it, that it's a gain for all the people who can afford it to do it.
And, of course, the substitution isn't perfect, so if 95% of new cars were already electric then this might not be worth it. The benefit comes from you choosing a new BEV when someone else might have chosen a new ICE. But when existing new sales are much less than half BEV, making the better choice can easily outweigh the imperfect substitution.
I'd heard similar complaints to GP about embodied energy, but not for electric vehicles. Only with HEVs and ULEVs, which are far more complicated than either of their competitors. It's no wonder they'd have higher embedded energy footprints.
> Under the average U.S. electricity grid mix, we found that producing a midsize, midrange (84 miles per charge) BEV typically adds a little over 1 ton of emissions to the total manufacturing emissions, resulting in 15 percent greater emissions than in manufacturing a similar gasoline vehicle. However, replacing gasoline use with electricity re-duces overall emissions by 51 percent over the life of the car.
This has steam coming out of my ears, and I agree with the goal they set for themselves. I haaaAAAAaaate when scientists pull tone-deaf shit like this. It's why I ran away from theory into applied as fast as my legs could carry me. Nobody is gonna drive an 84 mile range vehicle. The market has shouted this from the rooftop and if Concerned Scientist have not heard this, then they're nowhere near as smart as they want everyone to think they are. Use real numbers and spare us your white tower bullshit. A competitive car will have 2.5x times that range. That probably lowers that lifetime number into the high 3X%'s which is not as compelling but also not lying.
Lying to prove a point is the worst kind of lying, because when your detractors catch you in it then the unconvinced have confirmation bias against your original premise. Cut that shit out. For everybody's sake.
35% lifetime emissions reduction is not a slam dunk. Many more additional efforts (read: lifestyle changes) will have to go along with that improvement. And that's nearly as hard a pill to swallow as a car that only gets 84 miles per charge brand new.
This is in the report.. the 84mi EV is a Nissan Leaf. That was a very popular EV for 2015 (the year of the report). People definitely did and still do drive it. It's one of the best selling EVs every year.
I would suggest reading the report a little more closely.. It also has numbers for a 265mi Model S... so you don't need to make up estimates for such an EV.. it's in the report.
The 2017 Nissan Leaf had a range of 107 miles. The 2018 and 2019 Have an EPA mileage of 150 miles. The 2019 also has a large battery version with a range of 226 miles.
It's the 2015 leaf that had a 84mi range... it was a step up from 2014's 75mi range. The 2011 version had a 73mi range.
The Leaf was the best selling EV from 2011-2014 and in 2016. It lost out to the Model S in 2015 by 10%. 400k Leafs sold (bestselling EV of all time)... Tesla is just now starting to surpass that number.
Obviously a report from 2015 wouldn't include Leafs from the future.
I don't understand your comment. You're complaining about lying but the one who is lying is you.
1. The phrase "265-mile-range BEV" appears 9 times in the document. That's not 2.5x times that range. It's more than 3.1 times the range of the small BEV.
2. The document never mentions a 35% emissions reduction. On page 21 (or 31) you can see a chart showing a 51% CO2 reduction for the 84 mile BEV and a 53% reduction for the 265 mile BEV.
Reading further: the increased embodied energy for the Leaf is one tone of carbon. The Tesla is six tons.
The fact that the Tesla retains the same emission reduction is because it’s a much larger vehicle. The same sedan would burn much more gas. So what I’d want to know is what’s the footprint of the 2019 extended range Leaf? 2 tons? Five? What’s the lifetime efficiency profile there?
(Also I didn’t realize that power in the Midwest was quite that dirty. That’s nuts and it drags the profile down for everyone else. Apparently EVs in the West are a slam dunk, and also on parts of the eastern seaboard. Iowa? Not much of an improvement)
Is that the one that was massively revised about a month ago, where all the 'worst-case' assumptions for ev production related emissions were dramatically reduced?
Their technology aside, I don't think it's a good idea to put 7% of their vehicle payload on the roof. That would measurably elevate the center of gravity, which is not ideal for any vehicle that turns.
Seems like this might be a better solution for shipping than for trucks. Batteries are not really a viable solution for shipping, except on short routes. They're probably stuck with hydrocarbon fuels, but this might work, and the extra mass of CO2 carried wouldn't really be a big deal for a ship. Probably won't work with current dirty bunker fuel though, as I expect that contains too many contaminants; it would need the fuel to be cleaned up a lot first so I wouldn't expect the shipping industry to be overly enthusiastic.
Also, what percentage of semi trucks are only utilized on these short routes?
A big thing in fleets is flexibility, and if you're requiring a much larger fleet, or two fleets, to do the same job that's not workable in many cases.
The range of the Tesla semi is supposed to be 500 miles. Others can be expected to be similar. That's enough that if you're even partially charging every time you stop to eat or sleep you'll never run out.
It's okay to collect the CO2, but what source of energy will be used to reverse the C -> CO2 reaction? Renewables and even nuclear are by far insufficient.
Global warming is fundamentally a problem of sourcing enough energy in a different way than we used to. And the world/technology is nowhere near ready.
It is possible to convert the CO2 to methane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction
but it is not as efficient as portrayed in the media. Conversion to gasoline or diesel fuel is much more difficult and inefficient.
Well that only makes methane so you need an extra step (like Fischer topsch) to get longer hydrocarbons. So it makes sense that using it that way would be way less efficient.
What a stupid idea[0]. Massive distributed capital expenditure for the express purpose of collecting CO2 for an uneconomic (but technically feasible) conversion to methane.
If converting CO2 to methane made sense in any form[1], it would happen first at point sources (e.g. breweries) long before this Rube Goldberg-esque inanity.
[0] No really, it's awful. Might as well try and collect the water cars emit to try and reduce our dependence on bottled water.
[1]It, as a rule, doesn't per thermodynamics and Coloumb's constant.
Converting CO2 to Methane makes a lot of sense if you want to store large amounts of power. Every country already has the infrastructure for storing and distributing gas and turning it into electricity and heat.
Not compared to doing pretty much anything else with that power. Which includes easy things like pumping water uphill, charging lithium batteries, or just making H2 and distributing that into the gas grid directly.
To make CH4 from CO2 takes 8 electrons at (near enough) 2V, giving 1 / (96450 * 8) moles CH4 per amp second. Per tonne, that works out to roughly 1000$/tonne CH4 or 2900$/tonne CO2. Assm 4c/kwh.
So with an exceptionally efficient process requiring negligible capital expense or labor it is possible to convert 3000$ and one tonne of CO2 into 200$ of natural gas. Short of making rocket fuel on Mars, I'm not smelling even the slightest whiff of an application: which is why I am so derisive of the article's proposal - charitably it is at best proposing the equivalent of solar roadways.
Hydrogen is a lot harder to store than Methane, and afaik you can't substitute 100% Hydrogen for natural gas without changing large chunks of the heating infrastructure. But you're of course right that making hydrogen has a much better efficiency.
Britain is/was looking into just that with some moderate seriousness[0]; a quick google suggests as much as 30% enrichment. Though as I recall they wanted to use SMR/ATR on natural gas and bury the resulting CO2 in the north sea as opposed to electrolysis.
This and technologies like it sound like something that could literally save the planet. If this sort of thing could be used for trucks, it could be used for trains, ships and stationary engines.
As far as I can tell, the approach involves recycling the CO2 into other fuels and I assume eventually burning everything in a fashion that creates other pollutants but I assume much less CO2. I assume that at greater cost, you could just sequester the CO2 also.
> This and technologies like it sound like something that could literally save the planet.
The planet itself will be fine, it's the humans that are at risk from global warming.
However I don't think this is good enough, we need to go carbon negative which means electrification, clean energy sources and CO2 capture/storage (CCS) at large scale, and a whole lot of other changes. Unfortunately there are a couple of countries in the world that will piss in the well for the rest of us in this respect so I don't have much hope of actually fixing the problem.
In EU. Not much, this is after all something reasearch in Switzerland that has already done other CO2 extraction research, despite scorn and cynicism by misguided ecologists.
I think the time for this tech has finally come. There used to be an argument that if we talk too much about these, emissions habits may never change. Now it is clear that simply cutting down emissions will bring us to +2C degrees at best. Every additional tech we can have to cut down emissions or extract CO2 from atmosphere is welcomed.
You recapture CO2 at the expense of increased fossil fuel consumption due to lower payload capacity. Is this really better than just going straight to electric transports?
Edit: Assuming you can fuel the trucks with the product of the CO2 to fuel conversion, is it still better than electric?
The problem is that people focus on the word "carbon" and then ignore what the word "tax" means: tax is collected into a single account. Where it came from is irrelevant, and what's done with it is in no way tied to where it came from, so if you want a carbon tax, you better damn well also have some system in place that forces X% of a munipal/state/provice/federal/whatever budget to first be formally declared as reserved for spending on this particular issue. Otherwise that carbon tax goes to basically everything before it goes to "augmenting cars".
A carbon tax is a pigovian tax which works by disincentivising the undesired behaviour. It makes burning fossil fuels more expensive, thereby making everything else cheaper; in that sense you could also call it a "green subsidy".
What you do with that money is irrelevant. Turn it into a big paper boat and float it down the Hudson. The effect is in the levying of the tax, not in what is done with it.
See for example Canada, who directly deposits the revenue back to its residents.
The "augmenting cars" bit comes from people who don't want to pay the (now high) price of fossil fuels anymore, and instead want to avoid that tax by going green. That's how pigovian taxes work. See the UK who introduced a carbon tax, and promptly saw a huge shift in energy production to green energy and lower CO₂ emitting fuels.
You could also have a dollar-neutral carbon tax by lowering, say, income tax to exactly offset the revenue from the carbon tax. The population as a whole would not lose any money, but low-carbon behavior would be incentivised.
The point is not to augment cars via the proceeds of the tax, it's to change consumer or business behavior from the consumption of things that create otherwise uncaptured negative externalities like pollution or global warming - a market failure. As a side effect, these taxes are thought to create the economies of scale and investment necessary to make substitutes work in the market with minimization of consumption or economic output if the tax is introduced is scaled up with time.
This is why many well known economists are for a carbon tax:
In the US we already have Medicare and SS taxes dedicated to that. Many other jurisdictions also have dedicated tax funds for various purposes established by law, e.g. a sales tax used solely for funding transit services, for example.
Carbon tax is a good idea. But it's not happening! Writing proposals, calling representatives, signing petitions and voting isn't helping. I mean, how do we actually make it happen?
Because the will of the people is in the other direction. At this point, its a matter of convincing the greater public of the evidence.
People are stubborn and difficult to convince. And you need to convince roughly half of the voting population (maybe ~50-million people) before things happen in the USA. That's how democracy works.
There's also a power-imbalance that gets somewhat political: how smaller states have 2 senators and therefore control the vote despite having a very small population. Convincing those people is more important, because their vote matters more than most people.
200,000 Wyoming residents have the voting power of 700,000 California residents, due to how Senators work.
> And you need to convince roughly half of the voting population
Not with gerrymandering, you'll effectively need much more. And then there's the fact that people are consistently voted in on a set of plans/promises that either are never followed through with or they do they opposite because they were just saying the things that get votes rather than what they actually intend to do. The system is broken, plain and simple, and it's not going to change because it benefits those with the ability to change it.
Gerrymandering isn't really the issue. Even in a gerrymandered district, the representative is generally going to do what the majority of people in the district want. If you can convince the majority of the people in the majority of districts, you can get something done.
The biggest "problem" is that neither party is predicted to control the House, Senate and Presidency all at once any time soon, so it almost inherently has to be bipartisan. But the prevailing spirit is not exactly cooperation and good faith, on either side.
It's happened in the UK (£18/tonne of CO₂ equivalent) and Canada (varies per state), and probably others. UK total CO₂ emissions are below 1900 (!) levels, mostly due to many people switching to green energy, and substituting what coal remained with natural gas, which is most efficient power per tCO₂ among the fossil fuels.
Don't give up hope :) keep bringing up carbon price whenever relevant. The tide of public opinion will turn. Late, as always, but it will turn. People didn't think a black man could ever be president but lo and behold you did it. You just need to keep telling people that there is a solution, and that it is carbon price. Keep beating the drum.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. The US has a president that actively acts against such interests. He drops out of the Paris Agreement and has done tons of environmental protection rollbacks.
> The new rules make it easier to take out protections for threatened animals and plants and allow federal agencies to conduct economic assessments when deciding whether to protect a species from things like construction projects in a critical habitat. The rules also remove tools used by scientists to predict future harm to species from climate change.
As you can see, as with previous actions, he makes changes to benefit business because it's too difficult for businesses to thrive when they need to worry about the environment (paraphrasing of what he's actually said in the past).
I’m pretty sure the proposal is actually for on-the-spot extra-judicial executions of anybody who even criticizes the idea. Or maybe it’s just a call for a bit of regulation, I dunno.
They don't use the collected CO2 to make diesel fuel, they make methane. Some trucks may use methane as fuel.
IIUC they don't expect every gas station to have a converted from CO2 to fuel, but to have the conversion in the operational bases of the trucks, or collect it and send it to a specialized facility.
They use the heat from the exhaust gases to power the device, the calculations are in the paper.
They say that in other projects, they use the same heat of the exhaust gases to improve the efficiency of the fuel in a 10%. So this is not totally "free".
How does this compare to releasing the CO2 (and getting a 10% of efficiency) and collecting the CO2 from the air in a central location?
How does this compare to using Hydrogen as fuel? I guess the difference is that most of this technology is buildable now, but Hydrogen storage is too difficult for now.
How does this compare with a electric truck? I guess this system gives more autonomy, but all the chemical reactions to convert the CO2 to methane are less efficient that good batteries.