Gigapress
Trying to be less wrong
A South African chemicals company called Sasol has been doing what I’m describing with syngas made from South African coal since 1954. I have learned they actually started doing this not because of apartheid embargoes but because of abundant local supplies of low-grade coal.Oil & Natural Gas Not Needed for Chemicals; Solar will Dominate
In my essay on why energy consumption is about to explode in the coming decades, primary chemical production was listed as one of the main drivers of the growth. We can make methane, hydrogen, gasoline, diesel, naphtha, paraffin, methanol, and much more from atmospheric CO2, water and sunshine.
This is not some future research project that is optimistic speculation on a brand new technology. In World War II, when the Nazis were running low on oil supplies due to Germany's unfortunate poverty of domestic reserves, they resorted to substituting oil with domestically-abundant coal. How? By gasifying coal into syngas and then converting the syngas to liquid hydrocarbons with the Fischer-Tropsch process. The process had been invented two decades earlier in 1926 by Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch in their research as chemistry professors at a university in Germany. Decades later, South Africa resorted to using this process because of harsh trade embargoes from countries that disapproved of Apartheid which restricted their oil supply. Many gas-to-liquids (GtL) plants exist today for converting methane from natural gas into liquids. Even Shell and Chevron have some of these plants.
The science and basic technology is understood. The problem has always been economic competitiveness with oil and with alternative uses for natural gas. A 2017 study published in the academic journal Energy Economics by a team of MIT researchers calculated that GtL economics could work out if the gas-to-oil price ratio fell below a certain threshold. The authors were pessimistic about the future of the technology if using natural gas, but I think they weren't accounting for the advent of cheap sustainable methane gas that could one day pass that price threshold and which may receive carbon sequestration subsidies.
So, if we accept the premise that ultra-cheap solar around 2030 will make synthetic, sustainable methane sourced from atomspheric CO2 cheaper than methane sourced from natural gas, we should expect increased usage of synthetic methane for production of liquid hydrocarbons. If the price falls far enough, it would eventually be cheaper than sourcing from oil. In a commodity market such as the chemicals industry, the lowest-cost production method always wins in the long run because customers just buy from the lowest bidder.
The implications for Tesla Energy total addressable market are staggering if you do the math on how much solar energy would be required for H2 and CH4 production as the feedstocks for this process, even under thermodynamically ideal reaction efficiency. And then the plot thickens with SpaceX clearly signaling that they will go all out on minimizing the cost of making sustainable rocket propellant from atmospheric CO2 as soon as they achieve full and rapid reusability for Starship/Superheavy, which translates to SpaceX making huge amounts of H2 and CH4 in the sunshine in southern Texas. Their goal is to make life multiplanetary and increase the probability that the light of consciousness is not extinguished, which means in part helping civilization on Earth survive, which means solving environmental sustainability. To this end, Elon Musk has offered a $100M prize for carbon sequestration. Hmm...
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(From Wikipedia)
10.2. Fischer-Tropsch Synthesis
Liquid transportation hydrocarbon fuels and various other chemical products can be produced from syngas via the well-known and established catalytic chemical process called Fischer-Tropsch (FT) synthesis, named after the original German inventors, Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch in the 1920s...netl.doe.gov
10.2.2. Fischer-Tropsch Efficiency & Performance
Comparing liquid transportation fuels production from gasification to fuels from traditional production methods is a difficult undertaking because of the vastly diverse configuration options available for gasification processing.
From fuels to chemicalsEdit
From fuels to chemicalsEdit
The fuel price is directly linked to the oil price, so is subject to potentially large fluctuations. With Sasol only producing fuels, this meant that its profitability was largely governed by external macroeconomic forces over which it had no control. How could Sasol be less susceptible to the oil price? The answer was right in front of them, in the treasure chest of chemicals co-produced in the Fischer–Tropsch process. Chemicals have a higher value per ton of product than fuels.
In the 1960s ammonia, styrene, and butadiene became the first chemical intermediates sold by Sasol. The ammonia was then used to make fertilizers. By 1964, Sasol was a major player in the nitrogenous fertilizer market. This product range was further extended in the 1980s to include both phosphate- and potassium-based fertilizers. Sasol now sells an extensive range of fertilizers and explosives to local and international markets, and is a world leader in its low-density ammonium nitrate technology.[16]
With the extraction of chemicals from its Fischer–Tropsch product slate coupled with downstream functionalization and on-purpose chemical production facilities, Sasol moved from being just a South African fuels company to become an international integrated energy and chemicals company with over 200 chemical products being sold worldwide. Some of the main products produced are diesel, petrol (gasoline), naphtha, kerosene (jet fuel), liquid petroleum gas (LPG), olefins, alcohols, polymers, solvents, surfactants(detergent alcohols and oil-field chemicals), co-monomers, ammonia, methanol, various phenolics, sulphur, illuminating paraffin, bitumen, acrylates, and fuel oil.
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In South Africa, the chemical businesses are integrated in the Fischer–Tropsch value chain. Outside South Africa, the company operates chemical businesses based on backward integration into feedstock and/or competitive market positions for example in Europe, Asia, and the United States.
They could conceivably get into the business themselves or maybe partner with SpaceX. If nothing else, their existence demonstrates that a synthetic hydrocarbon economy can work.
Vast amounts of electricity will be required for the hydrogen electrolysis
and CO2 concentration with lime calcination that would dwarf humanities current energy consumption by at least an order of magnitude. Plants will probably have on-site solar to reduce transmission costs since most of the load would be resistive heaters that can be directly powered with DC from the solar panels. The theoretical minimum energy required for creating 1 kg of H2 gas from H20 is 40 kWh. First principles say that for every
Electricity will also be needed to run lime calcination cycles to capture carbon dioxide in a bed of pulverized limestone (CaCO3):
(Source: Terraform Industries whitepaper)
It looks like the solar cost trend is going to get us past a cost parity threshold where suddenly there is a strong capitalistic profit incentive to curtail finding / mining / refining oil & gas and instead use copious amounts of solar photovoltaic power to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere as fast as possible. I hope this is true because if so this is the best news ever.
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