Can we turn carbon dioxide turned into a hydrocarbon fuel?

Question

I noticed this article in my reading, and wondered if anything came of it. Does anybody know?

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2620

Hmmm. Yahoo won't let me fix the grammar above at the moment...sorry.

Bob, thanks for the link, and for reading the reference. Thanks to the rest of you for your comments as well.

It may be that the process didn't work economically, so the researcher went on to other things...

I didn't find anything much about the other researcher, William Siegfried, mentioned either.

I did find this additional link though:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/research/1282251.html

I'll let this question sit for a little while longer and see if anyone else chimes in.

I did find other a direct link to some of the author's work here, if anybody is interested:
http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jcersj/111/1298/111_709/_article/-char/en

Answer 1

Here's something from 2005 which mentions it, but doesn't indicate any progress:

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmsctech/578/578m27.htm

For Mike, below. Yamasaki claimed he could use heat energy at 300 C to drive the process. If true, that would mean the energy could be derived from waste heat from many processes. The fact that this seems to have just gone away indicates that was not true, though. Check out the original reference.

For Robert A, below:

"Many industrial processes generate large amounts of waste energy that simply pass out of plant stacks and into the atmosphere or are otherwise lost. Most industrial waste heat streams are liquid, gaseous, or a combination of the two and have temperatures from slightly above ambient to over 2000 degrees F."

http://www.cogeneration.net/Waste_Heat_Recovery.htm

It would be a very rare power plant that has reduced its' waste energy to 50C.

Answer 2

This is sort of interesting blue sky research. However the article talks about waste heat energy from power stations being available at 300 C (from a practical point of view this would need to be more to give a driving temperature difference across heat exchangers). Waste heat is simply not available from thermally efficient power stations at that temperature. It is more like 50 C and useless for this process.

Edited Comment: There are very few processes which waste significant amounts of heat at 300+C.


Edited Comment in response to Bob see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_power_plant section on condensing steam - talks about this being done at 32 to 38 C - ie my 50 C is in fact high. If you are talking about flue gases there is not much heat in this and difficulties with heat exchangers (pressure drop, corrosion)

Edited Comment to further comments from Bob: This is a vendor of equipment trying to peddle his wares. Not saying that it is not often worthwhile to recover waste flue gas heat but it is generally smaller scale installations that do not already have provision such as steam generation. There are also reliability questions hanging a complex and perhaps delicate process on the smooth operation of another process.

Answer 3

Ethanol is carbon dioxide that is turned into fuel. Corn plants turn carbon dioxide into sugar molecules/energy. They use corn to produce ethanol fuel that powers engine.

Plants have been doing this for gazillion years. It's photosynthesis.

Looks like some are looking to do similar things without plants. Using some synthetic methods that can be useful to make fuel in large quantities using CO2 present in our atmosphere.

The study looks interesting since it can take CO2 in atmosphere and turn it into fuel. Like what all plants do. Instead we'll be doing in factories in industrial scale if it works.

Since the method recycles CO2 in our atmosphere this will not cause additional accumulation of CO2 in our atmosphere. So we can drive normal cars without increasing CO2 in our atmosphere.

Answer 4

Like the other guys said people are kinda looking into it but until the science really gets into to it,and they do several more years of research its not going to happen, just one of those things you ask again in another 5-10 years by then they might be turning that theory into fact. I guess we will just have to wait and see....................

Answer 5

No. It is the equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. You can't raise the potential energy of a set ingredients without injecting energy in at some point.

Plants do this with CO2 by using sunlight.

Answer 6

Carbon dioxide, like water does not have chemical energy which can be used as a fuel.

Like water, if you put energy into carbon dioxide, you can store chemical energy which can then be used as a fuel.

You have to put more chemical energy into carbon dioxide to convert it to a fuel than you get back when you burn the resulting fuel.

Answer 7

No. Carbon dioxide is the result of something else (a carbon based item) being used for fuel. Carbon, when burned, results in carbon dioxide.

Answer 8

In short, the answer is no.