A team of researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (TIK) and the University of Toronto have proposed an innovative way to use air conditioning and ventilation systems to produce synthetic fuels from carbon dioxide (CO2) and water in the ambient air. Ventilation systems serving buildings are connected to special devices that collect carbon dioxide directly from the surrounding atmosphere and convert it into hydrocarbon, which is later used as a renewable synthetic fuel. The research team presented their concept for the production of a synthetic fuel called "Crowd oil" in the journal Nature Communications.
Today, the concentration of CO2 in the air is not so high, and its share is 0.038%, and for this reason, large filter systems have to be used to convert more air masses into a significant amount of fuel. A research team led by Professor Dittmeyer and Professor Jeffrey Ozin from the University of Toronto (Canada) is proposing decentralized artificial fuel production by connecting specialized equipment to existing ventilation and air conditioning systems. According to Dittmeier, the technologies required for this are in fact already available, and combining different temperatures and materials at specific stages is expected to increase carbon utilization and ensure high process efficiency.
“We intend to combine air purification technologies on the one hand and fuel and energy technologies on the other in such a way as to minimize financial costs and energy losses in the synthesis process. In addition, our "air fuel" can attract many new advocates for the "energy turn". Private PV systems have already demonstrated how well it can work. " However, switching from CO2 will require large amounts of electricity to produce hydrogen or synthetic fuels. The generation of electricity must not use carbon dioxide, meaning it must not be generated from fossil sources. “Rapid widespread adoption of renewable energy sources, including through the installation of photovoltaic systems in buildings, is what is needed,” says Dittmeyer.
In their publication, Dittmeyer and Ozin provide quantitative analyzes of office buildings, retail space and energy-efficient buildings to demonstrate the economic potential of installing conversion devices in all buildings. Scientists believe that much of the fossil fuel used in transportation will be replaced by “air fuel”. According to their rough estimates, the amount of CO2 that can be obtained from the air purification systems of twenty-five thousand large supermarkets in Germany corresponds to thirty percent of consumer demand for kerosene and eight percent of the demand for diesel fuel. In addition, there is a possibility of using the resulting product in the chemical industry for the production of a universal building material.
In their research, researchers are based on modeling the process and a preliminary study of its individual stages. The results show that energy efficiency (the ratio of energy consumed to the amount of chemical produced) should be approximately 50-60 percent, and the carbon efficiency (the content of spent carbon atoms in the finished fuel) will be almost one hundred percent. To test the simulation results, scientists are developing a fully integrated process with a planned carbon dioxide turnover of 1.25 kg / h.
At the same time, scientists have found that the proposed concept is not able to fully satisfy consumer demand for petroleum products. The question of the need to reduce the demand for liquid fuel is still acute, which is supposed to be solved with the help of new developments in the transport sector. Despite the fact that the technology of CO2 processing is already in some way ready for implementation, there is still a lot of research and engineering work in this direction.
Author: proger