Oh for *** sake NANDBLog, let me fix that that quoting for you so it makes some sort of sense.
(IE, when there just are no fossil fuels available at all)
CO2 + H2O + Energy = CH4 + O2
CH4 as we speek heats millions of houses everywhere around the world.
There are 28 millions cars converted to it.
"The Boeing SUGAR Freeze airplane concept looks at many advanced technologies which combine to provide over 70% reductions in Carbon Dioxide emissions. It is an example of a partially turbo-electric architecture. This plane uses liquid natural gas instead of jet fuel, and generates electricity in flight by integrating a solid oxide fuel cell with the turbine engine. The electrical energy is then used to drive an aft propulsor at the tail of the plane in order to energize the boundary layer and reduce drag."
I'm not quite sure what you're trying to say here.
"Liquid Natural Gas" is a fossil fuel. The methane used to heat millions of homes is fossil fuel. A tiny proportion is biogas from fermenters. There is no technological process for turning CO2 + H2O + energy into methane without involving good old fashioned agriculture and rather a lot of waste along the way. We're running out of land for agriculture to feed people, we certainly can't afford the land to make enough methane to keep the world's planes in the air, homes heated and so on.
Of course there is>
https://www.storeandgo.info/demonstration-sites/germany/
Which has produced "about 192.000 kWh" in "the run time of the project" (1186 hours = 49 days 10 hours). That's the equivalent of about 16 tonnes of kerosene, 19,919 litres of Jet-A1. The fuel capacity of a Boeing 737-200 is 22,596 litres. So that plant in its lifetime hasn't even produced enough fuel to fill a 737-200 once, energetically.
I'll say the same thing that I said above: "It has to be a practicable process, not merely possible, that operates economically at the scales of current and proposed world usage. One assumed that an intelligent person would take that as read in the circumstances under discussion."
Edited to add: The plant in question used grid electricity and the feed gas CO2 was from a bioethanol facility. The overall power-to-gas efficiency was 56%, and I couldn't find a figure for the ultimate land use to produce the CO2 .
This is a demonstration site. First I wanted to link a 40 Million EUR P2G facility that is being built in Germany.
But now I realize, it doesnt matter what I would've linked, you are just here to pick fights, and I'm not interested in that.
This shit is not just a fad that is picked up because it is trendy. There is nothing trendy about big industrial chemical plants, that's why nobody is talking about it. But the technology can be used to reverse global warming, just by using CO2 from the air to run the process.
Now *that* is in order and makes sense:
My frustration is with you just handwaving and effectively saying that some technological process for producing methane will solve the problem, and not saying it very clearly at that. You start out with an unbalanced chemical equation for reforming methane and say that methane is used for heating millions of homes and that there are 28 million cars converted to use it. As if getting from the formula to heating all those houses and fuelling all those cars on reformed methane is trivial. There's a bit more to it than that.
Then we have a pilot plant, running at 56% energy efficiency using grid power. That's fine, its experimental, who cares where the power comes from for the experiment. But it uses a potted source of concentrated CO
2 that's derived as 'waste' from a bioethanol plant. The energy costs (and other costs) of that CO
2 stream aren't factored into 56%. Even if it was, this process that will require a net supply of 1.8 times as much energy as we're currently using in methane form a solution at all? Doesn't increasing power generation capacity at all sound more like a problem than a solution? They're claiming a likely efficiency of 69% for a scaled up 5MW plant, so that figure will fall to a mere input energy multiplier of 1.45, still not a figure that makes one feel sanguine is it? And the costs of acquiring CO
2 feedstock are still not factored in.
What is so difficult in understanding that while these pilot plans are all very interesting, they aren't
the practical solution in the short term, and may not be in the long term?
But the technology can be used to reverse global warming, just by using CO2 from the air to run the process.
You can't "just" use CO
2 from the atmosphere without incurring massive energy costs. CO
2 is around 400ppm of the atmosphere, 0.04% - converting that into a concentrated 100% CO
2 feedstock isn't trivial. Whatever way you do it will incur a huge energy cost, concentration with zeolite type concentrators, compressing air to the point where you can extract liquid CO
2, or some other method. If you know of a technology for cheap, low energy CO
2 concentration from atmospheric air, please do tell.
These plants won't reverse global warming. I wish they would, but they won't. The energy budget for doing it from atmospheric CO
2 is huge. There's the biological capture and then fermentation route
en route to producing a fuel. But that uses energy, and land. Where do you get them?
The solutions are not technological. Technology will not save us this time. It might make fixing the problems easier, perhaps less painful, but it won't fix things on its own. You sound as if you think it's all fixed, and we just have to wait for the research projects to finish and the full scale plants to be built and then it's "problem solved".
If you think that it's about point scoring or picking a fight you're wrong. It's about the complacency that so may engineers exhibit that "Don't worry, technology will fix it". Keep believing that and it's what they'll have to write on mankind's, or at least civilisation's, gravestone. Engineers ought to be the people capable of seeing the flaws in the technological "quick fixes", capable of realising that it's a massive systems problem, not just producing the next generation of products (or whatever metaphor you prefer for looking at parts of the puzzle, but not the whole problem). And don't get me started on the so called 'engineers' who can't, or rather refuse to, even see that there's a fundamental problem of global warming staring us in the face here.