
Argonne National Lab Breakthrough Turns Carbon Dioxide into Ethanol - kiyanwang
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/08/08/argonne-national-lab-breakthrough-turns-carbon-dioxide-into-ethanol/
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maxk42
If anyone is interested I have found the press release directly from the
Argonne National Laboratory: [https://www.anl.gov/article/turning-carbon-
dioxide-into-liqu...](https://www.anl.gov/article/turning-carbon-dioxide-into-
liquid-fuel)

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Harvesterify
And the related direct link to the paper:
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-020-0666-x](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-020-0666-x)

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Animats
This has to be energetically uphill, of course. How many units of energy do
you have to put into get one unit of energy in ethanol form? Need numbers on
this. Would it be a win to use wind energy during low price periods to make
ethanol this way?

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lukehutch
They say in the article that the conversion efficiency is 90%, which I assume
means that if the reagent supply is infinite, 90% of the electrical energy you
put into the catalyst is turned into chemical bond energy.

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jlokier
It says the Faradaic efficiency is 90%, which unfortunately is not the total
energy efficiency. Total energy efficiency also includes thermodynamic and
practical constraints.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_efficiency#Faradaic_lo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_efficiency#Faradaic_loss_vs._voltage_and_energy_efficiency)

However that's still a great figure.

I'm in awe that a carbon-substrate catalyst converts CO2 so well without
degrading itself.

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azinman2
This is the kind of thing that could motivate big industry to get into carbon
scrubbing, and maybe eventually cause it’s price to drop to levels where it
outcompetes digging for oil.

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ADent
This is going to be big. You can make solar more reliable by over building.
Then you can use that sporadically surplus electricity to make liquid fuels -
needed for aviation and handy for trains and trucks.

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rweir
It seems very unlikely they'll be able to resist burning it, though.

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Nihilartikel
With a twist of lime, they might just end up drinking it.

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gervwyk
This is really cool! Since the ocean releases a good amount of CO2. Imagine
pods sitting in the ocean capturing CO2 and using wave energy to generate
ethanol..

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boxed
Offshore wind could use this system too. It could be more efficient than the
transmission loss.

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jvanderbot
This is an energy storage mechanism (in the form of combustable fuel), not a
fuel-generation mechanism.

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sliken
yes, exactly right, but a pretty exciting one. Combustible fuel can be stored
for hours, days, weeks, months, and even years... unlike most forms of storing
electricity.

A alcohol burning car could be carbon neutral, have great range, and be
relatively cheap.

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lukehutch
Presumably when the ethanol is burned, all the captured carbon is released
again... So you have to re-capture each time you use it.

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jsmcgd
Roughly speaking, if the carbon is captured from the atmosphere and later
released into the atmosphere, the technology is carbon neutral.

If the carbon is sequestered (stored permanently) it is carbon negative.

If the carbon is obtained from an unsustainable source and released to the
atmosphere it is carbon positive. The current consensus is that only carbon
positive systems are considered a problem.

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LatteLazy
I did this in Alevel chemistry back in ~2001...

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rsfern
This comes across as kind of dismissive, as if the innovation here is just a
realization that a well-known electrocatalytic reaction can be used for carbon
sequestration. Am I reading your tone wrong?

The really hard bit in this kind of research is designing a catalyst that can
mediate the reaction efficiently, doesn’t degrade rapidly, and isn’t
prohibitively expensive to deploy at scale.

