Audi makes carbon neutral synthetic diesel from air & water

[mistermack]

They've just invented the process, ffs. If it pans out at an industrial scale, then that's exactly what they will do.

And you are still wrong. ALL fossil fuels in our western industrial societies are subsidised. And as I said, that's not even taking into account the externalities not paid for yet.

As I said, if the two different diesel types were priced according to energy density, then you would be right. But they simply aren't. Well, I'm assuming they aren't as in 99.9999 percent of cases of two random different substances they wouldn't be. If you want to argue on the side of the 0.0000001%, then you need to provide evidence, not baseless assertions. Extraordinary evidence and that...

There is no subsidy involved, when you are comparing like-for-like generation costs.
If you want to involve subsidies in the argument, then the renewables have by FAR the highest subsidies.
At current oil prices, oil-fired is cheaper than any of the figures you are likely to read online, because the price of oil has dropped so low recently. But obviously that can change.
But in general, generating costs of renewables are way above coal, gas and oil at present.
If they are making diesel using electricity from renewables, they can certainly make it cheaper from electricity that was generated for less. That's bleedin obvious.

In any case, when they quote the estimated price that they can sell the diesel for, why would they add tax on top in their figure? They don't know the rate that the government would tax it at. If any. They would be hoping for either zero, or a very low rate, for being good little boys, and making it from renewable energy.

[laklak]

If (big if) this can be scaled up, and manufacturing externalities controlled, then it's big news. Diesel engines are less polluting than petrol, more efficient, longer lasting and cheaper to maintain.

[pErvinalia]

If they are making diesel using electricity from renewables, they can certainly make it cheaper from electricity that was generated for less. That's bleedin obvious.

Of course it is. But that in no way implies your mythical perpetual motion/energy. They are two different products. It would be like me claiming that if they are making plastic from electricity using renewables, they can certainly make it cheaper from electricity that was generated for less. No shit, Sherlock. But that doesn't imply the laws of physics are somehow being broken.

In any case, when they quote the estimated price that they can sell the diesel for, why would they add tax on top in their figure?

Because they are making a direct comparison, that's why. But even if they weren't making a direct comparison, it would still be a baseless assertion by you until you knew for a fact that they weren't adding tax. Your 'feeling' that they wouldn't add tax isn't proof of anything;

[mistermack]

Well, you haven't understood the economics of it. I would struggle to make it any clearer, but there is no way they are making diesel for 50p a litre, or anywhere near. Which is the price before tax etc of ordinary diesel.
If they are doing that, using electricity from renewables, they could make it for about 25p, using electricity from coal or gas, which is half the generating cost.
Now do you get it?

[pErvinalia]

Cost has nothing to do with the energy densities involved. So your reductio ad absurdum of making never ending cheaper and cheaper diesel isn't accurate.

I did make a bad analogy above with the plastic and diesel thing. The real comparison is between renewable electricity vs diesel generated electricity. IF the price of each unit produced by the two different processes was the same (or even not the same but related in such a way that your reductio ad absurdum could play out) then your point would be right. But the price of each isn't related solely to their energy densities. The simplest example of this is the difference between diesel and petrol. Diesel is about 9% more energy dense than normal petrol. Yet in Australia diesel is about 7% cheaper at the moment at the pump. That goes to show that there are more factors than just unit cost of energy that go into the price of a fuel.

[Animavore]

Soz, but I'm automatically sceptical of press-releases like this.

We'll see.

[mistermack]

I know a red herring when I see one.
Talking of red, I just priced 1000 litres of red diesel online. That's agricultural diesel. Same product as white diesel, but lower tax and stained red to prevent fraudulent use.
They quoted 53p a litre, including delivery. And sixty percent of that price is still tax.

You can check it out for yourself :

http://fueltool.uk/

[pErvinalia]

I know a red herring when I see one.

Talking of red, I just priced 1000 litres of red diesel online. That's agricultural diesel. Same product as white diesel, but lower tax and stained red to prevent fraudulent use.
They quoted 53p a litre, including delivery. And sixty percent of that price is still tax.

You can check it out for yourself :

http://fueltool.uk/

What are we supposed to be checking out?? That fuel has tax on it? No shit, Sherlock.

[mistermack]

I make that a raw price of 21p per litre for red diesel, without the tax.

That's how fucking expensive Audi's fuel is compared to the normal price of diesel. Unless they were adding about one twenty in tax and not bothering to mention it.

Wishful thinking on your part.

[Seth]

Read the article. It's expected to be cheaper than regular diesel.

I guess that depends on how much government subsidy is required to make it so. It sounds very energy-intensive to me. That energy has to come from somewhere. It's purported to come from "renewable" sources like wind and solar, but my question is, when the entire energy budget is considered, including the cost of building and maintaining the renewable energy systems, is it still going to be cheaper? The reason I'm skeptical is because there are almost zero "renewable" energy projects that are cost-effective. The vast majority of them require substantial government subsidies and many of them (like Solyndra) suck up hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars and produce absolutely no energy at all.

I'm suspicious that the putative cost of this process has been conveniently buggered so as to exclude deep costs like the renewables infrastructure that it depends on to function.

After all, they are trying to substitute short-term energy input for the millions of years of energy input that are stored in fossil fuels and there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

[Seth]

Diesel engines are far easier and cheaper to make than hydrogen fuel cells or electric vehicles (at the moment - that could change). I think that is why this process could prove economical compared to the other two.

Good point. Also, diesel engines are a well-matured technology. They've been around a long time and have largely reached peak capacity. Nowadays it's not power or reliability that is the concern, it's carbon particulate pollution that requires an enormous amount of weight and technology to deal with. My Ford F-450 "regenerates" the catalytic particle converter about every 20 minutes when I'm hauling a load. I'd say it's in regen mode 70 percent of the time when towing, which means that raw diesel fuel is being pumped into the converter where it burns and raises the temp of the converter to more than 1700 degrees f. And the mileage the truck actually gets while in regen mode absolutely sucks, and that's on top of the already lousy mileage it gets just because it's a big diesel engine. I've gotten as little as 2 MPG when hauling max capacity up the approach to the Eisenhower Tunnel on I70, which is a 7+% grade topping out at more than 11,000 ft MSL. Average for the truck, even when new, has never exceeded 14 MPG and that's with the truck completely empty, driving on flat roads at sea level.

A realistic average overall is about 8 MPG.

At least 50 percent of that is attributable to all the smog gear on the engine. I know this because I've owned older diesel trucks that easily averaged 16 MPG overall because they did not have all the pollution controls.

The problem with electric vehicles is that while it's useful in an urban setting for small cars, it's not useful for heavy hauling or long trips. To be useful to the trucking industry or anybody other than urban commuters, it has to have a reliable 250 mile minimum range and it must be fully rechargeable in 10 minutes or less at any fuel station that provides diesel, and the whole system must not weigh more than a current truck with fuel weighs because pounds matter on long-haul trucking.

No battery made today has the energy density/mass of diesel fuel and it's very debatable if it's even possible to get there.

Diesel is going to be with us for a long, long time. So, it's good they can make it this way, but that doesn't mean it's going to be affordable or that the environmental impacts of the infrastructure required to produce the energy needed are going to be acceptable. Just look what happened when somebody proposed putting up an off-shore wind farm within sight of the Kennedy compound. I don't know about you, but I am getting thoroughly sick of the thousands and thousands of acres of wind farms in the west that clutter up the landscape, particularly at night, when the anti-collision beacons all flash in unison and you can see the 15 mile long extent of the farm from the highway. Not to mention all the birds they kill.

[Seth]

Can none of you cunts read? It's cheaper than current diesel.

No, somebody is CLAIMING that it MIGHT BE cheaper than current diesel. I for one am extremely skeptical of that claim. I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying that it sounds very much like a typical inflated claim produced by the Greens that will turn out to be a complete fiction, kind of like ethanol was.

The other point is, that all existing diesel cars can run on it. All existing cars can't run on electric power or hydrogen.

It will also allow it to be a fuel source to supplement baseline power supplies when renewables are falling short.

Yes, that speaks strongly in its favor.

You can bet your life that they are not taking tax into account, when they compare the price to the current diesel price. Most of the price of road fuel is tax. If this stuff had the same tax added on top, it would be about double the current price of diesel.

Blind assertion. As usual.

Not really. He's right about fuel taxes.

I think there is potential there, but I'm not convinced it's going to be cheaper than fossil fuels because you can't get more energy out of the fuel than you put into making it. Fossil fuels are the product of millions of years of energy input, which is what makes them so energy-dense and cheap. I'd have to see some skeptical analysis of the claims before drawing any firm conclusions about this new idea. That being said, I encourage continued research because even if it's quite expensive it still provides us with a fuel source that does not require replacing the entire diesel engine fleet worldwide, which is beyond enormous, in order to convert to electric. In a crisis it would be nice to know that we CAN, with some relative efficiency, produce critical supplies of diesel using this process that is not dependent on foreign oil imports. I can see this being a huge deal for the military, for example, especially if it can be scaled down to make production facilities portable.

[Seth]

They've just invented the process, ffs. If it pans out at an industrial scale, then that's exactly what they will do.

And you are still wrong. ALL fossil fuels in our western industrial societies are subsidised. And as I said, that's not even taking into account the externalities not paid for yet.

As I said, if the two different diesel types were priced according to energy density, then you would be right. But they simply aren't. Well, I'm assuming they aren't as in 99.9999 percent of cases of two random different substances they wouldn't be. If you want to argue on the side of the 0.0000001%, then you need to provide evidence, not baseless assertions. Extraordinary evidence and that...

Diesel is priced according to energy density now. It used to be incredibly cheap when it was priced by cost of production, but that changed about 30 years ago when oil companies figured out they could get away with charging based on energy density, which is why diesel fuel is now more expensive than gasoline, which has higher refining costs.

I remember when diesel fuel was about half the cost of gasoline and that was one of the primary reasons I bought a diesel truck. Diesel is the workhorse fuel of commerce and agriculture, and since they jacked the price to be equal to or higher than gasoline the cost of everything, and I mean everything, went up substantially because everything, and I mean everything you use on a daily basis is delivered using diesel fuel.

[Seth]

Cost has nothing to do with the energy densities involved. So your reductio ad absurdum of making never ending cheaper and cheaper diesel isn't accurate.

I did make a bad analogy above with the plastic and diesel thing. The real comparison is between renewable electricity vs diesel generated electricity.

Almost no electricity generated by diesel fuel. It's either coal, natural gas, water or nuclear. Renewables proved less than 2% of the energy generated worldwide.

But it does take a lot of diesel to provide those other sources, particularly coal.

These are all valid points, but I agree somewhat that the article makes it sound like a perpetual motion machine to the unwashed masses. "Oh, look, we can make diesel fuel from water and CO2! Isn't that wonderful! Now we can stop drilling for oil and digging coal!" Sounds great until one examines the energy budget a bit more closely. It's obviously not a perpetual motion machine, that was certainly hyperbole, but we are correct to be skeptical of the claims in the absence of a full energy audit of the entire system, including the energy budget of the renewables needed to make it happen.

The basic budget is that the sun provides X watts per square meter per day and wind provides X watts per square meter per day and the process takes Y watts to produce one liter of fuel. But between X and Y are a zillion small energy drains that suck the efficiency of X away before it gets to Y, much less before it's turned into fuel, which means that one liter of fuel will always contain X minus Y minus miscellaneous losses worth of energy. That much is basic thermodynamics. This is not to say that it may not be worth it to make diesel this way, but in no way can that be said to be axiomatically cheaper than the X times 150 million years worth of solar energy storage that we use today to make it.

It's absolutely worth pursuing, but I remain skeptical of it's actual ability to provide the needed amount of fuel at an affordable price and without intolerable aesthetic and environmental side effects.

[JimC]

Seth, that's certainly dreadful fuel economy in your diesel vehicle. My 2 litre Forester diesel 4WD averages 6.7 litres per 100 km, which equates to 35 mpg, even better on long trips to the outback.

I think the main reason why the Audi process might be important in the long run, when an oil shortage eventually occurs, is that it will support what will be a large number of "legacy" diesel powered transport until other technologies mature.