It looks like a modified Fischer-Tropsch, so they're likely concentrating CO2, blowing off one O to make pure carbon monoxide, and then adding hydrogen gas (from water) under pressure over a catalyst to generate long-chain hydrocarbons.
Now, what would be nice to see as a proof-of-concept is an entire oil tanker's worth of jet fuel made by this process. How far off is that?
Sasol of South Africa has made liquid fuels via the Fischer-Tropsch process for decades. The synthesis gas comes from coal or natural gas. Clean synthesis gas from water, CO2, and clean electricity should be a drop-in replacement for fossil derived syngas. But it's relatively expensive to make liquid fuels this way even when starting with cheap coal. I only expect synfuels to be used for performance critical applications and niches like keeping collectible classic cars running.
For the Air Force, their particular need is to avoid billions of dollars in contractor expense for reliably supplying fuel to remote bases in hostile territory.
I read elsewhere on hacker news that the us military runs through 20 million barrels of fuel per day . I can imagine there is a great desire to be less dependent on suppliers both in terms of quantity and logistics. Imagine a nuclear powered aircraft carrier being able to generate fuel for its planes and support ships.
Since world production of oil is currently about 75 millions of barrels per day (mbpd)[1], this 20 mbpd figure is certainly wrong. Probably someone wanted to make the figure seem higher than it was and used gallons instead of the standard barrels unit. Even then, 1/2 million barrels of fuel per day would seem high to me when the US is not in an active shooting war.
20 million barrels of oil would be worth about $1.6 billion dollars. So the military would be spending about $580 billion a year on fuel. Or 3/4th its budget.
Yes the US Navy has been researching synthesizing aviation fuel onboard nuclear powered carriers since at least 2013. The goal is to reduce fleet dependence on vulnerable tankers.
- Maybe in the future they could use fusion reactors for power, synthesizing Deuterium and/or Tritium to enhance their endurance (maybe indefinitely?)
- make the carrier (with minimal crew) and the planes into drones (AFAIK already in research/testing) since even if the material could be at sea forever the people could not endure and also many probably wouldn't sign up for such a job
All subs and surface ships, literally since the very first nuclear powered vessel. Because all they did was switch to a different heat source for the desalination that ships had been doing for decades before that.
Instead of shipping hydrocarbon fuel, they will have to ship solar/wind/geothermal power plants, or some other dense source of energy such as nuclear reactors.
The Mars process is the Sabatier process, rather than Fischer-Tropsh, and reuslts in methane (and water) rather than heavier alkanes (petroleum-analogue hydrocarbons).
(Corrected from earlier misstatement of methanol production, thanks to philipkglass.)
The Sabatier process yields methane, the lightest member of the alkane series. Methane also has the best gravimetric energy density of the alkanes. But for ease of handling, heavier alkanes that liquefy at above-cryogenic temperatures are better.
An interesting possible future, as the EROEI of traditional fossil fuels continues to drop (the cheap easy oil is gone), the oil price naturally goes up. At the same time, renewables (solar + wind) massively increases, but there's no cost effective solution for storing the intermittent excess energy produced. These two factors (increasing oil price + a way to store excess renewable energy) combine to make synthetic oil competitive. If a carbon tax is introduced, that's another third factor that could help synthetic oil. Would the market favor increasing electrification or a synthetic oil that works immediately in all the existing carbon based infrastructure?
Battery powered electric vehicles are much more efficient than gasoline engines in terms of energy use per mile. With synthetic oil, you're losing energy both during the synthesis step and while using it. However, I think for airplanes or long term energy storage it could still make a lot of sense.
Agreed, in terms of airplanes. For airplanes, one of the most important considerations is the amount of energy per mass of fuel. Batteries are not practical, in this sense, as they weigh too much. It is simply not possible for batteries to fuel a large plane over long distances.
Used fuel weighs more than the raw fuel, it’s just outside your vehicle in the typical use case. As you have shown, a typical assumption made with fuel burning vehicles is that disposing of the effluent is free and you can just throw it overboard.
In terms of measuring performance of the aircraft, you do indeed just throw it overboard. Obviously the energy system as a whole need to take into account the dumping of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere but I believe the parent commenter does that by suggesting synthetic fuels created through carbon capture.
Anyway, my point is just that when comparing two aircraft, and their fuel sources, it’s probably worth just comparing the closed system of the aircraft and measuring the environmental impact of fuel sources separately.
It's also important as most long range airliners take off with more fuel than they can safely land with. The air frames are very heavily optimized as every pound matters. If you always landed with the same weight you took off with, you'd end up needing to make the landing gear and surrounding structure significantly stronger to prevent excessive wear over time.
My point is that achieving energy density parity with jet fuel isn't enough to make battery powered intercontinental flights viable. Such an aircraft will not be able to get to its destination. You can't get a fair comparison unless you are comparing a replacement that is similarly viable in the first place.
The nice thing about oil is that it's very energy dense. We could store excess energy in the summer to be used in the winter. In contrast, batteries can maybe provide a few days of storage, but with synthetic oil, we could buffer for multiple months.
It’s probably more efficient to use a fuel like methane as opposed to oil as a medium-long term storage, e.g. for turbines used to address peak power grid usage, or winter storms (especially as more homes electrify HVAC).
I like the idea of globally phasing out fossil fuels for synthetic fuels made from carbon capture (possibly with biomass components if required).
Gas cars might be less efficient than electric, as expected of any kind of shim or polyfill, but they would be good enough that we wouldn't need to incentivize people to ditch their current vehicles.
Perhaps more importantly, it would fill a big gap in our planning for the future. Rather than banking on the ability to massively scale up lithium mining, we build renewable power plants in proximity to natural gas plants and hook up carbon capture systems to those plants. Boom, now they're just overly complicated batteries, and therefore part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Consider them technical debt; at least people get to keep their jobs for a while longer and modernizing of the grid progresses more quickly.
Doesn't KSA and Venezuela still have decades of cheap oil left? And aren't aren't cars electrifying fast enough and getting feel efficient enough that oil demand should start going down?
What does the energy balance for this process look like? I don't know anything about it, but I would guess that it takes some energy to pull the CO2 out of the air and turn it into fuel. That's gotta come from somewhere? How does it become carbon neutral?
I'd guess that 30-40% of the original electrical energy gets stored as chemical energy. If the electricity originally comes from nuclear power or renewables, the life cycle carbon footprint is far lower than for fossil fuel. It's still not exactly carbon neutral because even nuclear power has a non-zero CO2 footprint, but it's tiny compared to the status quo.
Since many military aircraft are going to need chemical fuels indefinitely, it makes sense that the Air Force is interested in electricity-to-fuels. There was an analogous surge in researching coal-to-liquids in the 1970s after the oil price shocks. Liquid fuels are going to have at least military demand for a very long time, and planners are interested in mitigating supply threats before they become supply emergencies.
So this is less efficient than something like pumped hydro for energy storage, yeah? But what about the density? Or maybe a better question is how does energy/m^3 storage compare between pumped hydro and fuel synthesis? Could we do some kind of closed-loop combustion process where we capture the exhaust gas then re-synthesize the fuel? Or are the conversion losses just too great?
I don't think the point is to compete with power grid energy storage, but for cases where the energy must be in the form of aircraft fuel, so it doesn't quite matter if it's less efficient on all metrics that pumped hydro -- unless you plan on running a cord from a dam to the planes.
Flexibility and utility are gained, in the form of a high-enegy-density (by both volume and mass) energy store with excellent storage capabilities, a widely-developed extant handling and utilisation infrastructure and knowledge, and, considering the capabilities, extremely positive safety and interactions properties: hydrocarbon fuels are non-explosive, non-toxic with incidental exposure, and do not erode metallic or polymer components of fuel and power systems.
Net energy loss is at least 40% of input (hydrolysis to produce hydrogen), as well as the energy cost of carbon capture (this varies by methods). For seawater-based carbon sourcing, net synthesis costs of about 50% are what I've seen (see my earlier long comment on sources and references).
For seawater extraction: "CO2 extraction from seawater using bipolar membrane electrodialysis", Matthew D. Eisaman et al is a 2011 paper discussing CO2 extraction via a "BPMED" (bipolar membrane electrodialysis) process. It delivers CO2 at 1.52 kWh/kg, vs. a value of 0.54 kWh/kg cited by Terry, though it's not clear on first reading if Terry performed actual experiments or used theoretical values.
My recollection is that atmospheric extraction costs are 1.5--3x higher, though I'm uncertain of that precise figure.
Recovered energy through Carnot and Rankin-cycle engines is on the order of 20--40%. The round-trip energy recovery from input electricity to delivered motive power is about 10--20%. Those are inherent to the processes and cannot be improved on.
Note that electric generation itself converts only about 30--40% of input thermal energy (from a nuclear reactor in the US Navy's scenario). Again, this is an unavoidable energy loss given the physics of thermal-to-mechanical energy conversion
Military aircraft and marine vessels can make at best limited use of direct electrical power given limitations of batteries, extension cords, and transmission lines, particularly with regard to energy and power demands. Any fuel, even
Since you seem knowledgeable about this process - can it be miniaturized for personal production? I realize it is a net loss but storable high density energy is useful for various applications like off grid use or home generators. For example, people who need refrigerated insulin but live in remote areas (where they often get delayed fixes when a weather event disrupts utilities).
I've read and/or skimmed a few papers. I can point people to the literature, I don't claim to understand much of it well myself.
That said:
- The pilot projects are essentially small-scale deployments. The principles are being developed at what's effectively "personal scale", plus or minus.
- I expect that there would probably be economies of scale in several regards, including in operations, maintenance, and training.
- At small scale, if you want fuel, growing it may be the more robust and reliable option. This gets back to the fundamental problem that fuels require considerable energy inputs. For an off-grid site, a firewood-fueled stove, possibly driving a generator through some mechanism (turbine, steam engine) or a biomass-based oil (olive, corn, canola, algae, ...) or alcohol (via fermentation) production serving needs for which liquid fuels were absolutely essential might be more reliable.
Keep in mind that a little over a century ago, the US was effectively biofuel powered, with a principle prime mover in the form of the horse. Horsefeed consumed roughly 20% of total US agricultural output at the time. When I first started looking into alternatives to a fossil-fuel based world, my assumption was that biomass would be a readily-viable substitute. In reality, there simply is not enough net primary production (plant growth) to reasonbly support present levels of human energy consumption, let alone projected growth through economic advancement and population increase through the 21st century. If humans are to live on biomass (as we once did), either standards of living, or population, or both, will have to decrease quite considerably. (This give rise to some of the more modest suggestions of a maximum viable long-term human population, ranging from about 500 million to 2 billion, suggested by some experts on the topic.)
One of the prime positie attributes of hydrocarbon fuels, especially the slightly heavier grades (kerosene, diesel, fuel oil, etc.) is that they travel and store exceedingly well. So long as 1) a synfuel capability exists and 2) your off-grid site has some commerce with the outside world, trading for fuel would likely be your best bet.
And as far as flexibility goes, there are military bases in hostile territory with fuel demands far exceeding what the normal supply chain demands even if it were reliable.
Land-based synthesis strikes me as more problematic. There's a lot of gain in offsetting fuel use entirely (solar and wind generation, both of which see fairly extensive use).
For a large established base there might be some benefit. But there's also the last-mile problem.
Aircraft are effectively addressing the last-mile fuel delivery problem directly (by carrying it with them). They tend not to loiter long over the engagement area.
Long-mission drones might be an exception to this. If sufficiently lightweighted and dedicated largely to surveillance, these could benefit by solar + battery electric power. Personnel risks would be low, and aircraft flight dynamics improve as scale is decreased (square-cube law of lift (square) vs. mass (cube) relation. This is the inverse of aerostats, which are more efficient at providing lift with size.
Why would there be a last mile problem if you were directly generating on base for synthesis?
Solar and wind have the issue of land usage, in that the large land requirements of renewables mean more land to secure. That and military bases do not have the luxury of being conveniently sited next to the best places for such things.
I expect the military will be the among the first to deploy portable nuclear generation in containers. Then this process becomes an obvious win for these bases.
Even in non-combat environments (McMurdo Station, Project Iceworm), proved nuclear power solutions (adaptations of naval reactors used successfully in submarines) have proved nonviable.
The risks of a reactor in a live-fire zone are ... considerable.
I'm not talking of last-mile in terms of fuel synthesis alone, but in terms of all logistics.
Land-based actions have a last-mile problem in that to put and establish boots on the ground, they need to traverse that mile directly, and extend supply lines to that last mile.
Tactical aircraft have an effective combat range measured in hundreds or thousands of miles. Mechanised infantry in miles or tens of miles. Foot soldiers in yards to miles.
A Naval task force's operation is at sea, outside the effective range of virtually any of the opponents the US has faced in combat since WWII.[1] Aircraft and crew depart a carrier or other base, conduct a mission, and return to base, outside the area of engagment. The logistics chain occurs through what has been for nearly three quarters of a century non-hostile territory.
An FOB is right in the stinkin' middle of the mess. It's within the area of engagement, supply lines move through hostile territory, are subject to ambush attacks, both by live opponents and remotely-activated or passively-triggered IEDs and mines. Total supply requirements are too great for aerial supply alone.
That's the last-mile problem.
At the same time, FOBs and other installations are subject to enemy attack, and large-scale renewables deployments and synfuel equipment would be attractive and viable targets for relatively simple attacks (mortars, drones, missles), which could easily degrade, disable, or entirely destroy such equipment.
I'm unsure of what a major Army or Marine unit's fuel requirements are, but assuming a 40% conversion efficiency from sunlight and 8 hours at 200W per m^2 of PV array, creating 1 barrel of oil per day (42 gallons) would require on the order of 2,700 m^2 of PV array, or a square roughly 50 m on a side. A 100m square might provide 4 barrels/day.
There might be some land-based operations which could support this, but I strongly suspect many could not.
Actual solar performance would also likely be far lower, likely yielding only 25--50% of the output I'm listing here (spacing factor, overcast, and other standard reductions on nameplate capacity), even before accounting to combat-based degradation.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Five ships were lost to mines during the Korean war, the USS Liberty was scrapped after it was attacked by Israeli forces in 1967. The USS Cole was damaged, but not lost, in a suicide-bombing attack in 2000. Numerous other vessels have been lost largely through accidents and occasional sabotage (all by US nationals or service members). The USS Pueblo was captured intact in 1967.
https://news.usni.org/2012/08/28/notable-us-navy-ships-lost-...
I suppose in the Air Force's mind, even a slight reduction in delivering fuel via tanker would be a significant cost savings. Either way, they're operating from land.
My inner voice: "Scale those damn bastards! Build a whole bunch of these, stack 'em on land and boy you've got yourself something really special. Nuclear driven CO2 suckers."
That's not a bad idea necessarily, it's just not economical for regular civilian use. Fossil fuels are still far cheaper than synthetics regardless of the power source.
I'm not sure the Paris agreement optimises for "far cheaper" but for a maximum temperature increase instead. The consumer can't be expected to individually take one for the team (as it is presumably cheaper in the long run to not deal with a globally failing ecosystem) so through legislation and incentives we'd transition to clean energy, not necessarily by making something cheaper.
Of course, where possible the solution is to just use batteries, but try telling frequent fliers that they'll need to take a train in the future. We're going to need some synthetic fuels where energy density is paramount.
If you wanted to retool a big chunk of the world economy you could indeed solve the co2 problem by mass producing nuclear reactors attached to synthetic hydrocarbon plants that dumped the products in deep mines.
You would have to spend trillions of dollars though.
If we assume the price for a carrier nuclear reactor + generator would stay the same. Wouldn't the costs come down simply from basic economies of scale? The costs are high because we've build a few dozen of these ever.
The energy balance is significant negative. The point is to take cheap renewables and renewable hydrogen to make the fuel so I can be carbon neutral. But basic thermodynamics says it will always be energy negative.
Well, the point is not really to make it carbon neutral, but rather to reduce the amount of liquid fuel that needs to get supplied to a base, since tanker trucks and ships are fairly soft targets.
Since they're already removing co2 from the atmosphere as part of the process they could divert some of that to get sequestered underground. The process could be carbon neutral or carbon negative even.
This sort of research always runs stuck on the concentration of CO2 required to operate it effenciently. Even the climate-change tripled CO2 content of the atmosphere is only 0.04 percent. If you can get even 0.5% CO2 gas it is possible to hit 10% efficiency with very old processes, but that's just not possible to do without a lot of energy. Efficiently isolating it either takes months or uses way too much energy.
Now of course in warfare conditions "way too much energy" may not such a big problem. Price may also not be much of a problem. Militaries have done it in the past.
US Navy AFAIK considers using nuclear power on carriers to ignore the high energy requirements, and it's a net win for them as it reduces UNREP needs for aviation fuel.
What is the effect on the nu nuclear fuel and in the maintenance windows? I don’t know enough about nuclear power plants. But it seems to me they degrade faster under full load. Or is this not the case?
I think with membrane separation you can get staged concentration, like they do with say, isotopic separation of heavy water (H2O vs D2O). With a 10-fold increase at each stage (400ppm -> 4000ppm -> 40,000ppm -> -> pure CO2) you end up with a pure CO2 stream (which is typically what you want for efficient high-pressure, high-temperature industrial chemistry).
The real question is what kind of scale is needed to generate fuel at the levels desired - powering the concentrators, the water electrolyzers, the actual process (high pressure high temperature F-T synthesis). Ten square kilometers of solar panels and wind turbines for one oil tanker's worth per month?
Of course, if the world had exhausted its fossil fuel reserves by say 1970 we'd already be doing this at scale.
Stick one of those factories on the tailpipe of a coal-fired powerplant to raise the incoming CO2-concentration for a double win: you get to use coal (and, hence, gain votes in coal states) while producing JP6 (or something similar) without adding any CO2 to the environment.
"A total of 6,552 (!!) bomber sorties over 20 US Eighth Air Force and 2 RAF attacks dropped 18,328 tons (!!) of bombs on Leuna ... Leuna bombing from May 12, 1944 to April 5, 1945 cost the Eighth Air Force 1,280 airmen (!!)"
Sure you can, but that means you're using additional coal just for the purpose of making jet fuel, adding additional CO2 to the balance. By using CO2 from existing coal power plants you'll be CO2-neutral for the jet fuel. After all, if the point is to get fossil jet fuel it is even easier to use crude oil, of which there is plenty to go around. The Germans used the FT-process to get around the fact that they had coal of different types but only little oil, not because it is the easiest way to produce liquid hydrocarbons.
How do you generate enough electricity at said remote FOB to create a useful amount of fuel? Forward-deployed nuclear reactors would do the job, but would also be enormously expensive and vulnerable.
> How do you generate enough electricity at said remote FOB to create a useful amount of fuel?
You might not need to go that far to make the overall system economical. Imagine an aircraft carrier retrofitted with this system to generate jet fuel for its planes. If it can synthesize more fuel that its complement of aircraft require (this is likely), then it can be a supply generator for the remote FOB. There's still logistics in shipping from that carrier at sea nearby into the remote FOB, but that becomes a shorter supply line than shipping the equivalent quantity of jet fuel from a refinery in the state of Louisiana to the same FOB.
The process described is not new, and has been explored in various forms for 59 years by institutions including Brookhaven National Laboratory, M.I.T., the US Naval Research Lab (USNRL), and Google (Alphabet)'s Project Foghorn, an X-project "moonshot" which was cancelled on economic considerations. That is the constant theme for this work, which I'll address after noting research.
Prospects are often announced as "new" and "novel", despite extensive prior science and technology. In numerous cases, this is true not only of press and news releases, but of articles themselves ... as if, say, an evolutionary biology paper failed to credit Darwin and Wallace's original work. Much research has been by or associated with the US Navy, which has a considerable fuel-related logistical problem, especially with its aircraft-carrier-based force-projection capacity and supply-chain vulnerability. Other military branches have similar concerns, though have additional challenges with prospects of in situ fuel synthesis. For all branches, the cost of fuel delivered to combat and operational theatres is many times, often orders of magnitude greater, than the domestic "price at the pump". Given energy and feedstocks, synthesis is absolutely a credible option.
The chemistry works and is proven. Scale, operations, maintenance, logistics, and costs appear to remain hurdles.
I researched this topic fairly extensively in 2014 following release of a number of papers and articles over earlier USNRL studies and reports.
Early history is covered in a history of synthetic fuels roughly 1944--1960, "The Early Days of Coal Research: Wartime Needs Spur Interest in Coal-to-Oil Processes":
1962 M. King Hubbert (peak-oil pioneer) mention as an alternative to petroleum fuel, using limestone and hydrolsis-generated hydrogen as feedstocks utilising nuclear power to create a non-carbon-neutral hydrocarbon synfuel: https://web.archive.org/web/20061030044204/www.hubbertpeak.c...
Meyer Steinberg at Brookhaven picked up research based on Hubbert's suggestion:
Steinberg, M., and Beller, M., "Liquid Fuel Synthesis Using Nuclear Power in a Mobile Energy Depot System," Transactions of the American Nuclear Society, Vol. 8, pg 159, June 1965.
Steinberg, M. et. al., "Methanol as a Fuel in the Urban Energy Economy and Possible Source of Supply", BNL 17800, Brookhaven National Laboratory, April 1973.
Steinberg, M., and Dang, V.D., "Use of Controlled Thermonuclear Reactor Fusion Power for the Production of Synthetic Methanol Fuel from Air and Water", BNL 20016, Brookhaven National Laboratory, April 1975.
Steinberg, M., "Electrolytic Synthesis of Methanol from C02," United States Patent #3,959,059, May, 1976.
Steinberg, M., "Nuclear Power for the Production of Synthetic Fuels and Feedstocks," 11th International Energy Conversion Engineering Conference, American Institute of Chemical Engineering, New York, 1976.
Steinberg, M., "Combined Coal and Nuclear Plants for Power, Heat, and Synthetic Fuels," Transactions of the American Nuclear Society, Vol. 27, November, 1977.
Steinberg, M, Fillo, J.A., and Powell, J., "Synthetic Fuels and Fusion," Nuclear Engineering and Design. Vol. 63, No. 2, February, 1981.
Several Masters theses at M.I.T. listing Michael J. Driscoll as advisor also reported on the prospect, with at least three appearing in 1977, 1992, and 2012.
Robin Paul Bushore, "Synthetic Fuel Generation Capabilities of Nuclear Power Plants with Applications to Naval Ship Technology", 1977
Terry's thesis includes multiple citations of Meyer Steinberg. Sadly none of these appear to be generally available online, though some (and a few other papers) appear in Google Scholar. I've listed these above.
US NRL research ran from 2010--2013 (it may have continued though I've seen no further announcements). Conspicuously, Willauer cited no research prior to the 1990s IIRC, an exceedingly misleading practice.
"The Feasibility and Current Estimated Capital Costs of Producing Jet Fuel at Sea Using Carbon Dioxide and Hydrogen". Heather D. Willauer, Dennis R. Hardy, Frederick W. Williams. Navy Technology Center for Safety and Survivability, Chemistry Division. September 29, 2010. NRL/MRi6180--10-9300
"Extraction of Carbon Dioxide from Seawater by an Electrochemical Acidification Cell Part I--Initial Feasibility Studies". Felice DiMascio, Heather D. Willauer, Dennis R. Hardy, M. Kathleen Lewis, Frederick W. Williams. Navy Technology Center for Safety and Survivability, Chemistry Division. July 23, 2010. NRL/MR/6180--10-9274
"Extraction of Carbon Dioxide from Seawater by an Electrochemical Acidification Cell Part II--Laboratory Scaling Studies eather D. Willauer". Heather D. Willauer, Felice DiMascio, Dennis R. Hardy, M. Kathleen Lewis, Frederick W. Williams. Navy Technology Center for Safety and Survivability, Chemistry Division. April 11, 2011. NRL/MR/6180--11-9329
"Extraction of Carbon Dioxide and Hydrogen from Seawater by an Electrochemical Acidification Cell Part III: Scaled-up Mobile Unit Studies (Calendar Year 2011)". Heather D. Willauer, Dennis R. Hardy, Frederick W. Williams, Felice DiMascio. May 30, 2012. NRL/MR/6300--12-9414
"Extraction of Carbon Dioxide and Hydrogen from Seawater by an Electrochemical Acidification Cell Part IV: Electrode Compartments of Cell Modified and Tested in Scaled-Up Mobile Unit". Heather D. Willauer, Dennis R. Hardy, Frederick W. Williams, Felice DiMascio. September 3, 2013. NRL/MR/6300--13-9463
Again, the chemistry works, the economics do not. However that is due to a mis-pricing of fossil fuel resources that may well prove fatal to civilisation.
The principle problem with synfuel economics is that the process pays full energy costs of the actual creation of hydrocarbons. By contrast, petroleum and other fossil-fuel extraction supports present utilisation at millions of times the rate of initial formation. Whilst we often hear of carbon taxes and similar costs for the output consequences of this activity, economics is completely silent on the question of total resource input costs of hydrocarbons, which includes the time factor at a rate five million times current extraction. If I were to spend money at five million times my level of income ... I could live extravagently. For a short time. Geologically, this is precisely what the current fossil-fuel-powered economy has been doing for roughly 250 years. That gravy train will run out shortly (presuming we don't choke ourselves, or flood ourselves, or experience other as-yet-undetermined unanticipated consequences first).
An excellent analysis of the particulars of fossil fuel formation inputs (including also the very considerable biomass inputs) is Jeffrey S. Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine". I cannot recommend the PDF highly enough, despite its awkwardness on many mobile devices. There's a short HTML summary as well:
Traditional (nonenhanced) extraction of liquid petroleum peaked in the early 2010s, largely as forecast. The peak was delayed a few years possibly due to both economic slowdowns and efficiency measures (the late 1990s Asian financial crisis, the post-9/11 crash, the 2007-12 global financial crisis), though China and India's meteoric growth compensated in the other direction.
I'd have to dig into US DOE (EIA) and IEA data and charts, but enhanced and nontraditional recovery (deepwater drilling, which presents its own risks, fracking, heavy crudes as from Venezuela, and tar sands) have held up to demand, but at extreme cost and with huge impacts on prices and volatility. The industry itself is highly sensitive to both demand increases (surging prices and leading to political instability) and decreases (bankrupting extractors and their fianciers, and leading to financial instability). It's a tightrope walk. Swing producers (low-cost with excess capacity) such as KSA remain hugely influential globally, even for markets to which they do not ship directly. A tankerfull of oil can move across the globe for 1% of the realised energy capacity of that cargo. Oil markets remain global due to the commodity's extreme liquidity, in both physical and financial senses.
That's a hard question in large part because the specific timeframe depends on responses, reactions, and potential disruptive events. There's been a lot of ink and pixels spilled. Much of it comes from those wanting to deny the problem, those looking to sell you something, and those who poorly understand the problem. I hope I'm in the last camp and not the first two....
Economically, the most significant issue is that the marginal cost of oil under supply constraints varies greatly, and that's what has been seen in price history since 1973. You'll find a price history of oil dating to 1861 in BP's Annual Review of Energy, I'm looking at the 2021 report's graph on page 28.
Those swings have increased in amplitude since, resulting from and leading to political, financial, and economic disruptions --- causality seemst to go in both directions.
Remaining fossil fuel reserves will be increasingly expensive and difficult to extract. There will be "some" oil in the ground, in the same sense that after you've poured a beverage or eaten a tub of yoghurt, there is "some" food still left in the container, but 1) it's a finite amount and 2) you've got to work harder to get it. At some point it's simply not worth the effort.
Total geological deposits, recoverable deposits, and the rate of effective extraction, all differ, though the latter two depend on the first.
Those factors are insignificant, if we're lucky, next to the likelihood that further consumption of fossil fuels will be curtailed due to their output effects --- carbon emissions --- rather than supply limitations. Coal, oil, and gas that remain will have to be locked in the ground because we cannot afford the consequences of further use. Unfortunately, trends toward net zero carbon have greatly lagged what's necessary to avoid catastrophic consequences.
Which in the absence of either resource exhaustion or effective regulation could possibly end large-scale global technological civilization reliance on fossil fuels.
I wonder how close it is to "production" status and whether that's public information.
(I would also note that if the elaborate plans Musk has for Mars are ever to come to fruition, there has to be a CO2-to-fuel technology deployable there ...)
Interesting. I kind of err on skepticism based on previous attempts ala "Electric cars were tried in 60's, it will never work". It is worth trying and retrying old attempts at a problem, since a lot of underlying technologies, economics and affordability change rapidly. There is probably a whole host of old attempts that might be worth revisiting today in a startup context.
Apparently, Twelve is a new spinoff/rebranding from Opus-12 here in Berkeley which I had heard of, opus-12.com URL now points to Twelve.com, but certain pages are still accessible: https://opus-12.com/press
> I kind of err on skepticism based on previous attempts
There's a very powerful yet simple tool that helps with that: just ask yourself "what has changed?".
In your electric vehicle example it was battery technology that made all the difference.
The Fischer-Tropsch process hasn't changed in the past 100 years and neither has the underlying physics and chemistry or its efficiency (edit: efficiency improved with new catalysts and technology, but not as dramatically as with batteries).
The reason synthetic fuels didn't take off is that they're more expensive to produce than crude oil can be extracted and refined.
This is still true today, but the AF has a different problem statement than the economy of fuel production - it's the economy of fuel logistics - a subtle, yet important difference.
As long as Twelve's concept relies on syngas from water, it won't be any better in terms of that, though (if the area of operations includes deserts and dry land).
Otherwise there's no fundamentally new technology or breakthroughs required here. It's just a matter of finding creative ways to get the required hydrogen, really (in terms of improved fuel logistics, not necessarily cost vs fossil fuels).
If they are going to use electrolysis to make hidrogen to be used in Fischer-Tropsch process, wouldn't it be cheaper to develop some engines which can run on hidrogen?
* There are dozens of aircraft models in use each of which would require significant design changes to run on hydrogen. It’s more practical to design one alternate jet fuel source.
* Hydrogen has worse energy density than jet fuel. Energy density is especially important for aircraft.
* hydrogen is a lot harder to handle than than jet fuel. It’s more corrosive, more flammable, needs to be kept under pressure or at cryogenic temperatures.
Now, what would be nice to see as a proof-of-concept is an entire oil tanker's worth of jet fuel made by this process. How far off is that?