- A team of scientists has figured out how to convert planet-warming carbon dioxide into a harmless powdery fuel that could be converted into clean electricity
Frankly? It's a good study with a fairly sober assessment of difficulties, if imho overeager in extrapolation of future prospect. You can only do so much for buffering electrolytic medium without impacting purity (and therefore efficiency), and -- at those scales -- their use of sodium and potassium as reagents will only get costlier. They also incorporate tin nanoparticle as a catalyst, and even though it's by definition recoverable, that thing goes for $2k a kilo for shitty 100nm stuff and needs to be cleaned between batches. I could go on.
But that's the game: fluff it up for funding, hope it's cost-effective enough for someone to pick up. My real beef is that it's from MIT, a place that has a world-shattering breakthrough every other week for technologies that are hailed as success worth following up on a year later if they almost make it past the proof of concept stage. Seriously, if 10% of those announcements paid off, I'd be exploring Oort cloud in my fusion-powered spaceship made from superconducting paper-mache and plastic waste. And it's hard to not be jaded about it.
I want to be wrong so fucking much, though.
Dude this seems like a big fucking deal to me: This too: DOes that say what I think it does? You electrolyze the shit not much hotter than hydrogen, and keeping it in a bottle with nothing but CO2 above it keeps it running? 'cuz my water-welder makes fucktons of hydrogen with a scary amount of (cheap) potassium. This seems entirely doable.
However, when the partial pressure of CO2 in the overhead gas, PCO2, reaches 1 atm and above, bicarbonate dominates in the aqueous phase: [HCO3−(aq)] ≫ [CO32−(aq)] (Figure 1F). This means that the freshly prepared bicarbonate feedstock could be converted into formate with a theoretical yield of ∼100% with nearly zero carbon efficiency loss, if in a constant CO2 partial pressure environment of PCO2 = 1 atm or higher.
Hah. Neeeerd. It's the gist, yes. My problem is that if the idea is to scale the process to something that's more than a 100ml jar on a bench, this experiment is almost a spherical cow in a vacuum. For starters, you have to take steps to keep it under 80C, so it'll either need to be current-limited (takes more time) or be actively cooled (takes more energy, likely skews carbon balance). As it is, they probably just put a moist paper towel on the vessel and call it a day. Your product and reagents are strongly alkaline, so not all materials will stand the reaction conditions for whatever amounts of time. Those aren't insurmountable problems, sure, but stack enough of them and this might not be as viable as it looks on paper. That said, if there's a will there's a way. I'd like it to be me making mountains out of anthills.
Yeah I dunno, man - electrolysis doesn't pump up the temp crazy amounts. My only exposure to it prior to that water welder was "we sticks our cathode and our anode in the waterz and we turns on ze battery" but you get out a little potash and that shit starts to churn like goddamn Alka Seltzer. You've got a pressure you need to maintain - that's easily automated. You've got a temperature you need to maintain - that's easily automated. You basically need a continuous column that allows you to filter out your sediment and otherwise you just have a continuously-fed electrochemical vat which, hey, hit it with solar or some shit. I guess that's my broader point - I'm a really shitty chemist but redneck chemical processes? I mean I've run aquariums since I was a kid and this looks like "aquarium tech" not cold fusion. Where are the big sticking points you saw? Because "keep it under 80c" to me just says "run it underground."