What if: Cheap carbon-neutral ethanol? This news says it could happen.

Interesting news here:

https://www.engadget.com/2016/10/18/researchers-accidentally-turn-carbon-dioxide-into-ethanol/

Jack Baruth wrote an article about this on TTAC crowing that this meant we'd keep on driving ICE-powered cars forever and EVs would be consigned to the dustbin of history (and then went into a bunch of political conspiracy nonsense).

Let's say for the sake of argument that we will indeed have dirt-cheap carbon-neutral ethanol in the next couple of years, what would that mean for ICEs in cars, in particular?

I think it would only mean ICEs in new cars will hang around for another decade or so, perhaps into the late 2030s at most, due to the reliability, performance, packaging, and NVH advantages EVs have.

I still don't think it would make a place for liquid fuel cell cars. By the time that tech is ready to go into a car, EV range and charging speed would've advanced to pretty much eliminate the demand for it. Plus there would be a new yet well-established alternative form of carbon-neutral transport.

I think it would finally kill the ghost of the zombie of the idea of hydrogen-powered cars. ICEs will now be carbon-neutral, long-range, quick-refueling, cheap vehicles with a cheap fuel that we already have infrastructure for. Between this and EVs, what would anyone want a hydrogen car for?

By its design it is not carbon neutral through. Got to make energy to run through the catalyst and well you are going to burn the ethanol at some point. Would be great for energy storage around wind and solar plants if the conversion really is as efficient as they think at scale.

Theoretically if you could make the electricity by neutral source say wind you could just store the ETOH to trap C02.

If this is scaleable they could set up a bunch of nuke plants to run the reactors and get a net negative CO2 balance. Well, at least before the ethanol gets used, and depending on how the uranium for the nuclear plants is mined.

Edit: also, start running the things on Venus to eventually give the "I don't want to live on this planet anymore" crowd an option.

That's a complicated sounding catalyst, I believe the joke is carbon nano anything has a habit of doing everything but leave the lab. The way I figure it, batteries will never get good/cheap enough and we'll eventually just make synthetic gasoline/diesel (which is a fairly established technology), which would be carbon neutral if you pull the carbon out of the ocean and power the whole deal with a nuke/solar/wind plant.

BrokenYugo wrote: ... I believe the joke is carbon nano anything has a habit of doing everything but leave the lab.

That there is funny cause it is so true!

BrokenYugo wrote: That's a complicated sounding catalyst, I believe the joke is carbon nano anything has a habit of doing everything but leave the lab. The way I figure it, batteries will never get good/cheap enough and we'll eventually just make synthetic gasoline/diesel (which is a fairly established technology), which would be carbon neutral if you pull the carbon out of the ocean and power the whole deal with a nuke/solar/wind plant.

Nano does get done at scale it is just really really rare. Lots of 3rd gen solar panels were nano fabricated. Heck for a while there graphene was rare and now we make it with chard chicken feathers.

Solar storage would be a game changer. On the smaller scale.

But to give a bit of scale, but its late and I am a little tired so may be off by a bit.

1,105 million metric tons of CO2 are produced a year just by cars. ~22.38lb's per gallon of ETOH so ~1×10^12 gallons of ETOH to be produced would wipe it out.

1.337×10^10 ft^3 (cubic feet) (cubic feet)of ETOH which is about a mile square of ETOH or the volume of every single human being on the planet.

So enough for say one weekend worth of drinking at the challenge.

That is just to break even for just the cars and only for the year.

What I was thinking this morning- is this reversible?

So can this technology be used to take Ethanol and turn it into electricity? And what efficiency?

Possible alternate path for fuel cells.

In reply to alfadriver:

My first thought was you could burn the ethanol, collect some or all of the CO2, plug the car in at home and use grid electricity to get back to ethanol. Still have the ability to fill up at a station in 5 minutes, or rechargeable at home. If you get more ethanol you'd have to give up your CO2 back to the filling station and they'd use it to make more.

Theoretically, sure. But that would require a CO2 capturing device.

The same thing would apply to fuel cells, BTW.

But using ethanol as a potential energy for electric cars solves a lot of the EV problems. Most of the existing ones, at least.

We're increasing electricity through solar and wind faster than use, aren't we? At least in some places we're heading toward "what do we do with this extra electricity?". That's where we worry less about overall efficiency of process and more about producing something of value and ramping up efficiency through time. Production of easily transportable fuel is a reasonable end game.

alfadriver wrote: What I was thinking this morning- is this reversible? So can this technology be used to take Ethanol and turn it into electricity? And what efficiency? Possible alternate path for fuel cells.

Yes, that is a really interesting possibility. All the energy density and refueling advantages of liquid fuel with the packaging and noise advantages of an EV.

Engadget wrote: On Monday, researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee announced that they too had unintentionally discovered something incredible: a means of transforming carbon dioxide directly into ethanol using a single catalyst.

In Tennessee, we have a long history of converting things into ethanol and don't need no fancy labs to do it.