https://phys.org/news/2017-06-discovery-sustainable-ethanol-carbon-dioxide.html

 

Interesting....one must wonder what total efficiency would look like -comparing the energy used to make the ethanol with the energy utilized when it is burned in an internal combustion engine, for example.

The overall efficiency of HHO systems (decompose water into H2 and O then burn it to recover some of the energy) comes to mind.

 

Interesting....one must wonder what total efficiency would look like -comparing the energy used to make the ethanol with the energy utilized when it is burned in an internal combustion engine, for example.

The overall efficiency of HHO systems (decompose water into H2 and O then burn it to recover some of the energy) comes to mind.

Total mass/energy balances are difficult but possible.

Plenty of banks and other investors have backed energy-generating ideas that minimal engineering skills should have raised a number of red flags. The problem is, there are scientists and engineers who fall in love with their idea and surround themselves with yes-men and investors desperately looking to make returns way above more than GDP that nobody sees the huge red flags.

 

The whole premise of using electricity to make ethanol is silly on the face of it, and smells like something purely cooked up to justify grant money. You want ethanol only because it's a good mobile fuel. It could also be a way to store excess electrical energy off the grid, but I'll bet batteries and other storage schemes are already more efficient than this approach could hope to be.

So if you take away grid storage, there's no other reason you'd waste all the inefficiencies to make ethanol from electricity than to make a more mobile fuel. But by the time this catalytic technology could possibly become commercial, even if it works which is by no means a given, the world will have largely moved on to electric propulsion systems for transportation. The primary energy for transportation will be electricity in a battery, not a flammable liquid in a tank.

Catalysis is a worthy area of study, and making valuable chemicals with it is an interesting pursuit. Ethanol for fuel, not so much.

 

In-spite of the environmental PAN pollution problem coming of ethanoled fuels (probably giving the terrible headache for a day), the vodka is just what we need in the every car tank, its indisputable. Hik!
And if it is beneficial to the Global Warming Potential, that`s even more nice, hik! (Gratuitous political jab removed by moderator -no politics please.)
Actually soon after WW2 as my memory tells at Europe the gasoline was sold exclusively for military transport and no ausweis for civil. Thus half of civils was driving on CO gas (German Imbert, Latvian Vairogs, Swedish construction(see www.mestmotor.se/bilsnack/forum/showthread.php?154123-Bilder-Vedeldad-Volvo-142) , and russian CIGI, CNIGI, CAGI or somehow similar), while other was brewing and distilled thus the cars of those days was having no limitations about how far to go. Probably that was a basic reason why straight after, in the fifties and sixties, russians made a pricing to the fuels so cheep that for cubic meter of gasoline may buy just a few bottles of vodka. Just aiming to kill the millions of self-made fuel pocket-factories.Its not like today, when liter of gasoline=half pint of vodka by price.