Another Blue-Sky Energy Source

Yesterday the New York Times’ Dot Earth blog put up an excited post about a Los Alamos National Laboratory plan to convert CO₂ into truly greenhouse-neutral synthetic gasoline and ethanol via “an electrochemical process.” Two hours later the blog had to temper its enthusiasm, having noticed that it would take huge amounts of energy, probably from nuclear power, to make it work.

This sort of thoughtless enthusiasm is way too common. At least no investors lost money this time, or, rather, yet.

I don’t want to insult anyone, but I think the real problem is that people don’t understand the chemistry — not even at a freshman level — that’s involved in thinking about what it would take to turn CO₂ into fuel on an industrial scale.

• » See also: Biofuel Update With Emerson Process Management
• » Get Gas 2.0 by RSS or sign up by email.

Briefly, it’s like this: the carbon in CO₂ is completely oxidized, and can’t react in any convenient way to release energy. Hydrocarbons, on the other hand, contain carbon that’s completely reduced, and when this carbon is burned large amounts of energy are released, along with oxidized carbon and water. It is simply not possible to turn the oxidized carbon of CO₂ back into reduced carbon without the input of much more energy than was released in the first place. Photosynthesis is the most well-known way to make reduced carbon out of oxidized carbon.

Overly eager reporting may have made some readers doubt it, but of course they know all this at Los Alamos. At the Lab, they’re probably mostly jazzed about the cool chemical tricks they’ve come up with.

I suppose it’s possible they were blindsided by the coverage. Still, they did take the time to trademark the name of their process — it’s called Green Freedom^TM (Dang! I was going to use that one!), and they claim in the press release that the process is “transformational.” Maybe the process is technically sweet, but I don’t see how they can call it transformational. It’s easier to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear than to make fuel out of CO₂.

Tweet This Post