Carbon in the atmosphere is a major driver of climate change. Now researchers from McGill University have designed a new catalyst for converting carbon dioxide (CO2) into methane -- a cleaner source of energy -- using tiny bits of copper called nanoclusters. While the traditional method of producing methane from fossil fuels introduces more CO2 into the atmosphere, the new process, electrocatalysis, does not. "On sunny days you can use solar power, or when it's a windy day you can use that wind to produce renewable electricity, but as soon as you produce that electricity you need to use it," says Mahdi Salehi, Ph.D. candidate at the Electrocatalysis Lab at McGill University. "But in our case, we can use that renewable but intermittent electricity to store the energy in chemicals like methane."
By using copper nanoclusters, says Salehi, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere can be transformed into methane and once the methane is used, any carbon dioxide released can be captured and "recycled" back into methane. This would create a closed "carbon loop" that does not emit new carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The research, published recently in the journal Applied Catalysis B: Environment and Energy, was enabled by the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan (USask). The team plans to continue refining their catalyst to make it more efficient and investigate its large-scale, industrial applications. Their hope is that their findings will open new avenues for producing clean, sustainable energy.
If you have excess oil you build a really cheap metal container to put it in. If you have extra energy to go into the battery to need to spend the full amount to make a new battery to store it.
It's fixed cost vs marginal cost. Marginal cost of oil storage is pretty low
Yes.. 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... https://www.energy.gov/fecm/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.
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.