Comment on Capturing CO2 With Copper, Scientists Generate 'Green Methane'
Auzy@beehaw.org 2 months agoYes… Sure, its cheap to set up…
Great at periods when you have lots of extra solar/renewables.
But… if the efficiency is low, a potentially worse solution for the rest of the year (like Winter), because any excess you can generate, will mostly be lost.
Furthermore, you’ll need a way to convert it back into electricity. In the future, they’re aiming for 60% efficiency for Gas Power Plants… energy.gov/…/how-gas-turbine-power-plants-work . At the moment apparently its much less
So 60% * 0.85 = 50% efficiency… AND THAT IS OPTIMISTIC AND DETERMINANT ON FUTURE TECH!
So you lose half of the power you store. Which means you’re replacing the money you spend on batteries… on more power generation anyway…
They definitely have some utility when there is insufficient battery as a final backup. They may also be useful in applications which don’t use power too and in some utilities which use the gas directly. It also is still centralised power generation, so rural areas will still be unreliable…
But, I’d prefer they deploy Vanadium Redox Flow batteries instead as they’re 75-90% efficient.
Five@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
That’s correct. Electro-chemical storage is not limited by the Carnot efficiency limit like combustion engines are. Conversion losses should be a huge factor in choosing energy storage.
The fertilizer that’s propping up our unsustainable factory farming is created using the Faber process that turns methane and nitrogen into ammonia. Food prices are lower because methane is cheap as a byproduct of oil refining. It might be cool to instead take carbon out of the atmosphere and then convert it into fertilizer to grow plants that remove even more carbon from the air.