Making fuel from air and water

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Making fuel from air and water

Postby gnosticheresy_2 » Fri Oct 19, 2012 9:18 am

Air Fuel Synthesis

Oil is basically made from carbon and hydrogen. Carbon is in the air in the form of carbon dioxide and hydrogen can be found in water.

Air Fuel Synthesis is the process of turning carbon dioxide and hydrogen in water into a sustainable fuel.


The AFS Process - turning air into a sustainable fuel

i) Air is blown up into a tower and meets a mist of a sodium hydroxide solution. The carbon dioxide in the air is absorbed by reaction with some of the sodium hydroxide to form sodium carbonate. Whilst there are advances in CO2 capture technology, sodium hydroxide has been chosen as it is proven and market ready.

ii) The sodium hydroxide/carbonate solution that results from Step 1 is pumped into an electrolysis cell through which an electric current is passed. The electricity results in the release of the carbon dioxide which is collected and stored for subsequent reaction.

iii) Optionally, a dehumidifier condenses the water out of the air that is being passed into the sodium hydroxide spray tower. The condensed water is passed into an electrolyser where an electric current splits the water into hydrogen and oxygen. Water might be obtained from any source so long as it is or can be made pure enough to be placed in the electrolyser.

iv) The carbon dioxide and hydrogen are reacted together to make a hydrocarbon mixture, the reaction conditions being varied depending on the type of fuel that is required.

v) There are a number of reaction paths already in existence and well known in industrial chemistry that may be used to make the fuels.

(1) Thus a reverse-water-gas shift reaction may be used to convert a carbon dioxide/water mixture to a carbon monoxide/hydrogen mixture called Syn Gas. The Syn Gas mixture can then be further reacted to form the desired fuels using the Fisher-Tropsch (FT) reaction.

(2) Alternatively, the Syn Gas may be reacted to form methanol and the methanol used to make fuels via the Mobil methanol-to gasoline reaction (MTG).

(3) For the future, it is highly likely that reactions can be developed whereby carbon dioxide and hydrogen can be directly reacted to fuels.

vi) The AFD product will require the addition of the same additives used in current fuels to ease starting, burn cleanly and avoid corrosion problems, to turn the raw fuel into a full marketable product. However as a product it can be blended directly with gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel.
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Re: Making fuel from air and water

Postby wintler2 » Fri Oct 19, 2012 5:27 pm

Some easy questions for AFD:
What is sustainable about burning water when billions already lack enough of it? 90 million barrels a day is a fair chunk of water, will the supermax oil tankers backload the water from ... Greenland?
Where is all the energy coming from to run the process, produce the NaOH, run FisherTr. etc.? Sunlight wont cut it.
Where is the carbon capture happening on which their process relies? Thats last decades lets-pretend, AFAIK nobody is even faking it these days (except in relatively trivial quantities for use in enhanced oil recovery from old fields).

There will always be a market for hopium.
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Re: Making fuel from air and water

Postby JackRiddler » Fri Oct 19, 2012 6:50 pm

Does this promotional material at any point mention net energy?

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Re: Making fuel from air and water

Postby justdrew » Sat Oct 20, 2012 7:55 am

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Re: Making fuel from air and water

Postby wintler2 » Sun Oct 21, 2012 5:49 am

[quote=]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_neutral_fuel[/quote]

To the extent that carbon neutral fuels displace fossil fuels, or if they are produced from waste carbon or seawater carbonic acid, and their combustion is subject to carbon capture at the flue or exhaust pipe, they result in negative carbon dioxide emission and net carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere, and thus constitute a form of greenhouse gas remediation.[7][8][9] Such carbon neutral and carbon negative fuels can be produced by the electrolysis of water to make hydrogen used in the Sabatier reaction to produce methane which may then be stored to be burned later in power plants as synthetic natural gas, transported by pipeline, truck, or tanker ship, or be used in gas to liquids processes such as the Fischer–Tropsch process to make traditional fuels for transportation or heating.


Mere marketing. Reusing fossil carbon once or even twice is immaterial to the climate, its still hundred million y.old carbon being released now-ish. And since when has nuclear energy been carbon neutral?

Image
^Olympic Dam (copper & uranium mine in South Australia) Those trucks run 24/7/365, and theres not enugh biodiesel in the country to run them. Then the uranium oxide ore needs to be refined, ores concentrated and separated, yada yada.
Not that renewables are carbon neutral either, and theres still that water consumption problem.

I'm not against looking for solutions, but everything is pointing to solutions needing to be smaller and simpler and personal, not consumptive and complex processes reliant on patented catalysts and globalised product chains; better human software not more hardware.
I'd guess that the efficiency of syn-methane as an energy store must be better than batteries otherwise why bother, so hopefully theres a real gain here, unlike hydrogen cars, fusion reactors, abiotic oil, space mirrors, 'unlimited' geothermal, magic fuel additives, perpetual motion machines, zero point energy, etc. But most tech-fix proposals seem to exist only to make the current reality more palatable, to provide symbolic relief as we burn our way to hell.
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Re: Making fuel from air and water

Postby justdrew » Sun Oct 21, 2012 6:55 am

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_hydrogen_production
Biohydrogen reactors use a method of photobiological water splitting which is done in a closed photobioreactor based on the production of hydrogen by algae. Algae produce hydrogen under certain conditions. In 2000 it was discovered that if C. reinhardtii algae are deprived of sulfur they will switch from the production of oxygen, as in normal photosynthesis, to the production of hydrogen.

It seems that the production is now economically feasible by surpassing the 7–10 percent energy efficiency (the conversion of sunlight into hydrogen) barrier. with a hydrogen production rate of 10-12 ml per liter culture per hour.
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Re: Making fuel from air and water

Postby justdrew » Sun Nov 04, 2012 8:40 pm

justdrew wrote:
Iamwhomiam wrote:justdrew,
Biomass, at least in most of its applications, is an ultimately unsustainable technology and a foolish investment.


I'm not talking about biomass, or ethanol crops, I agree they're no good.

I'm talking about designing a relatively simple photobioreactor that recovers and reuses most of it's water and prevents contamination from wild undesired algae/other strains. It feeds into an oil extraction step, which feeds into a refining step. all in one unit, continuous process. Several aspects need optimization, but the tech is already here to do most of it, if someone puts it all together.

...to increase the amount of CO2 to above atmospheric levels in the air bubbling through the algae bearing water packets... here:
New Materials Can Isolate and Capture CO2 More Efficiently with Five Times More Density than Current State of the Art

... picking an ideal mix of species isn't too difficult, we could pick from already understood strains, and hopefully selectively breed better over time.

new technology makes for cheap photovoltaic panels and lots of people are working on better electricity storage systems, then the electricity can be feed into the photobioreactor through LED lights that are tuned to emit the ideal wavelength for photosynthesis in our algae. the rest of the light can come from mirrored concentrators of solar light, but the LEDs can keep our algae growing nearly round the clock. (probably not 24/7 because I suspect high yields from the algae require a rest period of a couple hours for the algae cells.)

the system is modular and say., about 4' x 8' x 5' need to make more? or need to insure reliability? get two or more modules. even if one breaks down briefly or needs maintenance, the rest are still working.

I think centrifugal separation and a tuned sonic application can be used to ease lipid extraction from mature algae.

after lipid extraction, you're left with cellulose mostly, some of which might be kept or processed into nutrient feed stock, some sold or used for a variety of things.

operator time commitment to a module could be in the range of one hour a day or less.



well, I've been talking about designing cheap modular photobioreactors. I'm in no position to do it though. Thankfully, someone else apparently WAS :thumbsup

check it out, this looks almost exactly like what I was seeing...
Image
Joel Cuello has developed the patented Accordion photobioreactor design to grow algae under precisely controlled conditions.

Biofuel expert explains how future innovations could help realize algal biofuels' full potential
November 2, 2012 by Daniel Stolte

Scaling up the production of biofuels made from algae to meet at least 5 percent – about 10 billion gallons – of U.S. transportation fuel needs would place unsustainable demands on energy, water and nutrients, says a new report from the National Research Council, or NRC. However, these concerns are not a definitive barrier for future production, and innovations that would require research and development could help realize algal biofuels' full potential.

"Algal biofuels are not quite ready for prime time," said NRC committee member Joel Cuello, a professor in the UA department of agricultural and biosystems engineering who co-authored the report. "In other words, if scaled up today, the resources that have to go into production would not be sustainable. However, in our report we say that this not a show stopper, because there are technology combinations that can be designed and developed to make the production process more environmentally sustainable." For algal biofuels to contribute a significant amount of fuel for transportation in the future, the committee said, research and development would be needed to improve algal strains, test additional strains for desired characteristics, advance the materials and methods for growing and processing algae into fuels, and reduce the energy requirements for multiple stages of production. Biofuels derived from algae and cyanobacteria are possible alternatives to petroleum-based fuels and could help the U.S. meet its energy security needs and reduce greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon dioxide. Algal biofuels offer potential advantages over biofuels made from land plants, including algae's ability to grow on non-croplands in cultivation ponds of freshwater, salt water or wastewater. The number of companies developing algal biofuels has been increasing, and several oil companies are investing in them. Given these and other interests, the National Research Council was asked to identify sustainability issues associated with large-scale development of algal biofuels. Cuello said if current methods were to be scaled up to meet the 5-percent goal, algal biofuel production would consume too much water, energy and nutrients to be environmentally sustainable at this point. Additional concerns voiced in the report are the amount of land area needed for algae ponds and uncertainties in greenhouse gas emissions over the production life cycle. "For example, to produce those 10 billion gallons of biofuel, you'd need about 33 billion gallons of water," Cuello said. "That is a huge concern." "Resource consumption is very dependent on which technology components you combine and how you combine them to constitute a biofuel production pathway that is both environmentally sustainable and economically viable," he explained. Most of the current development involves growing selected strains of algae in open ponds or closed photobioreactors using various water sources, collecting and extracting the oil from algae or collecting fuel precursors secreted by algae, and then processing the oil into fuel. "Our report brings awareness to address the concerns of making production not only commercially viable but environmentally sustainable," he said. "In my opinion, you can't divorce the two. As a matter of fact, most efforts aiming at lowering the production costs is to make the process more sustainable in terms of energy, water and nutrient use." Several researchers at the UA are exploring innovative ways to extract biofuel from algae more effectively and, ultimately, sustainably. For example, researchers in Cuello's lab have developed the Accordion photobioreactor to provide a controlled environment for growing algae. Kimberly Ogden of the department of chemical and environmental engineering studies algae to better understand the chemical structure of the oils, with the goal of being able to process them into biodiesel with the same facilities currently used to process petroleum. Another approach, followed by Judith Brown in the UA department of plant sciences, seeks to coax algae into producing more oil. To produce 10 billion gallons of algal biofuels, 6 million to 15 million metric tons of nitrogen and 1 million to 2 million metric tons of phosphorus would be needed each year if the nutrients are not recycled, the report says. These requirements represent 44 percent to 107 percent of the total nitrogen use and 20 percent to 51 percent of the total phosphorus use in the U.S. "The most effective way of addressing the challenges our report identified would be in an integrative approach addressing all the factors together – water, nutrients, energy, land use and greenhouse-gas emissions," Cuello said. "There is the biological component – the algae, and the engineering aspect – cultivating, harvesting and processing " he added, "and there has to be a conversation between the two. For example, you could have high-yielding algae that excrete the oil or its precursor, which would eliminate the need for harvesting the algae biomass in the first place." Similarly, by using wastewater from agricultural or municipal sources to grow and feed the algae, one could address both the water and the nutrient issue, and lower the energy demands in the process as well. Cuello pointed out that the report should not come as a surprise to experts. "All of the federally funded research projects on algal biofuels are, at least indirectly, already working to address these concerns that we identified and explicitly stated because people have been aware of these challenges – though perhaps not with the degree of process integration that is required."


far more details:
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13437#toc
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Re: Making fuel from air and water

Postby justdrew » Sat Mar 30, 2013 7:05 pm

Sara Volz, 17-Year-Old, Makes Groundbreaking Algae Biofuel Lab In Her Bedroom And Wins $100,000 Scholarship

Take a look under most teens' beds and you're likely to find old socks, some dust bunnies or maybe a secret diary that's meant to be kept hidden from prying eyes (a.k.a. your annoying little brother). But for 17-year-old Sara Volz, instead of using the space under her bed to collect dust, it's home to her groundbreaking algae biofuel lab. Yup, that's right: Volz grows algae under her bed, allowing her to spearhead cutting-edge research -- and win a $100,000 scholarship in the process.

Volz, the 2013 Intel Science Talent Search winner who beat out 1,700 other nationwide whiz kids, is taking algae to a new level. She explained to ABC News that the natural oils produced by algae can be converted into biofuels, which can be used in diesel engines.

"It's great because it means you're not relying on petroleum-based fuels. You're not relying on fossil fuels," Volz said.

The problem is that this isn't necessarily economically feasible, but Volz may have found a way to work around this hurdle. Using the resources of her lab-based bedroom -- decorated with green algae-filled beakers and microscopes -- Volz is working to make biofuels ultimately more cost efficient by increasing the natural oil production of the algae through "artificial selection." The teen even admitted to adjusting her sleep schedule to accommodate her work.

Moving forward, the science star (and captain of her school's Science Bowl team) will be taking her talents to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she'll begin college in the fall. While it's unclear if Volz will be moving her algae into her college dorm room, we can't wait to see what she does next (but we hope it involves more sleep!).


almost now, the pieces are almost all in place :thumbsup
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Re: Making fuel from air and water

Postby justdrew » Sat Mar 30, 2013 8:12 pm

and this:

I would think this could be put to use to make some nice simple solar sterling engines for power generation.

http://phys.org/news/2013-03-solar-cools-full-sunlight.html

New type of solar structure cools buildings in full sunlight
March 27, 2013 by Andrew Myers
(Phys.org) —A Stanford team has designed an entirely new form of cooling panel that works even when the sun is shining. Such a panel could vastly improve the daylight cooling of buildings, cars and other structures by radiating sunlight back into the chilly vacuum of space.

Homes and buildings chilled without air conditioners. Car interiors that don't heat up in the summer sun. Tapping the frigid expanses of outer space to cool the planet. Science fiction, you say? Well, maybe not any more. A team of researchers at Stanford has designed an entirely new form of cooling structure that cools even when the sun is shining. Such a structure could vastly improve the daylight cooling of buildings, cars and other structures by reflecting sunlight back into the chilly vacuum of space. Their paper describing the device was published March 5 in Nano Letters. "People usually see space as a source of heat from the sun, but away from the sun outer space is really a cold, cold place," explained Shanhui Fan, professor of electrical engineering and the paper's senior author. "We've developed a new type of structure that reflects the vast majority of sunlight, while at the same time it sends heat into that coldness, which cools manmade structures even in the day time." The trick, from an engineering standpoint, is two-fold. First, the reflector has to reflect as much of the sunlight as possible. Poor reflectors absorb too much sunlight, heating up in the process and defeating the purpose of cooling. The second challenge is that the structure must efficiently radiate heat back into space. Thus, the structure must emit thermal radiation very efficiently within a specific wavelength range in which the atmosphere is nearly transparent. Outside this range, Earth's atmosphere simply reflects the light back down. Most people are familiar with this phenomenon. It's better known as the greenhouse effect—the cause of global climate change.

The new structure accomplishes both goals. It is an effective a broadband mirror for solar light—it reflects most of the sunlight. It also emits thermal radiation very efficiently within the crucial wavelength range needed to escape Earth's atmosphere. Radiative cooling at nighttime has been studied extensively as a mitigation strategy for climate change, yet peak demand for cooling occurs in the daytime. "No one had yet been able to surmount the challenges of daytime radiative cooling—of cooling when the sun is shining," said Eden Rephaeli, a doctoral candidate in Fan's lab and a co-first-author of the paper. "It's a big hurdle." The Stanford team has succeeded where others have come up short by turning to nanostructured photonic materials. These materials can be engineered to enhance or suppress light reflection in certain wavelengths. "We've taken a very different approach compared to previous efforts in this field," said Aaswath Raman, a doctoral candidate in Fan's lab and a co-first-author of the paper. "We combine the thermal emitter and solar reflector into one device, making it both higher performance and much more robust and practically relevant. In particular, we're very excited because this design makes viable both industrial-scale and off-grid applications." Using engineered nanophotonic materials the team was able to strongly suppress how much heat-inducing sunlight the panel absorbs, while it radiates heat very efficiently in the key frequency range necessary to escape Earth's atmosphere. The material is made of quartz and silicon carbide, both very weak absorbers of sunlight. Net cooling power The new device is capable of achieving a net cooling power in excess of 100 watts per square meter. By comparison, today's standard 10-percent-efficient solar panels generate the about the same amount of power. That means Fan's radiative cooling panels could theoretically be substituted on rooftops where existing solar panels feed electricity to air conditioning systems needed to cool the building. To put it a different way, a typical one-story, single-family house with just 10 percent of its roof covered by radiative cooling panels could offset 35 percent its entire air conditioning needs during the hottest hours of the summer. Radiative cooling has another profound advantage over all other cooling strategy such as air-conditioner. It is a passive technology. It requires no energy. It has no moving parts. It is easy to maintain. You put it on the roof or the sides of buildings and it starts working immediately. A changing vision of cooling Beyond the commercial implications, Fan and his collaborators foresee a broad potential social impact. Much of the human population on Earth lives in sun-drenched regions huddled around the equator. Electrical demand to drive air conditioners is skyrocketing in these places, presenting an economic and an environmental challenge. These areas tend to be poor and the power necessary to drive cooling usually means fossil-fuel power plants that compound the greenhouse gas problem. "In addition to these regions, we can foresee applications for radiative cooling in off-the-grid areas of the developing world where air conditioning is not even possible at this time. There are large numbers of people who could benefit from such systems," Fan said.
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Re: Making fuel from air and water

Postby justdrew » Wed Dec 18, 2013 7:52 pm

:sun: algae is the way :sun:

Scientists cut million-year natural process to convert algae into crude oil to about an hour
By Travis Gettys | Wednesday, December 18, 2013 9:11 EST

Engineers have sped up a naturally occurring process to make crude oil from algae from about a million years to just minutes.

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory pumped a slurry of wet algae into a chemical reactor, which then subjects the biological material to very hot water under high pressure to tear it apart and convert it into liquid and gas fuels.

The resulting crude oil can then be conventionally refined into aviation fuel, gasoline or diesel fuel, the researchers reported in the journal Algal Research.

The team’s experiments converted more than 50 percent of the algae’s carbon into crude oil, sometimes up to 70 percent, in about one hour and created nothing more hazardous than an odor of dirty socks, rotten eggs and wood smoke from the processed biological material.

In fact, the leftover water and nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium can be recycled to grow more algae.

Algae has long been considered a potential source of biofuel and has been produced by several companies on a research scale, but the fuel was projected to be prohibitively expensive.

However, the recently developed technology uses a number of methods to reduce costs and has been licensed by the Utah-based Genifuel Corp., which is building a pilot plant with an industrial partner.

The process works an algae slurry that contains up to 90 percent water, unlike most current processes that used dried algae, and cuts costs significantly by eliminating the need for time and energy used to dry out the biomaterial.

“Not having to dry the algae is a big win in this process; that cuts the cost a great deal,” said Douglas Elliott, who led the PNNL research team. “Then there are bonuses, like being able to extract usable gas from the water and then recycle the remaining water and nutrients to help grow more algae, which further reduces costs.”

Other groups have tested similar processes, but most of that work was done one batch at a time.

The PNNL system runs continuously and processes about 1.5 liters of algae slurry per hour in the laboratory reactor, and scientists think this can be accomplished on a commercial scale.

The method also eliminates the need for complex processing with solvents such as hexane to extract energy-rich oils from the algae.

The system runs at more than 660 degrees Fahrenheit at about 3,000 pounds per square inch, combining processes known as hydrothermal liquefaction and catalytic hydrothermal gasification.

The system isn’t easy or cheap to build, but Elliott said cost savings later in the process justified the investment.

“It’s a bit like using a pressure cooker, only the pressures and temperatures we use are much higher,” Elliott said. “In a sense, we are duplicating the process in the Earth that converted algae into oil over the course of millions of years. We’re just doing it much, much faster.”
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Re: Making fuel from air and water

Postby justdrew » Wed Dec 18, 2013 7:54 pm

so you see, here we have clearly all the parts needed for an end-to-end continuous process that could be housed in people's garage. Distributed, fault-tolerant, redundant, easily scale-able.
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Re: Making fuel from air and water

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Wed Dec 18, 2013 9:23 pm

I'd like to ask a practical question at this juncture, prefaced by an unpractical hypothetical:

Let's say, hypothetically speaking, we have found the solution here. Let's not even ask about EROEI, let's just hypothetically assume, since this is the solution to our energy problems, the EROEI is somewhere between 100 to 1 Texas Tea and Mr. Fusion infinity. Say this solution can be implemented in any private owner's garage or storage facility so that we can continue our Happy Motoring Society at affordable prices.

Now the practical question: once this algae becomes oil, and we refine this formerly algae/now crude oil into aviation fuel, gasoline or diesel fuel, wouldn't burning this diesel fuel, aviation fuel or gasoline release the same amount of greenhouse gasses that burning crude oil that didn't start out as algae releases?!

I mean, am I missing something here, or could we possibly have found the Ultimate Soma to make Humanity's collective suicide that much sweeter?
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Re: Making fuel from air and water

Postby justdrew » Wed Dec 18, 2013 9:32 pm

stillrobertpaulsen » 18 Dec 2013 18:23 wrote:I'd like to ask a practical question at this juncture, prefaced by an unpractical hypothetical:

Let's say, hypothetically speaking, we have found the solution here. Let's not even ask about EROEI, let's just hypothetically assume, since this is the solution to our energy problems, the EROEI is somewhere between 100 to 1 Texas Tea and Mr. Fusion infinity. Say this solution can be implemented in any private owner's garage or storage facility so that we can continue our Happy Motoring Society at affordable prices.

Now the practical question: once this algae becomes oil, and we refine this formerly algae/now crude oil into aviation fuel, gasoline or diesel fuel, wouldn't burning this diesel fuel, aviation fuel or gasoline release the same amount of greenhouse gasses that burning crude oil that didn't start out as algae releases?!

I mean, am I missing something here, or could we possibly have found the Ultimate Soma to make Humanity's collective suicide that much sweeter?


and the CO2 goes right back out of the air into growing more algae. It's net carbon neutral.
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Re: Making fuel from air and water

Postby Rory » Wed Dec 18, 2013 10:29 pm

Right - so all the fuel exhaust goes into further production. That's good but where do you get all the stuff to make the vehicles, parts for the processors and generators - each of these will have a net water and energy footprint associated, and while eventually their production will be off-set, there will be huge expense in the near to medium term.

Water costs energy too - industrial water sometimes needs to be cleaner than potable - the water/energy bill alone will be high in terms of emissions.

Not trying to shut you down here JD, just posing some practical constraints
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Re: Making fuel from air and water

Postby justdrew » Wed Dec 18, 2013 10:38 pm

Rory » 18 Dec 2013 19:29 wrote:Right - so all the fuel exhaust goes into further production. That's good but where do you get all the stuff to make the vehicles, parts for the processors and generators - each of these will have a net water and energy footprint associated, and while eventually their production will be off-set, there will be huge expense in the near to medium term.

Water costs energy too - industrial water sometimes needs to be cleaner than potable - the water/energy bill alone will be high in terms of emissions.

Not trying to shut you down here JD, just posing some practical constraints


the water is recoverable and recycled in the growth process as are most non-hydrocarbon components. The process makes gas, no new vehicles are required. and energy bill? it's solar...
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