Blue Crude

[Jeff Porter]

Interesting article about diesel. The Audi plant will soon be making a whopping 160 liters a day, but....

http://www.sciencealert.com/audi-have-successfully-made-diesel-fuel-from-air-and-water

 

[NSTG8R]

Interesting article about diesel. The Audi plant will soon be making a whopping 160 liters a day, but....

http://www.sciencealert.com/audi-have-successfully-made-diesel-fuel-from-air-and-water

Definitely interesting...But it seems to me they should stop after cracking the H2O molecule and just use the hydrogen. Neat science though. Thanks for the link, Jeff!

 

[Lil4X]

That's an interesting process, and I'm sure it works, but producing 160 liters (or about 42 gallons) of diesel per day is going to have to be scaled up drastically in order to produce commercial quantities of the product. It's going to take years of work, and I'm sure at some point we'll find cheap, renewable replacements for fossil fuels - but not today, and maybe not in our or our children's lifetimes.

Petrochemical plants and refineries operate on a razor thin margin of profit per hundredweight of product. The trick is to produce a LOT of product and make their money on the economies of scale. I once visited an alcohol unit in a major chemical plant that was being torn down after only a year in production - the reason being that it was obsolete. Somebody figured out how to make alcohol for a couple of pennies a hundredweight less, making that unit uncompetitive in the market. In a few months, this unit that spread over about half of a city block, containing piping and vessels, reactors, and treaters, was up and running, merrily churning out petrodollars for its owners. Sure, it cost many millions of dollars, but it paid out in a matter of months.

That's the same problem most alternative fuels are going to have - we have many years experience with turning fossil crude into motor gasoline - sure we could do better, but is it worth the investment to produce a product at a competitive price? Call it investment inertia. Our current technology is well known and we can tweak it to respond to the market quite easily. We are largely unwilling to gamble on turning CO2 or any other "waste" product into gold - at least on an enormous scale that would compete with refined crude. Alchemists have been trying to do it for years, and as yet, none have retired rich.

 

[Ty]

That's an interesting process, and I'm sure it works, but producing 160 liters (or about 42 gallons) of diesel per day is going to have to be scaled up drastically in order to produce commercial quantities of the product. It's going to take years of work, and I'm sure at some point we'll find cheap, renewable replacements for fossil fuels - but not today, and maybe not in our or our children's lifetimes.

Petrochemical plants and refineries operate on a razor thin margin of profit per hundredweight of product. The trick is to produce a LOT of product and make their money on the economies of scale. I once visited an alcohol unit in a major chemical plant that was being torn down after only a year in production - the reason being that it was obsolete. Somebody figured out how to make alcohol for a couple of pennies a hundredweight less, making that unit uncompetitive in the market. In a few months, this unit that spread over about half of a city block, containing piping and vessels, reactors, and treaters, was up and running, merrily churning out petrodollars for its owners. Sure, it cost many millions of dollars, but it paid out in a matter of months.

That's the same problem most alternative fuels are going to have - we have many years experience with turning fossil crude into motor gasoline - sure we could do better, but is it worth the investment to produce a product at a competitive price? Call it investment inertia. Our current technology is well known and we can tweak it to respond to the market quite easily. We are largely unwilling to gamble on turning CO2 or any other "waste" product into gold - at least on an enormous scale that would compete with refined crude. Alchemists have been trying to do it for years, and as yet, none have retired rich.

The truly neat things about this is that the process takes Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere (good) using renewable energy to produce NOT an alternative fuel but an existing fuel. Okay, not exactly an existing fuel but think of all the alternatives that there have been including natural gas vehicles, hydrogen vehicles, etc. Why haven't those taken off? It's the chicken and the egg phenomenon. People won't buy hydrogen vehicles because there are no filling stations and there are no filling stations because there are no cars... Well, with the Diesel Blue, they don't have that same problem. The Diesel Blue can be mixed right in with regular old diesel fuel and can follow normal channels and can be used by existing diesel vehicles.

While I agree it makes more ecological sense to stop once you have hydrogen, realistically, converting it to diesel fuel will have a wider impact. Come on, how many alternate fuel vehicles are there out there? Some, okay... But, I'd bet most of those dual fuel vehicles run regular old gasoline most or all of the time..

This technology shows some promise and I'd much rather see it catch on that ethanol, for instance. Let's face it, it takes a lot of resources to grow and harvest that corn. This Diesel Blue, while using electricity, doesn't consume much else. (The water would be separated in order to store energy but after combustion, will be reformed back into water)

I hope it works as well as they are thinking it will.

 

[CheeseheadEarl]

Interesting. But saying it can be made for 1-1.50 Eu/L is not a good comparison to the current price quoted of 1.50 Eu/L for diesel which likely includes a ton of taxes and marketing, transport, etc. costs that aren't likely to be added in to the E diesel cost yet.

It's a cool concept, but will it really work large scale? Think how taxed our electric grids are already in the States. New hydro power isn't likely, wind is a boom right now but works in limited areas, and large scale solar requires huge tracts of land. Being green ain't easy, or cheap.

 

[CheeseheadEarl]

/sarcasm Plus, think of all the trees that will starve when we use all their CO2. /sarcasm off

 

['lio]

Interesting. But saying it can be made for 1-1.50 Eu/L is not a good comparison to the current price quoted of 1.50 Eu/L for diesel which likely includes a ton of taxes and marketing, transport, etc. costs that aren't likely to be added in to the E diesel cost yet.

It's a cool concept, but will it really work large scale? Think how taxed our electric grids are already in the States. New hydro power isn't likely, wind is a boom right now but works in limited areas, and large scale solar requires huge tracts of land. Being green ain't easy, or cheap.

You are right, the approximately $6 a gallon of fuel in Europe includes a lot of taxes, but the governments charge much less in taxes for sustainable and alternative fuels such as biodiesel, diesel is cheaper than regular unleaded too. Agreed: the concept might not work on a bigger scale and if one has to generate that much electricity, the money might be better spent on developing better electric cars or batteries.
Generating enough solar and wind power isn't hard. Germany is farther North than most of the US and just reached another milestone: Germany Sets New Record, Generating 74 Percent Of Power Needs From Renewable Energy

 

[WilliamH]

What ever happened to Brown's Gas?
It is also made from water using electricity.
There are currently welding applications using it.
It will work, with some modifications, in ICE gas engines.
Combustion product is also water.

 

[NSTG8R]

What ever happened to Brown's Gas?
It is also made from water using electricity.
There are currently welding applications using it.
It will work, with some modifications, in ICE gas engines.
Combustion product is also water.

I've done some research on that myself. Big in the diesel truck community. The dry cells are fairly simple to make with stuff from the hardware store, and a lot safer to run since it make the HHO on demand (no storage). Here's a pretty good link with tons of info:

http://www.hho4free.com/bob_boyce.htm

 

[satx]

"we'll find cheap, renewable replacements for fossil fuels"

there will transformative breakthroughs in batteries, sooner rather than later, cheaper, faster charging, greater energy density, longer lasting.

Blue diesel looks wonderful but how many millions of solar panels and 1000s of wind turbines will it take to produce the electricity to produce it at useful quantities? What's the eROI? And blue diesel exhaust is still a pollutant.