Synfuels and the Price of Oil

by Marcel F. Williams

In January of 2007, petroleum prices dipped below $60 per barrel. But by March of 2008, oil prices had begun to peak above the $100 per barrel mark. And by July of 2008, oil prices had risen above $140 per barrel! But as the global economy began to decline, oil prices had again fallen below $100 per barrel by October of 2008 and as of late February 2009, the price of oil now stands at below $40 per barrel. Average gasoline prices in the US have also declined from a record $4.11 per gallon in July of 2008 to below $2.00 a gallon as of February of 2009.

Advocates of alternative fuels have bemoaned the current low price of oil as a hindrance towards weaning America off foreign oil and the petroleum fuel economy. However, I view low oil prices as a great economic opportunity to gradually introduce the higher priced carbon neutral synthetic fuels into the American hydrocarbon fuel economy as a component of our total liquid transportation fuel economy.

In 2006, the USA consumed more than 20 million barrels of oil per day while producing only 8 million barrels of oil daily while importing more than 12 million barrels of oil per day.

Thanks to America's importation of huge amounts of foreign oil, several hundred billion dollars of America's national wealth is being exported to foreign nations on an annual basis. And as we continue to use petroleum products for fuel and industrial chemicals, we continue to add substantially more excess CO2 to the atmosphere which is heating up our planet, accelerating the melting of the ice caps, and raising global sea levels.

With oil prices so low, some have argued that this is a perfect time to increase taxes on gasoline in order to fund alternative fuels and to provide incentives for drivers to continue to conserve fuel. However, some believe that raising taxes during a global economic recession (or depression) is a bad idea. However, I believe that mandating the a certain percentage of all gasoline, diesel fuel, and aviation fuel be composed of carbon neutral synfuels is a better alternative than raising taxes and would be a far more effective means for moving America away from the petroleum fuel economy.

If the Federal government mandated that just 5% of all gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel and industrial hydrocarbon chemicals in the US be composed of carbon neutral hydrocarbon fuels and industrial chemicals by the year 2015 and 10% by the year 2020 then a huge new carbon neutral synfuel industry could be created in the United States that could possibly completely replace the need for foreign and domestic petroleum in the US by the year 2050 and possibly even sooner.

Sources for these carbon neutral hydrocarbon fuels and industrial chemicals could come from:

1. Urban biowaste (garbage and sewage)
2. Rural biowaste (agricultural biowaste and forest by products)
3. Hydrogen from water electrolysis combined with CO2 extracted from air via clean nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, and solar electric power resources.

All of these sources of hydrocarbons could produce carbon neutral gasoline, diesel fuel, aviation fuel, methanol, methane, in addition to industrial chemicals such as hydrogen and ammonia. However, there is only enough easily available urban and rural biowaste to supply about 6% of America's total petroleum needs. So any substantial environmentally friendly increase in carbon neutral synfuels beyond that level would probably require a substantial increase in synfuels from the synthesis of hydrogen and carbon dioxide via clean nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, and solar electricity resources.

The current cost of these synthetic fuels and industrial chemicals would be generally higher than similar fuels derived from petroleum. However, these relatively more expensive synfuels would only be a small percentage of the total fuel cost since they would initially only be a small percentage of the total fuel content.

For instance, the GreenFreedom advocates argue that current nuclear reactors combined with electrolysis and CO2 extraction technologies could produce 18,000 barrels of oil equivalent gasoline per day for a 1000 MWe nuclear reactor at an estimated operating cost of just $1.40 per gallon. However, this doesn't include the capital cost of the nuclear reactor and the associated synthetic fuel facility and a reasonable profit margin which they conclude would raise the price of nuclear produced gasoline to $4.60 per gallon. Of course the capital cost of nuclear reactors and synfuel facilities would probably fall dramatically due to economies of mass production since it would require the construction of at least 700 new 1GWe reactors to produce enough gasoline for US consumption, or perhaps only half as many reactors (350) if all gasoline vehicles in the US are PHEV (plug-in-electric vehicles) in the 2020s.

So if all gasoline in the US were required to consist of at least 10% carbon neutral gasoline then $2.00 per gallon gasoline from petroleum combined with $4.60 per gallon of carbon neutral gasoline would cost $2.26 per gallon. Of course, if you're driving one of those future plug-in-hybrid vehicles (PHEV) in the 2020s then the cost of electricity could cost you as little as $0.75 per gallon. So your equivalent cost per gallon using 50% electricity, 45% gasoline from petroleum and 5% carbon neutral synthetic gasoline would be approximately $1.88 per gallon. Using nuclear derived carbon neutral gasoline alone in a PHEV would cost you approximately $3.05 per gallon which is still far below the peak cost of $4.11 per gallon US consumers payed for gasoline in July of 2008.

References and Links

1. Green Freedom: A concept for producing carbon-neutral synthetic fuels and chemicals, Los Alamos Labs, November 2007 F.J. Martin and WL Kubic,

2. Gasoline from Air and Water

3. Gasoline from Nuclear and Renewable Energy

4. The Plug-in-Hybrid Revolution

5. Crude Oil Futures

6. Petroleum (Wikipedia)

7. Country energy profiles

Gasoline from Air and Water

by Marcel F. Williams

Fossil fuels are predominantly responsible for putting excess carbon dioxide and methane into the Earth's atmosphere, greenhouse gases that are melting our polar ice caps, raising global sea levels, and causing more extreme climate conditions around the world. The coal and natural gas power industry has looked looked towards future technologies for the on site capture of flu gas in order to recover and sequester carbon dioxide. However, there is no cost effective technology for capturing the CO2 from the mobile producers of carbon dioxide: automobiles, trucks, aircraft, and sea craft.

But there are new technologies that are rapidly being developed that may eventually divorce carbon dioxide polluting sources of energy from the need for on site capture and sequestration of carbon dioxide. These devices are sometimes referred to as mechanical trees. But what they do is to simply extract and recover carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And these future technologies appear to be far more efficient at extracting CO2 from the air than the plant life on our planet.

Some argue that these carbon dioxide from air extracting technologies could be the saviors of the fossil fuel industry. Ironically, such future technologies could also eventually lead to the complete extinction of fossil use on this planet if the CO2 taken from the atmosphere is used in combination with hydrogen from water to produce hydrocarbon fuels such as: gasoline, methanol, diesel fuel, jet fuel, and dimethyl ether.

Hydrogen

Because the combustion of hydrogen produces only energy and water, hydrogen via the electrolysis of water through hydroelectric, nuclear, wind, and solar has often been proposed as a replacement for hydrocarbon transportation fuels. Liquid hydrogen fuel has been used in US space craft since the days of the Apollo Moon program. And liquid hydrogen has also been frequently proposed for future generation subsonic and hypersonic airliners and aircraft. Hydrogen fueled buses now transport commuters in many urban areas in the US. And hydrogen automobiles have been demonstrated by many automobile companies around the world .

However, hydrogen automobiles have a substantially shorter range than hydrocarbon fueled vehicles and are a lot less efficient than electric vehicles. Refueling hydrogen vehicles also takes much longer than refueling with gasoline, ethanol, or methanol. Because of the hydrogen embrittlement of metals like steel, hydrogen pipelines are more expensive to maintain than natural gas and oil pipelines. Aircraft, seacraft and ground vehicles, and the infrastructure associated with these vehicles, would also have to be completely replaced if we completely replaced our fuel economy with hydrogen.

Hydrocarbon fuels from CO2 and hydrogen

Alternatively, there are several demonstrated methods for synthesizing hydrocarbon fuels by utilizing carbon dioxide in combination with hydrogen which could allow a country to avoid any major overhaul in its transportation energy infrastructure.

Chemist have known how to produce methanol from hydrogen and carbon dioxide for more than 80 years:

CO2 + 3H2 → CH3OH (methanol) + H2O

Methanol is mostly used as a feedstock for making other chemicals. But methanol can be converted into dimethyl ether (DME), a fuel that can be effectively used in diesel engines equipped with new fuel injection systems. The fact that dimethyl ether produces no black smoke, soot, or sulfur dioxide is an clean advantage it has over diesel fuel.

Methanol can also be converted into high octane gasoline via the Mobil Oil methanol to gasoline (MTG) process. Back in the 1980's, the New Zealand government produced 600,000 tonnes of gasoline a year from methanol derived from natural gas using the MTG process.

Methane gas can also be synthesized from hydrogen and carbon dioxide:

CO2 + 4H2 → CH4 (methane) + 2H2O

And methane can also be converted into diesel and jet fuels via Fischer-Tropsch and hydrocracking processes.

Mechanical extraction of atmospheric CO2

Plants capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while utilizing sunlight to convert the CO2 into starch. During photosynthesis, trees, for instance, convert carbon dioxide and water into starche molecules and oxygen through a series of oxidation and reduction reactions:

6 CO2 + 6 H2O + sunlight ---> C6H12O6 + 6 O2

Some farm crops and trees can produce up to 20 metric tons per acre (4047 square meters) of biomass a year. One tonne of dried tree consist of 0.45 tonnes of carbon which would translate into the extraction of 1.65 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually extracted from the atmosphere. That's 33 tonnes of CO2 per acre extracted on an annual basis.

Even though the concentration of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere is a meager 0.04 per cent, companies like GRT (Global Research Technologies) in Arizona and Canadian researchers at the University of Calgary have already built machines that can extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere far more efficiently than any tree or any other source of biomass. GRT claims that its carbon dioxide air extraction system is a thousand times more efficient than a tree of equal size.

GRT CO2 absorbent material

The University of Calgary team has shown that they could capture CO2 directly from the atmosphere with less than 100 kilowatt-hours of electricity per tonne of carbon dioxide. Their carbon dioxide from air extraction tower was able to capture the equivalent of about 20 tonnes per year of CO2 on just one single square meter of air scrubbing material. Astonishingly, this suggest that even the most conservative estimates would allow these CO2 extracting machines to produce more than 80 thousand tonnes of carbon dioxide per acre annually.

University of Calgary carbon dioxide extraction machine

Because of the need for cheap electricity for hydrogen production, only nuclear and hydroelectric facilities would be currently viable for hydrocarbon fuel production utilizing carbon dioxide from air extraction technologies. Hydroelectric facilities currently produce electricity at 0 .85 cents per kwh while electricity from nuclear facilities currently cost 1.68 cents per kwh. Wind and solar thermal electricity, however, is much more expensive and ranges from over 4 cents per kwh to over 6 cents per kwh.

At the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, F. Jeffrey Martin and Williams L. Kubic, Jr. have developed the Green Freedom concept for using the cooling towers of nuclear reactors to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for the production of gasoline and methanol. They argue that a 1 GWe power plant using their Green Freedom method could produce 18,000-bbl/day of gasoline or 5000 tonnes a day of methanol.

Carbon neutral hydrocarbon synfuel production at nuclear and hydroelectric facilities would not only allow such power facilities to produce transportation fuels and industrial chemicals, they would also allow them to pump methanol and oxygen up to 80 kilometers away to high efficiency power plants for the production of peak-load and back-up-load electricity and commercial waste heat. Nuclear power plants could therefore not only produce base-load electricity but could also supply methanol fuel to replace greenhouse polluting natural gas power plants which are used for daytime peak-load energy and back-up energy for wind and solar power plants.

In 2006, the US consumed nearly 21 million bbl/day of petroleum for transportation fuel and industrial chemical use. If we assumed that nuclear power plants replaced all of the petroleum used in the US in 2006, that would roughly require more than a thousand new 1Gwe nuclear reactors, over 1000 GWe of electrical capacity. Existing nuclear sites that already have nuclear reactors could probably add an additional 200 to 300 Gwe of capacity. However, if one large centralized nuplex (nuclear park) with about 30GWe of average electrical capacity were set up in every state in the union, then that could add an additional 1500 GWe of electrical capacity, more than enough to replace all of our petroleum needs today and probably our needs 30 years from now.

If the new Obama administration is going to invest substantial R&D money into new energy technologies, I would strongly suggest investing in the fast tracking of these carbon dioxide extraction from air technologies that could revolution synfuel production by helping to achieve US independence from the petroleum fuel economy while protecting the global environment from the dangers of global warming and climate change.

Links and References

1. Green Freedom: A concept for producing carbon-neutral synthetic fuels and chemicals, Los Alamos Labs, November 2007 F.J. Martin and WL Kubic,

2. GRT (Global Research Technologies, LLC)

3. Giant Carbon dioxide Vacuums

4. Snatching Carbon dioxide from the Atmosphere

5. CO2 capture from air

6. First Successful Demonstration of Carbon Dioxide Air Capture Technology Achieved:

7. First Successful Demonstration of Carbon Dioxide Air Capture Technology Achieved by Columbia University Scientist and Private Company, (2007) Earth Institute News Archive, 04/24/07

8. Carbon capture and storage:

9. Researchers Scramble to Create CO2-Busting Technologies:

10. CO2 capture from ambient air: a feasibility assessment:

11. Carbon Capture and Storage A False Solution

12. The Case for Carbon Dioxide Extraction from Air

13. Klaus S. Lackner, Patrick Grimes, Hans-J. Ziock, Capturing Carbon Dioxide From Air

14. K. Schultz, L. Bogart, G. Besenbruch, L. Brown, R. Buckingham, M. Campbell, B. Russ, and B. Wong HYDROGEN AND SYNTHETIC HYDROCARBON FUELS – A NATURAL SYNERGY General Atomics Poster

15. G. Olah, A. Goeppert, and G. Prakash, (2006) Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy, Wiley-VCH Verlang, Weinheim, Germany

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