DON'T GIVE UP DEADLY CO2 RELEASEING BEER JUST YET.

[Hank Kroll]

Don’t give up deadly CO2 releasing beer just yet. Scientists at
Scandia National Laboratoried in New Mexico use Sunlight to Make Fuel
From CO2
By Chuck Squatriglia 01.04.08


Sandia researcher Rich Diver checks out the solar furnace which will
be the initial source of concentrated solar heat for converting carbon
dioxide to fuel. Eventually parabolic dishes will provide the thermal
energy.
Photo: Randy Montoya / Sandia National Laboratories
Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico have found a
way of using sunlight to recycle carbon dioxide and produce fuels like
methanol or gasoline.
The Sunlight to Petrol, or S2P, project essentially reverses the
combustion process, recovering the building blocks of hydrocarbons.
They can then be used to synthesize liquid fuels like methanol or
gasoline. Researchers said the technology already works and could help
reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, although large-scale implementation
could be a decade or more away.
"This is about closing the cycle," said Ellen Stechel, manager of
Sandia's Fuels and Energy Transitions department. "Right now our
fossil fuels are emitting CO2. This would help us manage and reduce
our emissions and put us on the path to a carbon-neutral energy
system."
The idea of recycling carbon dioxide is not new, but has generally
been considered too difficult and expensive to be worth the effort.
But with oil prices exceeding $100 per barrel and concerns about
global warming mounting, researchers are increasingly motivated to
investigate carbon recycling. Los Alamos Renewable Energy, for
example, has developed a method of using CO2 to generate electricity
and fuel.
S2P uses a solar reactor called the Counter-Rotating Ring Receiver
Reactor Recuperator, or CR5, to divide carbon dioxide into carbon
monoxide and oxygen.
"It's a heat engine," Stechel said. "But instead of doing mechanical
work, it does chemical work."
Lab experiments have shown that the process works, Stechel said. The
researchers hope to finish a prototype by April.
The prototype will be about the size and shape of a beer keg. It will
contain 14 cobalt ferrite rings, each about one foot in diameter and
turning at one revolution per minute. An 88-square meter solar furnace
will blast sunlight into the unit, heating the rings to about 2,600
degrees Fahrenheit. At that temperature, cobalt ferrite releases
oxygen. When the rings cool to about 2,000 degrees, they're exposed to
CO2.
Since the cobalt ferrite is now missing oxygen, it snatches some from
the CO2, leaving behind just carbon monoxide -- a building block for
making hydrocarbons -- that can then be used to make methanol or
gasoline. And with the cobalt ferrite restored to its original state,
the device is ready for another cycle.
Fuels like methanol and gasoline are combinations of hydrogen and
carbon that are relatively easy to synthesize, Stechel said. Methanol
is the easiest, and that's where they will start, but gasoline could
also be made.
However, creating a powerful and efficient solar power system to get
the cobalt ferrite hot enough remains a major hurdle in implementing
the technology on a large scale, said Aldo Steinfeld, head of the
Solar Technology Laboratory at the Paul Scherrer Institut in
Switzerland, in an e-mail.
He and Stechel said the technology could be 15 to 20 years from
viability on an industrial scale.
The Sandia team originally developed the CR5 to generate hydrogen for
use in fuel cells. If the device's rings are exposed to steam instead
of carbon dioxide, they generate hydrogen. But the scientists switched
to carbon monoxide, so the fuels they produce would be compatible with
existing infrastructure.
Stechel said the Sandia team envisions a day when coal-fired power
plants might have large numbers of CR5s, each reclaiming 45 pounds of
carbon dioxide using reclamation technology currently under
development and producing enough carbon monoxide to make 2.5 gallons
of fuel. The Sunlight to Petrol process also raises the possibility
that liquid hydrocarbon fuels might one day be renewable – provided
CO2 reclamation reaches a point where the greenhouse gas can be
snatched directly from the air. Such a process is being explored by
Global Research Technologies and Klaus Lakner of Columbia University,
among others.
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