Exactly! NET negative calories.
WHY is this a good idea??????
If you create easily used hydrocarbons during the low power usage times at power plants for use in auxillary generators or portable engines like cars, you can come out ahead of where you are today. Coal plants are difficult to turn on and off, so if you run them at constant output and run the excess into one of these for later use you can make the whole process more efficient. Is it a net energy loss? Yes, but less that the alternative of just making steam without turning a turbine to keep the plant running.
Yep -
And when back when in organic chemistry III, all of our tests involved manufacturing a desired complex organic molecule from methanol or methane, and catalysts. Point being, the chemistry to go from methanol to most any other organic molecule is well defined.
Yep, just like ethanol.
Unless the energy comes from some source that doesn't itself release CO2 (nuclear, hydropower, etc.), you're right back where you started.
In one way, this product (method) is just like ethanol -- without raping the taxpayer, neither would ever come to market.
We have thousands of years of cheap, abundant energy sources. Let the market decide, not leftist or RINO politicians.
Thanks! I figured as much. Key here is how much electricity does it take to convert CO2 into useful fuels?
Butanol can also be dehydrated using standard petchem catalysts to butane and then dimerized or trimerized or oligomerized to any other straight chain alkane, or isomerized to any of the branched chain aromatics this is standard petroleum refinery tech that is done on the level of millions of tons per day using crude oil and NG liquid feeds. Butanol is also an industrial solvent / base chemical that is currently worth more per gallon than gasoline on the wholesale market if they make butanol it will not end up as motor fuel it is too valuable a chemical commodity for that currently.
Methanol can be turned directly into isooctane using the MTG process at high commercially viable yields ask the South Africans they do the MTG process by the millions of tons commercially already. the MTG process yields isocatane and propane in an 3:1 ratio with no side reactions over a zeolite catalyst.
If the catalyst are cheap enough and blue light is all you need plus CO2 there are plenty of compounds that florescence in full sunlight one could be tuned to take in broad spectrum sunlight and florescence out blue light directly to one of these catalitic cells, but if you can go directly from electrons to chemical energy at 95% efficency skip the solar photon to semicondutor electron step and just use off peak power from wind, hydro, and nukes.
Texas has installed over 5 gigawatts of wind power that peaks out in the middle of the night while we all sleep and during the heat of the day anyone who has lived in west Texas will tell you there is no wind to be had it's just hot and dry till sun down then bam out of no where the wind starts to howl again it has to do with the advection of unequal cooling of the different land use types to the cloud less night sky. All that power at night mostly goes to waste as we Texans are off work and going to sleep right as the wind really peaks out all the way till the sun comes up and heats the ground up again the mid-mornings.