> The system runs at around 350 degrees Celsius (662 degrees Fahrenheit) at a pressure of around 3,000 PSI, combining processes known as hydrothermal liquefaction and catalytic hydrothermal gasification.
I wonder what it the energy ROI of the whole process. It is not mentioned in the article, so it is not sure it is positive.
It's certainly very negative. The advantage is you can use things like solar, hydro or geothermal energy to heat the system. Even turning 1000MW of geothermal energy into only 100MW of crude oil can be worthwhile since you can't run an internal combustion engine on geothermal energy.
But is it better than turning that geothermal energy into electricity and transmitting it to a battery in an electric car?
Edit: To be clear, I'm not saying there isn't a need for oil. Just wondering what the efficiencies are for each route, and whether this process means that we don't even need electric cars any more (doubtful, but I thought I'd ask)
Gasoline has tremendous energy density compared to other forms of storage. If you need that energy to be portable (like in a car or truck), you may still want to use petroleum. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
Gasoline is still way ahead. It still has ~40x the density of batteries. Even at 16%, it's still going to be about 6x as efficient as batteries, even if batteries + electric motors are at 100% efficiency.
A Toyota Camry car carries 17 gallons of fuel, which, at 6 lbs per gallon, is about 100 lbs. At 28 mpg, that's enough to travel 476 miles. The Tesla S carries a 900 lb battery which is enough to travel about 250 miles. In miles per lb, that's 4.7 for the Toyota, and 0.28 for the Tesla.
Obviously, there are a lot of other considerations than just miles per lb, but gasoline's energy density and portability are stellar.
If you're allowed any scientific process regardless of engineering challenge and economics, thermally crack the crude down to hydrogen and pure carbon coke deposits, sequester the carbon for carbon credits, and pipe the H2 into fuel cells for near 100% efficiency.
It means a lot. The Tesla Model S (a reasonable sedan) needs 85kwh to reach a 300+ mile range, and the drivetrain is probably about as efficient as electric cars will ever be. So realistically, we need 85-100kwh of power on board a reasonable car.
A single gallon of gasoline is ~33kwh of power. At 30mpg (easy for a sedan), 10 gallons (330kwh) is sufficient for a 300 mile range. So the Tesla is ~4 times as energy efficient as internal combustion, and unlikely to get any better.
Cars and trucks can easily be powered electrically, if the need arises (by frequently changed batteries, by induction, or as in trolley buses or trains)
I think planes, rockets and various military applications (e.g an infanterist carrying a zillion gadgets that have to be powered for hours) are the only examples of cases where this process might be beneficial.
It's basically time-shifting. Either you can turn this geothermal energy into electricity and have the consumer charge their car at home over a long period of time (hours) or you can turn it into a full tank of gasoline over a long period of time (hours), ship it to the consumer to fill their tank in a short period of time (minutes).
Either way, it takes a long time. The difference is the impact to the consumer of converting it to something useful for them (gas), or having them convert it to something useful (a charged battery). The consumer doesn't notice the gasoline taking a long time, to them it takes minutes.
Sure, that's better in the few scenarios when it is reasonable to do so. But electric engine technology is still very limited, and we're a long way from replacing all internal combustion engines with electrical. I doubt we'll seeing transatlantic passenger flights in electric airplanes any time soon.
The other huge advantage with oil is that it is a very efficient, stable and easy to transport store of energy. Transporting and storing 1MWh worth of energy using batteries is a serious undertaking compared to transporting and storing the equivalent in oil.
I'm petty sure I'm being pedantic, but to be clear: Electric engines (motors) are great. Highly efficient, simple, powerful, scalable both ways, and reliable. If you've got electricity available and want things to move, they're the way to go.
It's the batteries that are sub par, in many ways.
Because you know what happens when you try to pass immense torque through a transmission? Bad things. Its why Elon fought for so long for a 2-speed transmission on the Roadster before giving up and opting for a lower top speed. Electric motors have a ridiculous amount of force they can put out.
"Subsequent to completion of production car number one at Hethel, the company announced problems with transmission reliability. The development transmission, with first gear enabled to accelerate 0 to 60 mph (0 to 97 km/h) in 4 seconds, was reported to have a life expectancy of as low as only a few thousand miles. Tesla Motors' first two transmission suppliers were unable to produce transmissions, in quantity, that could withstand the gear-shift requirements of the high torque, high rpm electric motor. In December 2007, Tesla Motors announced plans to ship the initial Roadsters with the transmissions locked into second gear to provide 0 to 60 mph (0 to 97 km/h) acceleration in 5.7 seconds. The first production car was not delivered with this interim solution; P1 has both transmission gears enabled. According to the plan, the initial transmissions were to be swapped out under warranty when the finalized transmission, power electronics module (PEM), and cooling system became available. The EPA range of the car was also restated downward from 245 to 221 miles (394 to 356 km). The downward revision was attributed to an error in equipment calibration at the laboratory that conducted the original test"
DISCLAIMER: Tesla's final solution was a single-speed gearbox, combined with software and energy management upgrades. The electric motor will now run as high as 14K RPMs to achieve it's 125mph top speed while retaining it's 4 second 0-60 time.
Yes - if you don't have an electric car. Or if you're somewhere in Siberia at -40 degrees C where a) batteries stop working and b) you're 500km away from a power line.
And a feedstock for herbicides, pesticides, (some) fertilizers, or on a meta level above those, its a feedtock for "human food".
Of course you could eat the algae straight, or feed it to hogs and then eat hogs, but variety being the spice of life its a perfectly valid alternative tech to turn sunlight into food.
Wonder if this could be done in space? A few months ago I read about the idea of solar energy being captured in space, and I struggled with the question of how to transport that energy to where we'd like to use it.
If the algae could grow in space, and this process could occur in space, then we could wastefully convert solar to oil in space, and spacecraft could use that oil in space.
Lot of if's and speculation there, but it's an interesting line of thought.
I think you'll find radiation to be an interesting additional challenge to add to the mix. That and the relative lack of local oxygen. I get what you're saying though, its a heck of a lot more rational to design and airdrop an algae plant on Mars than to expect oil wells to produce on Mars.
> I think you'll find radiation to be an interesting additional challenge to add to the mix.
Not as much in near-Earth orbit where we enjoy much of the Earth's magnetic field's protection. Astronauts come back with an elevated risk of cancer but not tremendously so.
> That and the relative lack of local oxygen.
Grow some photosynthetic algae too, which'll convert sunlight to oxygen.
I can't tell if you're joking, but photosynthesis rearranges carbon dioxide and water into sugars, releasing some of the oxygen from the water molecules.
And when you burn the algae sourced synthetic kerosene and algae sourced O2 in your rocket engine (or whatever you're doing with it) you'll run out of water. And its dumb to ship unprocessed water up into space if you can use cheap earth based refineries to ship the same weight of highly refined fuel. Keep those heavy refineries at the bottom of the gravity well unless you have a really good reason to hoist them up.
So that was the origin of my idea that this isn't going to scale in space "in general". I'm told Europa has a lot of water, other than the whole lack of sunlight thing, I could see Europa as the "fuel tank of the solar system" in the future. Maybe it could be economically viable to mine comets and turn them into fuel while they're near the sun? Or mine icy asteroids?
I think you're going to overall have more trouble finding water in space than energy.
The problem is that algae is biomass. Thanks to conservation of mass, whatever amount of biomass you bring down from space needs to come from somewhere, and space is famously devoid of mass, let alone anything for algae to consume. That means that the problem of algae farms in space becomes one putting algae food into orbit.
I'm not sure how effective launching literally tons of material into space will be.
You're forgetting the one plausible energy source, however: the gravitational energy that the biomass has in outerspace. If you could figure out how to capture the energy of millions of tons of material moving from orbit to the Earth's surface, that might be able to provide the large majority of the energy needed to bring it up there in the first place.
I wonder how efficient we could make space elevators.
Let me tell you one of my pet peeves: space solar power. Okay, the stupidest thing ever. If anyone should like space solar power, it should be me. I got a rocket company and a solar company. I should be really on it, ya know. But it's like, super obviously, not going to work because, ya know, if you have solar panels - first of all, it has to be better than having solar panels on Earth, so then you say, okay, solar panel is on-orbit, you get twice the solar energy - assuming that it is out of Earth's shadow - but you've gotta do a double conversion. You've gotta convert it from photon to electron to photon, back to electron. You've got to make this double conversion, so, okay, what's your conversion efficiency? Hmm. All in, you're going to have a real hard time even getting to 50%. [The solar cells are better.] It does not matter, put that cell on Earth then. See, that's the point I'm making. Take any given solar cell, is it better to have it on Earth, or is it better to have it on orbit? What do you get from being in orbit? You get twice as much sun - best case - but you've got to do a conversion. You've got to convert it the energy to photons - well, you have incoming photons that go to electrons, but you - you've gotta do two conversions that you don't have to do on Earth, which is you've got to turn those electrons into photons and turn those photons back into electrons on the ground, and that double conversion is going to get you back to where you started, basically. So why are you bothering sending them to bloody space. "I wish I could just stab that bloody thing through the heart." BTW - electron to photon converters are not free and nor is sending stuff to space. Then it obviously super doesn't work. Case closed. You'd think. You'd think case closed, but no. I guarantee it's gunna come up another ten times. I mean, for the love of God.
I always saw it as a very long-term solution. Once we have the lunar colonies, orbital space stations, asteroid mining, and the economic infrastructure to make interplanetary travel routine, we could begin building out SSP as a practically unlimited source of power. But, for the foreseeable future I have to agree with Musk. Considering how expensive launching stuff to orbit is right now almost any sort of terrestrial solar power coupled with an energy storage mechanism (e.g. pumped hydro, heat reservoirs for solar thermal) would be more cost-effective.
Isn't the point of solar in space, well, space? You get less efficiency, but you are not going to run out of deserts nearly as fast. So the ultimate scale is not limited.
Are we really running out of deserts anytime soon? Isn't the issue more the capital and labor intensity of harvesting energy from sunlight, and transporting that energy to places that actually need it?
Ok, here they produce 1-sun intensity by having a 10 km mirror at 1000 km height, focusing on a 10 km terrestrial array.
That's a similar angular diameter, 1/100, as the sun, so from the receiver's point of view it can appear as powerful as the sun. I'm surprised that the numbers work out like that.
Maybe you could create a huge "death ray" constellation with 10x solar intensity and whose ground track (all sats in the same ground track) was filled with liquid cooled solar panels. Over the ocean it would just kill everything in its path.
Nuclear. You want to generate a lot of heat and you don't have geothermal energy handy, you go nuclear.
You could make the whole facility mechanical - the heat from the reactor is used to heat the algae and use steam-driven pumps to create the pressure. Eliminate the electrical middleman.
You need a fair amount of hydrogen gas to run a hydrocracker, which is basically what this is. Industrially you get the hydrogen from natgas. Yeah yeah you can get methane from the output of a hydrocracker and hydrogen from methan but depending on the process its net overall hydrogen negative (think about it, how are you going to split a long chain hydrocarbon that has two H ends into two little ones thus a net of 4 H ends without a continuous input of hydrogen?)
So yeah you're mostly right but never going to get away from maybe 5% to 10% capacity driving steam turbines to electrolyze water and run the (insecure, of course) SCADA and hotel load for the humans running the plant etc.
A likely plant would look like two nuke generating plants backing each other up and 18 nukes cooking algae into diesel, roughly.
So just get rid of the internal combustion engine...Surely that energy could be used in a more efficient way - such as filling up batteries for electric cars, and then power 10x more electric cars than oil-based cars.
The algae->oil part of the process necessarily loses energy, so it all comes down to the process of turning sun into algae. Which is not itself very efficient, but may be cheaply scalable.
I think if you just care about renweable EROI and not about storage in convenient petrol form then wind and solar are still the winners.
If you can't store it, you can't use it, so it doesn't matter how green it is, it won't be used.
The ideal transportable liquid fuel is diesel with gasoline a very close second. Some peculiar and temporary engineering and economic issues make gasoline ideal for passenger cars but in a very long run perspective the whole world is going diesel, its just the future has arrived a little quicker for some parts of the world than others. A common sci fi (and tech) theme.
Originally the diesel engine was developed by the Diesel bros (no kidding) to run on nut oil not crude oil. The Diesel bros had a political axe to grind about farms having self sufficient tractors much like they had self sufficient ox drawn plows. To say things didn't turn out that way would be an understatement, but there's no scientific reason it won't work that way in the future.
The primary problem with nut based biodiesel is you can't scale the production up to reasonable economic levels by shoving entire walnut trees thru a pipeline... but you can pump algae thru a pipeline...
So that's the big pix of why people are trying to turn algae into diesel.
Sure, but people use nonstorable electricity just fine, so I disagree with your first sentence.
Biogas rather than biodiesel might appear as a farm fuel in the future, either from manure or wood gasification. But not while underground gas is still cheap enough to flare.
Ah I think you're correct. I reread your post and I got stuck circular. Yes fixed installations would almost certainly continue not to use liquid fuels just like now. Probably direct solar like you say. And just like now, the transport industry would continue to heavily rely on liq fuels. I'd worry about practical engineering issues with biogas either leaking out (especially if pressurized) or oxygen contamination leaking into the flammability limit range.
If you unleash a chemist and tell him to do anything he wants to make the best energy store, you end up with a liquid hydrocarbon, they really are awesome by both mass and volume energy density and working temp range and corrosion resistance and shelf stability and a bunch of other parameters, even if cost is not an issue. True, weird corner cases like solid rocket boosters do end up with weird fuel components, but they're weird, so that's OK.
The story starts with people terraforming a planet and turning it into a giant algae-growing factory, for the purpose of creating oil from it. Whole plots with interesting characters occur. Then, suddenly, towards the end, those people abandon the whole project to go fight a war in their own galaxy. Then, the story ends with the shocking twist ... somehow you find out the abandoned algae factory is Earth. :)
...and then in the sequel they show up millions of years later when the war is over, only to find that sentient creatures have evolved and have almost entirely used up the oil reserves :)
In Larry Niven's "Known Space" stories, one bit of backstory is that billions of years ago the Slaver empire colonized planets with yeast to feed to their livestock -- giant bioengineered slugs. In his "World of Ptavvs" he describes a survivor coming out of stasis on earth, long after the fall of the Slaver empire, very confused about what happened to his planet...
Phonons. Phonon pipelines, phonon tanks... Investors please form an orderly line for me to fleece you go millions.
Srsly though. Liquids are extremely good at this kind of density storage trade off, it's the reason petroleum won over electric cars in 1900 ( look it up, electric cars aren't new, we just decided about a. Hundred years ago we liked oil more.)
Right, it was my understanding anyway that it was pretty simple to turn any kind of biological into oil, but the issues were energy efficiency, and scaling the process up.
Well, I wouldn't call it simple. The term to google for is hydrocracker or cracker in general (uh, cracker in petroleum chemistry, specifically). For the first 50 years or so from 1890 to WWII they only did it thermally and since WWII its been all about exotic catalysts.
Its not viable to thermal crack other than weird situations (Like I don't care if its net energy positive, we need feedstock to produce methane to produce ammonia to produce fertilizer so if you want to eat next winter, get crackin' today said the Kaiser to .. somebody .. in WWI). If its ridiculously expensive to thermally crack and crude is cheap, its simpler to just refine more crude and kill the market price of asphalt by dumping it on the market. So thats how we get blacktop roads, which seems to be a stupid use of valuable crude, yet... So this is a gross generalization but you can't thermally crack as a primary energy source, you've gotta cat crack. Unfortunately catalytic cracking is still something of an art or craft rather than a science because its horrifically complicated. Since day one there has been slow continuous incremental improvement, to the point that in 2010-ish its finally reasonable to finally start cat cracking algae on an industrial scale, or at least kinda sorta.
The problem with cat cracking is the catalysts are sensitive to trace contaminants so just pitching in crap from a field is an excellent way to destroy the catalyst. It is almost exactly like how carbon monoxide kills people, in that "stuff" gets stuck in the important parts which jams the whole works up and then nothing works ever again. On the other hand algae grown in glass tubes can have all its inputs controlled to not destroy the catalyst... more or less... plus or minus required trace elements... some of which kill some catalysts...
The best HN analogy I can provide is its kind of like 3D FPS games in the early 90s, no one suddenly shockingly invented out of whole cloth "the 3d chip" and that's how we got endless WWII sequels, its more like the smooth and gradual ramp up in performance from 1800s punch card unit record equipment up to the present day, where a phase change or whatever happened in the market in 1990 where suddenly the state of the art in 1990 made 3D FPS video games a reasonable application. But nothing really "new" happened in 1990 other than a century of computational performance gains continued as usual. Its the market that shifted after a certain performance level was achieved.
True, you can point to the days before and after the bipolar transistor demonstrated amplification and say the world changed on a certain date. But smooth growth in computer performance or cat cracker performance means there is no such sudden change date for FPS video games or algae based feedstock for hydrocrackers. And thats why we've been hearing about algae crackers as a "new" thing for about two decades and probably have to keep hearing about them being "new" for at least another couple decades because it becomes commonplace for people to run their cars on algae based biofuel.
The difference in the situations makes it an interesting HN topic more so than the trivia about someones recent lab experiment.
There are also practical engineering problems with making a "rolling coke/charcoal oven" reliable enough to last 250K miles with about the same maint as a gasoline car. There are certain economic balances that have to be achieved, if the maint cost is going to be X times a gas car maint and lifespan will be Y times shorter that has certain capital cost requirements which probably are not possible to meet.
Also this is something of an enviro-slur but renewable ideas are typically horribly polluting but the small scale types handwave past it. A gasoline engine can output exhaust cleaner in some ways than its input air, especially WRT hydrocarbons in smoggy areas, but a coke/charcoal oven is just beyond filthy polluting, which scales pretty well to one dude and his one car but is a non-starter for 100M American cars. The interstate would be unimaginable.
As somebody who works in the fuel industry. We easily can keep about 3-5 liters of fuel at ~15,000 psi for injector testing in about ~1kw to 2kw watts of power (with 350F heating). So not super far off.
I wonder what it the energy ROI of the whole process. It is not mentioned in the article, so it is not sure it is positive.