Diesel, the new clean fuel.

[loanrangie]

Audi has successfully made diesel fuel from carbon dioxide and water - ScienceAlert (http://www.sciencealert.com/audi-have-successfully-made-diesel-fuel-from-air-and-water)

[goingbush]

Excellent stuff.
progressing from this I wonder if E-Diesel can be made on board, just fill up the tank with water & harvest C02 from the exhaust !!!!

[superquag]

Excellent stuff.
progressing from this I wonder if E-Diesel can be made on board, just fill up the tank with water & harvest C02 from the exhaust !!!!

... I think I can see where this is going.....:whistling:

[d2dave]

... I think I can see where this is going.....:whistling:

Please enlighten me.

[Saitch]

... I think I can see where this is going.....:whistling:
A methane gathering seat perhaps??

[Hoges]

quote from article:
German car manufacturer Audi has reportedly invented a carbon-neutral diesel fuel, made solely from water, carbon dioxide and renewable energy sources. And the crystal clear 'e-diesel' is already being used to power the Audi A8 owned by the country’s Federal Minister of Education and Research, Johanna Wanka.... etc really?


[bigwhistle]"The wheels on the bus go round and round....." perpetually! :eek:[bigwhistle]

[Blknight.aus]

Technically.... no..

but...

yes.

you could use some of the waste energy from your combustion process and recapture some of the waste gasses to make some fuel but you wouldn't be able to make enough to sustain the process it would essentially just gaining back a fraction of a percent for your efficiency that you lost as waste gasses and heat.

OF course fitting it all up and carrying it would probably burn up more fuel than you recoupe.

Then the "recycled fuel" is mroe effecient so you get less return on burning the recycled fuel and you head into a game of deminishing returns, of course as the uel burns more effeciently you'll probably also pick up some points in the combution preocess...

but...

what about big stationary diesels on say a power plant? why not hang the technology off of that? why not then also use it as a dummy load for the power plant? why not then use that fuel that you just recovered in auxliary equipment like the site forklift? the supply truck?

[Slunnie]

I've heard of making fuel from water and the oil companies squashing it in the past. I didn't know if it was for real. Irrespective, wait for the might of the oil companies coming down on this and making an offer which Audi can not refuse so they can shut it down.

Hopefully the VW group support this and make it a commercial reality.

[Rurover]

Maybe the big coal fired power generators will grab this technology and make it work commercially. (Regardless of possible pressure from the fuel companies).

Their "carbon sequestration" technology has so far been a multi billion dollar "white elephant" and even if it did work, too expensive to be implemented.

Seems to me that power stations are an ideal source of CO2 and they'd jump at the chance to turn this liability into a valuable asset.

Alan

[bee utey]

I think the whole idea is to stop the need for coal altogether as you don't want to burn any more of the filthy stuff just to make electricity to make more fuel.

[Blknight.aus]

I was initially taling about big disel plants in remote areas.

while we wait to get rid of coal burners I dont see any harm in trying to recoupe some of its waste byproduct to get something useful back, especially if the emergent technology leads to better, cleaner, more abundent energy resource thats easily transportable.

[bee utey]

I was initially taling about big disel plants in remote areas.

while we wait to get rid of coal burners I dont see any harm in trying to recoupe some of its waste byproduct to get something useful back, especially if the emergent technology leads to better, cleaner, more abundent energy resource thats easily transportable.

The trouble is the energy source you need to convert this supply of CO2 into fuel. You truck diesel out to your generator. You collect the CO2 and then what? Burn more diesel to convert it back into diesel, or burn more diesel to run a compressor to pipe or truck it back to a conversion plant powered by renewables. Very wasteful energy wise, you're better off using available CO2 at the source of clean energy and making the wonder diesel right there, then truck it out to your generator.

I can however see some utility in putting a solar/wind farm next to a remote mine site and converting bore water plus local CO2 into diesel fuel for those vehicles unable to run on batteries. This cuts the need to truck any fuel out to the site. And perhaps a half way solution would be to capture some CO2 from night time generator use and use daytime solar to convert it back to fuel, but batteries are fast approaching the point where this is inappropriate.

West Australia copper mine to be powered by solar plus storage : Renew Economy (http://reneweconomy.com.au/2015/west-australia-copper-mine-to-be-powered-by-solar-plus-storage-45689)

[ramblingboy42]

probably one of the most abundant and easily sourced supplies of co2 is your breweries.

they make huge quantities and if it starts to get low , we only need to drink more beer so the breweries make more

[Blknight.aus]

The trouble is the energy source you need to convert this supply of CO2 into fuel. You truck diesel out to your generator. You collect the CO2 and then what? Burn more diesel to convert it back into diesel, or burn more diesel to run a compressor to pipe or truck it back to a conversion plant powered by renewables. Very wasteful energy wise,


I was thinking more along the lines of when you're running the generator and need a dummy load, use the regernator as the dummy load.

they're already doing it with totally renwable energy sources but or those places that cant afford massive alternate energy setups have a reasonable shot at getting a viable version of it using an energy source that would otherwie goto waste.

Theres no reason you couldn't do the same thing on a coal fired plant but I was trying to keep it in the realms of "making diesel out of diesel you already used once"

[superquag]

I thought that BMW was fiddling around with using some of the waste heat in the exhaust system to run a mini-boiler, the steam from which used to 'add' acceleration to the drive system.
Not as silly as it sounds, as the Doble steam car was relatively efficient, both "for it's day" and the present.