From Smokestacks to Your Tank
- Image by Broken Haiku via Flickr
IF the government regulates carbon dioxide emissions, power plants and other factories will probably start removing CO2 from their smokestacks and will have to pay to get rid of it.
The conventional wisdom is that it will be sequestered underground.
But one audacious concept is to recycle the carbon by turning it into liquid hydrocarbon fuels.
Chemical plants, in this vision, could generate liquid hydrocarbons by taking hydrogen from natural gas or even water and combining it with CO2 to make fuels that would cut the demand for crude oil. In effect, each carbon atom would be used twice: the first time in a coal-fired power plant and the second in a car engine.
For the United States, such a system would also have a strategic benefit, substituting chemical processing here for oil imports from abroad. Its financial viability would depend on the cost of making new fuel from carbon, and on how much a company with surplus carbon would be willing to pay to get rid of it.
A crucial consideration, though, is how much energy it would take to recombine carbon with hydrogen to produce a fuel that could substitute for gasoline. Energy costs money, but it also comes with a cost in carbon emissions that could reduce or eliminate any environmental benefit to the process.
As unlikely as the concept may seem, chemists have been working on it for decades. Chemistry journal articles in the 1990s reported various approaches to the problem, with the target product often being methanol, which can be used as a vehicle fuel or as an intermediate product.
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