Re: Current prices for bulk quantities of LOX, CO2 and H2

lathamr@xxxxxxxxxx (Richard D. Latham) wrote in
news:1w2lo6eu.fsf@xxxxxxxxxx:

In another newsgroup, rec.art.sf.written, I got sucked into a
discussion of "estimate the floor production costs for producing
iso-octane on a carbon neutral basis, assuming electricity
'too-cheap-to-meter' is available".

I took this to mean, get H2 from water, and CO2 out of the
atmosphere.

I was trying to get more precision than "really expensive" :-)

I (IIRC) ended up with feedstock cost estimates of circa $1.50 per kg
of gaseous H2 and $12.50 per kg of gaseous CO2. Including a WAG for
plant construction costs, I estimated a _floor_ cost of $20 gallon for
iso-octane.

This was kicked off by a "whatta we gonna do when (most of) the
available fossil fuels are all used up ?".

Well, if we suppose that p-B11 fusion is made to work and deliver
really cheap electricity (and process heat from the relatively
modest waste heat this fusion cycle will produce)...

....and further suppose that coal and natural gas will still be
used for some electricity, guaranteeing a supply of CO2 they'd
otherwise be trying to sequester...

I'd guess it might be a carbon neutral source of synthetic fuel
hydrocarbons that wouldn't be too horribly expensive. But it seems
a bit backward to "unburn" CO2.

You might also want to consider a typical large city garbage stream
as a (very) raw source of hydrocarbons; a process called hydrolysis
has been demonstrated to break down just about anything organic and
distill/process into various hydrocarbon stocks. The cities might
pay< you to take their garbage instead of land-filling it.

The process avoids having to go through the energy-expensive step of
obtaining raw hydrogen.

--Damon

.

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