Hacker News Reader

Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

You can't stop using fossil fuels for everything just yet. Rockets, planes, still need fuels with high energy density - they won't run on batteries (at least with the current technology). There are of course other industries where fossil fuels are currently the basis for chemical reactions as well.

View on HN

You can make synthetic plane fuel, whose burning just releases the same carbon captured when made.

(I don't know enough about rocket fuel.)

Of course, making that plane fuel will cost energy. But probably closer to eg 2-3x the energy regained on burning than 10x.

But there is power to fuel, and I think the main problem with power-to-fuel is energy consumption of the process.

From https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096014811... it looks like input electricity cost is around half of the costs and efficiency is around 50%. If electricity is abundant then this is still ok.

Those two are a very small portion of total emissions.

Hydrogen from hydrolysis seems like it might work, if you are willing to replace the current fleet of vehicles.

We can make hydrocarbon fuels too. Eg Fischer–Tropsch, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-diesel etc.

Hydrogen is more efficient though.

Yes, but hydrogen is just a bad battery.

It's awkward and relatively unsafe to handle, and has low energy density.

You'd be better off making eg synthetic petrol.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com