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I know that some are fearful of hard work for low wages but along with that were the health conditions that prevailed from doing that type of work, the likelihood of death due to accidents and collapses. Sure, not all things had those situations.
We do not need large monopoly games with power companies and poorly placed energy creation plants either.
Sure, the corporate greed to pay out the profits to the board rather than protecting the worker seems to always be the way.
On the flip side zoning to keep what others think are low class housing since many are content to have less so long as it keeps them warm and dry, has basic life support utilities and a place to lay one's head plus a means to cook food ect...
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For SpaceNut re #126
This topic has drifted away from it's intended focus. You are NOT responsible for the drift, but you ARE the forum member in Post #126 who said nothing about how to create Synthetic or Natural Fuel using Solar Power. I am looking for practical, Real Universe information about how this idea can be turned into an industry that supplies a decent fraction of the Earth population's needs for hydrocarbon fuels.
There are reported to be actual working examples of plants designed to produce hydrocarbons from air and water using solar power. We can fill this topic space with details about how that is done, so that a future reader would have a readily available checklist to build a plant, or to convince someone with available funds to put them into a project to build such a plant.
There are MANY Chat Topics where folks can rant away to their heart's content. The Science Index level is NOT a good match for a rant of any kind.
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The main issue for synthetic fuel is how to get sufficient carbon to make it practical as it's not just about a powerful energy source or the amounts of hydrogen that will be used in the reaction that makes the fuel. It would be one thing to collect the carbon as we burned the fuel as its fully concentrated to store even with all of the Nitrogen within the burn.
As for oil companies that have the funds to build this but that would cut into a profit that they enjoy for not doing this as the oil is a small cost to pull it out of the ground.
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SpaceNut,
You seem to think oil company profits are endless. Maybe you should look at net year-over-year cashflow if you think they have anywhere close to enough cash to build the synthetic fuel plants we need. They can't get a loan from a regular bank to do anything at all, not even to build photovoltaic arrays, thanks to the ESG nonsense. All of the capital comes from private investors or the government.
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Experimental Device Converts Light and Water into Fuel
Dr. Qian Wang and Professor Erwin Reisner, along with a team of researchers from Cambridge’s Department of Chemistry, have created a device that can mimic the process of photosynthesis, processing sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into completely clean fuel. This process doesn’t even require any external parts or electricity; just set it up and let it go. The device produces a clean, storage-safe fuel known as formic acid, which can also be processed into hydrogen. Plus, much like real plants, the process creates oxygen as a byproduct.
Appears Colbalt is the catalyst to be used in this process to convert the Co2 and water into fuel and excess oxygen.
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The article at the link below is primarily about making synthetic fuel. It ** does ** hint at wanting to draw power from renewable sources.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/small-brookl … 08753.html
Behind the scenes: This company makes jet fuel out of just air and water
Zach Wichter, USA TODAY
Mon, April 24, 2023 at 8:26 PM EDT
"Green Travel” is a six-part series focusing on what it means to be sustainable travelers, how the industry is moving the needle on greener efforts, and how consumers can reduce their carbon footprint when exploring. If you'd like to contribute to our future reporting and share your experience as a source, you can click here to fill out this quick form.NEW YORK — Bushwick is probably not the first place that comes to mind when you think of jet fuel production, but tucked away in an industrial corner of the hipster haven of Brooklyn is an unassuming, windowless warehouse that could hold the key to a future of more environmentally friendly flying.
Air Company, which was founded in 2017, is using this Brooklyn location to experiment with making sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) out of water and carbon dioxide. The method they're using is known as power to liquid. I've heard of and written about this process before, and honestly, I don't understand why it's not getting more attention.
What is SAF?: Some say sustainable aviation fuel is the key to a greener airline industry
Reverse global warming by scrubbing the air? That's what carbon capture aims to do
Air Company's Brooklyn production facility.
I had a chance to visit Air Company's SAF production facility in March, and although the quantities it's producing now are small, in the coming years they plan to open a new plant that could produce thousands of gallons a day. However, that's still a piddling amount compared to the aviation sector's overall thirst for fuel. (For reference, U.S. airlines used 1.41 billion gallons of fuel in January 2023 alone, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.)
What is SAF?: Some say sustainable aviation fuel is the key to a greener airline industry
Still, Stafford Sheehan, one of Air Company's co-founders and its chief technology officer, told me that by the end of this decade, they hope to have a larger number of industrial-scale production facilities in operation across the country.
How does power to liquid work?
Here's how Sheehan and his colleagues explained the process.
First, Air Company draws a relatively small amount of water – "a couple gallons an hour" – from the municipal water supply. That water (which you may remember is H2O from your high school chemistry class) is broken down via electrolysis into hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen is vented back out into the atmosphere and the hydrogen is stored at high pressure awaiting the next step.
The machine used to separate hydrogen and oxygen from water molecules.
Near the hydrogen storage tank is a much larger carbon dioxide storage tank, which is used for the crucial next phase.
Sheehan said that, for now, Air Company uses biogenic CO2 sourced from traditional ethanol fermentation, captured from another facility in upstate New York before it is released into the atmosphere, which allows the company to mitigate those emissions altogether.
How do carbon offsets work?: And are they worth your money?
"Literally, all we did was put a compressor at the end of the smokestack," he said. The captured, compressed carbon gets trucked down to Brooklyn and ultimately turned into fuel when mixed with the compressed hydrogen.
"We don't need deliveries (of captured carbon) very frequently, like less than once a month," Sheehan said.
For larger-scale production, he added, Air Company is considering locating its facilities closer to the source of the captured carbon.
Although the technology it uses can be placed anywhere, the overall lifecycle emissions of Air Company's SAF are lower when the carbon source is closer to the fuel production facility, because it eliminates the need to transport the captured carbon from the source to where the fuel is ultimately produced, which is currently one of the more emissions-intensive parts of the process.
Air Company's carbon storage tank.
Other companies are developing technology that will capture carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere to feed the power to liquid process, but Sheehan said that work is still in its infancy.
Sheehan also said that the machinery required for capturing carbon emissions is prohibitively heavy to install on airplanes, so it's not likely that your flight's exhaust will ever be directly captured and turned into fuel for the return trip.
How is sustainable aviation fuel created?
The next step is bringing the ingredients together.
Compressed hydrogen and carbon are introduced to a catalyst in a carbon conversion reactor, producing flammable paraffins, methanol, ethanol, and wastewater. Those products are then distilled and turned into fuel, among other things.
Sheehan said the exact catalyst for that reaction is proprietary, but Air Company uses a standard reaction chamber to make it happen.
The chamber where hydrogen and carbon are combined to make paraffins and other byproducts.
"Every single reactor in the chemical and the petrochemical industry is essentially the same as that: they’re tubes with rocks," he said. "Because this is the most standard reactor type in the entire chemical industry, the scale-up of it is well known. Our approach is to have as many things as possible that are similar to oil and gas or drop-in replacement because all the infrastructure in the world is made for oil and gas."
Tell us your story: Mobility device lost or damaged by an airline? USA TODAY wants to hear about it.
Even at this small scale, the efficiency of power to liquid shows promise. Lauren Riley, United Airlines' chief sustainability officer, recently told USA TODAY that she views this method as the future of aviation fuel production.
The reaction produces paraffins and wastewater, with some other byproducts that are also extracted.
Paraffins and water are the two major products of Air Company's process.
Sheehan emphasized that power to liquid's process efficiency is a major advantage over other kinds of sustainable aviation fuels, which require more refining to deploy.
The paraffins produced by the reaction are converted into aviation fuel. Through Air Company's partnerships with the Department of Defense, its product has already powered experimental jet flights and does not have to be mixed with traditional aviation fuel to be used, as other forms of SAF sometimes do.
"With the military, we fly only 100%, we don't do any blending," Sheehan said. "This can be drop-in" as a replacement for petroleum-based jet fuel.
The production process also creates wastewater, which can be recycled to make more fuel, along with methanol and ethanol, which Air Company puts into consumer products including perfume and vodka.
These tanks hold wastewater, which is recycled to make more fuel, as well as ethanol and methanol, which are used in consumer products like vodka and perfume.
How quickly can power to liquid be deployed for commercial flights?
Sheehan acknowledged that Air Company's fuel isn't going to be on your own flights any time soon, even if their current production facility is just a few miles from New York's major airports.
"The scale that we're producing here is small compared to commercial jets," Sheehan said. "But out of our next facility, that's going to be flying commercial jets," and is set to come online in the next few years.
Sustainable flying: Lufthansa introduces 'green fares' to make it easier for travelers to offset their CO2
Economic and other roadblocks are a drag on scaling up, too.
The process Air Company uses is energy intensive. At the scale they are producing fuel in Brooklyn, they can purchase renewable energy certificates to account for the power they're using from the ConEd grid, but at larger facilities, they plan to co-locate with sustainable energy producers.
"You have to buy a lot of renewable electricity and deploy a lot of costly renewable electricity," Sheehan said.
The core section of Air Company's fuel production process.
Finding enough renewable energy to make more fuel through this method is one of the major obstacles to growing Air Company's overall eco-friendly production.
The economics of the industry also complicate its growth, because SAF production by any method remains more expensive than drilling for fossil fuels, but tax credits passed by the Biden administration under the Inflation Reduction Act allow the end cost of SAF to be similar to that of traditional petroleum aviation fuel.
And as exciting as power to liquid sounds, it's just one part of the solution to climate change.
"What's evident is it's going to take a portfolio of solutions to solve climate change," Sheehan said. "We don't need to be reliant on fossil fuels. That's good for the climate and it's good for people in general because then you don't have a concentration of wealth and power in the few people and the few countries and the few groups that run oil wells."
How can the travel industry reduce its carbon footprint?
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How can travel be sustainable? This company wants to change plane fuel
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This plant appears to be an alternative to soybeans ...
It has the distinct advantage of not serving as a food ingredient (according to the article).
https://propane.com/environment/podcast … ntent=4.14
https://www.gceholdings.com/investors/c … -directors
Global Clean Energy’s Richard Palmer on Camelina: Is it the wonder crop for renewable fuels?
Path to Zero
4.14 - Global Clean Energy’s Richard Palmer on Camelina: Is it the wonder crop for renewable fuels?
https://propane.com/feed/podcast-feed/path-to-zerohttps://propane.com/environment/podcast … ble-fuels/
This episode features a deep discussion on the game-changing crop, Camelina, which is quickly becoming a popular feedstock for renewable fuels production. Tucker welcomes the head of the world’s leading developer of camelina. Richard Palmer is CEO of Global Clean Energy, which owns Sustainable Oils, a camelina breeding and production businesses in the U.S. Global Clean Energy also owns the largest camelina company in Europe, Camelina Company España S.L.
What is Camelina?
Camelina has been grown for centuries but recently the plant is gaining attention for biofuels because of the oil contained in its seeds. Camelina has one of the lowest carbon scores, with studies showing it can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 60% compared to petroleum fuel.Global Clean Energy works with hundreds of farmers in the nation to grow camelina and holds the world’s largest camelina patent and IP protection portfolio. In addition to the upstream camelina business, Global Clean Energy owns a downstream refinery in Bakersfield, California. That plant is currently undergoing a retrofit to become a renewable fuels refinery to eventually process camelina into ultra-low carbon renewable fuels, including renewable diesel and renewable propane.
“The founders of our company were really at the very beginnings of renewable fuel development,” Palmer tells Tucker. “One of the things we were hyper-focused on was not using a food grade product to make fuel because of all the unintended consequences with food security.”
Benefits to Farmers
One of the many benefits to camelina is it is fast growing and requires less water than many other crops, so farmers can plant it between other crops. Camelina is also relatively pest and disease tolerant. It captures carbon not only above the ground, but also the roots don’t get harvested, which puts more carbon and organic material back into the soil.
Photo courtesy: Global Clean Energy
“We’re not asking farmers to plant our crop instead of another crop,” says Palmer. “We’re saying, plant our crop instead of no crop.”
Renewable Fuels Market
According to Palmer, the adoption and expansion of the renewable fuels market is highly dependent on feedstock availability. Most feedstocks for biofuels today are served by food products like ethanol, soybean oil and canola oil.
“By us showing that camelina is a highly scalable non-food feedstock as an option for renewable fuels, it continues to fuel interest,” says Palmer. “All we need is a large commercial adoption and we’ve proven the fact that camelina can be grown on large scale.”
Resources
Global Clean Energy Website
Sustainable Oils Website
Yahoo Finance – Global Clean Energy Holdings, Inc. Receives Funding from ExxonMobil to Advance Renewable Diesel Production and Camelina Expansion
Biomass Fuels – Sustainable Oils opens North American headquarters in Montana
ABC Montana – Montana farmers growing camelina, producing crop for renewable diesel fuel
Camelina Company España opens innovation center in Spain
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There are lots of plant sources to feed the device, but the issue is how much yield to energy input is required not only to grow but to harvest so that you can use it.
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For SpaceNut re #133 ... thanks for noting the need for any renewable system to sustain it's own energy needs, as well as supply oil for customers! The fuel described in the article is (apparently) made from a plant that is not currently consumed as a food crop. For that reason it would appear to be a better choice than peanuts or soy beens.
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