PowerSwitch

This letter appeared in the Grauniad today:

The 20m tonnes of CO2 produced annually from Drax power station (Letters, May 18th) is a valuable chemical resource. If all of it were sequestrated conveniently via closed-cycle combustion at 100% purity, it would be available to manufacture petrol. This can be achieved at modest cost using water as a hydrogen source. A suitable chemical pathway is via methanol back to petrol (gasoline). In Drax's case this could use wind power from offshore wind farms in the Wash. The petrol produced would power some 5m cars. This strategy renders the power station carbon- neutral and emission-free (good for local residents). Furthermore, one-sixth of our cars would then run on renewable petrol. We would also save the energy from the Humber refineries. It's definitely beyond petroleum.
Reg Mann
Professor of chemical engineering, University of Manchester

Can some explain why this is nonsense?

biffvernon wrote:This letter appeared in the Grauniad today:

The 20m tonnes of CO2 produced annually from Drax power station (Letters, May 18th) is a valuable chemical resource. If all of it were sequestrated conveniently via closed-cycle combustion at 100% purity, it would be available to manufacture petrol. This can be achieved at modest cost using water as a hydrogen source. A suitable chemical pathway is via methanol back to petrol (gasoline). In Drax's case this could use wind power from offshore wind farms in the Wash. The petrol produced would power some 5m cars. This strategy renders the power station carbon- neutral and emission-free (good for local residents). Furthermore, one-sixth of our cars would then run on renewable petrol. We would also save the energy from the Humber refineries. It's definitely beyond petroleum.
Reg Mann
Professor of chemical engineering, University of Manchester

Can some explain why this is nonsense?

A) Second Law of Thermodynamics
B) Cost. Herr Professor, I think, has an odd idea of what 'modest' means'
C) "This strategy renders the power station carbon- neutral " - no it doesnt. Drax's CO2 emission simply gets diverted into the exhaust pipes of cars rather than venting into the atmosphere via its own stacks.

From here:
Reg Mann, BSc, MSc, PhD, CEng, MIChemE

Wow, impressive credentials, it therefore seems odd that he makes such a schoolboy error in not considering the 2nd Law, maybe he's been hanging around with economists too much.

His idea is the classic, if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

Rereading this I think we misunderstand what he is trying to do. He is not trying to "recover" energy from the CO2 (clearly pointless) but is using it as a chemical resource to convert wind powered electricity into a transport fuel (that can be burned in more or less conventional engines). However it fails to avoid CO2 emissions and would not be the most energy efficient scheme (for wind to transport fuel) by a long shot - way too many conversions.

skeptik wrote:B) Cost. Herr Professor, I think, has an odd idea of what 'modest' means'

That's the key point - it's perfectly pssible to do, but requires a large input of energy to break up the CO2 and H2O. Yet another crazy scheme sadly... I think these will abound more and more as we approach and pass the Peak.

Wine from water.

Get a bucket (10 litre). Clean it out then fill it up with water and add 1 tablespoon of bleach and stir (to sterilize it). Let it stand for 90 minutes then pour out the water/bleach and swill out a couple of times with fresh water.

Add a 1kg bag of white sugar to the bucket and a jar of cheap blackberry jam. Pour 1.5 litres of boiling water into the bucket and stir till sugar and jam is in solution. Top up the bucket with cold water. Feel the side of the bucket and when the water feels about room temperature (20 degrees C) toss in some yeast (about a flat desert spoon of brewers yeast or a heaped desert spoon of bread yeast). Note that you cannot use ?Quick ? Fast Action? bread yeasts ? it has to be the normal dried stuff like ?Allisons? or natural solid bread yeast. Stir well for a minute then cover bucket and put it somewhere warm.

In two weeks you should have 10 litres of cheap blackberry hooch wine. If you used bread yeast it will be about 5% alcohol and sweeter. Whereas brewer?s yeast will make it about 7% alcohol and drier (less sweet). Decant from the bucket into 5 x 2 litre plastic bottles (they are about 17p each for generic pop or water from Tesco). If you want the hooch fizzy put a flat teaspoon of sugar into each bottle before decanting. Note that you need to leave about a 2 inch gap of air at the top of each bottle.

Store the bottles in a warm place for a week ? check each day to make sure they are not coming under massive pressure (if they feel really hard ? let a bit of the gas out by unscrewing the top a bit, then tighten it back up). After a week put the bottles in a cool place for a further week and again check each day to make sure they are not coming under massive pressure.

You can drink the stuff now but it seems to get better if you leave it longer.

This cheap hooch costs about ?1.50 for 10 litres and tastes (to me) about as good as ?5-a-bottle wine. Instead of jam, you can of course use fresh berries you have picked yourself (about 1.5 kg well washed and boiled for 20 minutes added to bucket), or flavour the hooch with nettles and dandelions (lovely ? boil about 1.5kg of nettle tops and dandelion heads for 30 minutes for the juice to add to bucket) but add a further ? bag of sugar to the bucket if using natural flavourings (about a 250g).

ToY wrote:
This cheap hooch costs about ?1.50 for 10 litres and tastes (to me) about as good as ?5-a-bottle wine.

Urgh!

I expect it would if you've had your tastebuds surgically removed or etched away with battery acid...

I think I'll stick to the Morey St.Denis....

I do remember making lager in plastic dustbin using a kit from Boots many years ago. Actually tasted quite good.

It?s not that bad, but admittedly there is always an element of self-delusion about the quality of one?s creations.

ToY wrote:It?s not that bad, but admittedly there is always an element of self-delusion about the quality of one?s creations.

Indeed - I brewed quite a bit while I was at Uni (the first time), and made beer that only I could drink, and wine that other people would drink on rare occasions. My only real success was cider, which was extremely potent and lots of my friends drank. This was all from homebrew kits I'm afraid, nothing more "natural". While I was at school we tried distilling once, and I count myself lucky we didn't posion ourselves, as we didn't know the first thing about what we were doing!