Scientists unveil fire-safe fuel
news.ucr.edu
news.ucr.edu
(Also, what the fuck, this is a chlorine compound, as perihelions points out. WTAF.)
Edit: To be clear, I'm talking about Gasoline ICE applications in the context of this article, which is far more narrow than all of combustion. Most ICE applications that are not ground transport are Diesel, which is not applicable to this. This is not applicable to jet fuel. Most small engines (lawn care) are rapidly being replaced with electric power as well.
From ecological perspective, mid-term, it makes sense to use renewable power source and captured carbon to synthesize fuel for airplanes to burn. That's properly carbon-neutral, with gasoline being effectively a high-density battery in liquid form.
Airlines optimize to such an extent that they include only the fuel needed to reach a destination, including a safety margin, so on short-haul flights the tanks are mostly empty at takeoff.
I think electric planes could be made to work fairly well for those short flights because the batteries could be kept small. But for long flights the deadweight is going to be a huge problem!
And on the other hand, planes on long flights are so heavy due to the additional fuel that they can not land early without getting rid of the excess weight first or risk structural damage or worse.This usually means dumping the fuel or burning it off in a holding pattern.
The edge cases matter. Combustion fuels are going to be with us for awhile, even after automobiles and heavy industry mostly migrate.
Applications of liquid fuels which are remote, in high fire-risk environments, don't lend themselves to other safety countermeasures during fueling, and don't lend themselves to electrification are tiny portions of the energy market, but still could be quite noticeable in absolute terms.
But that's not why I answered you. I answered in the way I did because you responded to a question "why do you think combustion fuels are a dead-end?". Even if we take the absolute best path for climate and get lucky on some aspects of battery and electrification economics, we're still going to be burning significant quantities of fuels for the next 100 years. They will be markets in significant decline, but still huge.
Diesel is not very flammable. You can drop a kit match into a puddle of diesel and it’ll extinguish the match.
The big difference is that unlike gasoline, diesel doesn’t really vaporize at standard conditions, and it’s the vapors that are so dangerous - the god old surface area effect, the same reason sawdust is much more dangerous than a solid hunk of wood.
The only actual problem is making a boatload of current batteries. Technology is good enough as it is. Of course it'll still improve over time.
Unless you have to travel long distances regularly, can't charge at home, or haul heavy things like a boat/camper/trailer/etc
[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/key-world-energy-statistics-2021...
1. Electric vehicles use 1/4 or less the energy of gasoline vehicles for the same result. If 75% of cars were EVs, your angle of cars would be "EVs only use 18%!". 2. Just because current state is mostly gas does not mean that we do not intend to change this. The current limitation is a propagation issue. EV cars for example are getting cheaper...but fewer people can own new cars anyways, it's going to take time. 3. Heating is a major use of energy and much of the world is behind on better solutions such as heat pumps.
Additionally, while I fully agree with your angle...in a city...much of the world does not actually work like that. You tell someone in Montana to stop using a car and they will ask for you to build a shrink ray. Saying' Stop using a car' is exactly the same as hitting like on FB for a social cause: It doesn't change reality of people needing to be at work, have food, or live life. The world isn't a happy imaginary place where 'Oh, just walk/take a bike/public transport!' works. It only works if it is better than the car. That is true in NYC and SF, that is not true between them.
1. As non-green electricity sources are replaced by green electricity sources, those non-green EVs become green EVs with no action required on the part of their owners. To switch someone using an ICE to a green car you have to get them to buy a new car.
2. If you have to use a burning fuel power source, you can try to capture some of the emissions where the fuel is burned to reduce the environmental impact.
If you are burning the fuel in your car, that emissions capture has to be done at the car where you are quite limited in feasible weight and volume of your emissions capture equipment.
If you are burning the fuel in a big power plant and then distributing the energy as electricity to EVs you don't have weight limits and have much less restrictive size limits on your emissions capture equipment.
Fossil-based hydrocarbon fuels could be replaced by non-fossil synfuel analogues which are themselves carbon neutral. This is based on proved chemistry, though the economics to date have not permitted anything but experimental and pilot-project scales of operation.
One of the appeals of this route to me, however, is that by introducing equivalent fuels to the extant energy system it would be possible to convert to a green, sustainable energy economy without wholesale replacement of extant fleets, powerplants, and energy infrastructure for refining, transport, storage, and distribution of those fuels. In this sense it's the exact analogue of replacing underlying grid generation and storage infrastructure with EVs.
Again, the slight fly in the soup is that neither economics nor the necessary scale of operations are proven, though the prospect isn't obviously unattainable, as many other proposed solutions are. (Say: biofuels, for which biological capacity simply isn't sufficient.)
With an EV the only harmful emissions are tires and brake pads.
Cleaning up the electrical grid is also a lot more attainable given current technology than scaling up synthetic hydrocarbon production. If a car has an estimated lifespan of say 20 years then I am more confident in achieving cleaner grid power than I am in clean synfuels in that lifetime.
There is also the matter of where you live. Some grids are already very clean and so the EVs that operate there really are low or even zero tailpipe emission.
I am curious how a synfuel ICE vehicle compares to an EV in terms of energy per distance. How much energy does it take to synthesize the fuel?
Of the secondary emissions of combustion, most of those can be controlled through ensuring the purity of the fuel mix, and if you're synthesizing the fuel in the first place, you can ensure that those components aren't present, notably sulfur and other contaminants.
That still leaves partially-combusted hydrocarbons (where fuel burn is too lean and/or cold), NOx emissions (where fuel burn is too hot, and the nitrogen comes from the atmosphere itself), carbon monoxide (partial combustion, again), and ozone. Those can all be mitigated to some extent through engine, combustion, and emissions controls, though there will always be some pollutants.
My understanding is that the round-trip efficiency of electricity-to-fuel synfuels based on seawater-sourced carbon is about 50-60% in the fuel synthesis, and about 25--30% for the utilisation (Carnot efficiencies are again a weak point), for a round-trip of as low as 12.5% to a high perhaps of 20%. That is admittedly not great, but what you do gain is an extremely energy-dense fuel that transports well and stores indefinitely. (Fossil fuels themselves are tens to hundreds of millions of years old.) Where those characteristics are desireable, there's simply nothing else which provides equivalent characteristics.
The fuels are also remarkably non-toxic (contra ammonia), non-corrosive (contra methanol), at heavier weights non-flammable (ironic in a fuel), certainly non-explosive (contra hydrogen). I have a feeling that they'll be with us for some time yet to come.
Is seawater sourced carbon actually carbon neutral? I always imagined the neutrality of synfuel relying on atmospheric carbon. I know the ocean absorbs some but is it enough to not be adding CO2 to the atmosphere? And if not then whats the energy efficiency of atmospheric carbon captured synfuels?
The advantage of sourcing CO2 from seawater as opposed to the atmosphere is that the energy cost of doing so is far lower. That's a key message (unsure if it's an original finding) of 2010s USNRL research by Willauer et al I'd looked at when it made news a ways back.
<https://web.archive.org/web/20230604174145/https://old.reddi...>
- "The Feasibility and Current Estimated Capital Costs of Producing Jet Fuel at Sea Using Carbon Dioxide and Hydrogen". Heather D. Willauer, Dennis R. Hardy, Frederick W. Williams. Navy Technology Center for Safety and Survivability, Chemistry Division. September 29, 2010. NRL/MRi6180--10-9300 <https://web.archive.org/web/20230604174145/http://www.dtic.m...>
- "Extraction of Carbon Dioxide from Seawater by an Electrochemical Acidification Cell Part I--Initial Feasibility Studies". Felice DiMascio, Heather D. Willauer, Dennis R. Hardy, M. Kathleen Lewis, Frederick W. Williams. Navy Technology Center for Safety and Survivability, Chemistry Division. July 23, 2010. NRL/MR/6180--10-9274 <https://web.archive.org/web/20230604174145/http://www.dtic.m...>
- "Extraction of Carbon Dioxide from Seawater by an Electrochemical Acidification Cell Part II--Laboratory Scaling Studies eather D. Willauer". Heather D. Willauer, Felice DiMascio, Dennis R. Hardy, M. Kathleen Lewis, Frederick W. Williams. Navy Technology Center for Safety and Survivability, Chemistry Division. April 11, 2011. NRL/MR/6180--11-9329 <https://web.archive.org/web/20230604174145/http://www.dtic.m...>
- "Extraction of Carbon Dioxide and Hydrogen from Seawater by an Electrochemical Acidification Cell Part III: Scaled-up Mobile Unit Studies (Calendar Year 2011)". Heather D. Willauer, Dennis R. Hardy, Frederick W. Williams, Felice DiMascio. May 30, 2012. NRL/MR/6300--12-9414 <https://web.archive.org/web/20230604174145/http://www.dtic.m...>
- "Extraction of Carbon Dioxide and Hydrogen from Seawater by an Electrochemical Acidification Cell Part IV: Electrode Compartments of Cell Modified and Tested in Scaled-Up Mobile Unit". Heather D. Willauer, Dennis R. Hardy, Frederick W. Williams, Felice DiMascio. September 3, 2013. NRL/MR/6300--13-9463 <https://web.archive.org/web/20230604174145/http://www.dtic.m...>
Other and earlier research: <https://web.archive.org/web/20230601122020/https://old.reddi...>
I really hope you're right, because the internal combustion engine directly causes a substantial portion of climate change. It is not so obvious to me that it's on the way out, because petroleum companies have a vested interest in it.
Diversifying or other future thinking, is far down the list. (As measured by investment allocations)
The reason fossil fuels are bad when it comes to climate change is that they are taking carbon that was sequestered long ago and putting it back into the atmosphere. Fossil fuels that are made from carbon recently removed from the atmosphere are just putting that carbon back, so cause no net change in CO2 levels.
They still have the same problem with putting things like sulfur dioxides, nitrogen oxides, and various other things into the atmosphere, so it would be best to someday move completely away from them, but that is massively less urgent than reducing CO2 emissions. They don't make those other things worse and could make reducing CO2 much less disruptive so would be a win if they ever get to the point where they can be produced economically in sufficient quantity.
Hydrogen or ammonia will likely be cheaper to make than hydrocarbons and might work for many uses, like airplanes and ships, that can't use batteries. Hydrocarbons may be only be used for places where can't upgrade.
Synthesized fuels aren't fossil fuels. If you want name, say hydrocarbon fuel.
Well that and tire particulate pollution.
And the bugs that get killed by windshields and grills.
And the people who get killed and maimed by collisions.
And the conversion of useful space to roads and parking lots.
And the disposal of the batteries so they don't catch fire.
And getting the raw materials for the batteries without messing things up more.
That's a fairly minor point relative to the emissions picture, which is most significant. But nonzero.
In re: better batteries, we have to ask, "Better for whom?" Tesla has already spun off another for-profit corporation to make money charging people to dispose of their batteries. More exploitive mineral extraction methods are typically cheaper than doing it right. Etc.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal%E2%80%93air_electrochemi...>
Combustion engines will be around for the next 100 years, even if human society mostly collapsed
- "...This mixture spontaneously ignites under the decomposition conditions, but it does not thermally decompose the underlying liquid. Meanwhile, at the anode, the perchlorate gets oxidized to chlorate and chlorite ions, but none of that shows up in the gas phase."
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/instant-flames-saf...
Perchlorate itself is at least somewhat toxic. Chlorate and chlorite are, too, and efforts are made to reduce the amount in drinking water.
Chloride is relatively innocuous (people need quite a bit to be healthy), although it’s not great when it gets on metals due to corrosion issues. Bit chloride doesn’t exist by itself — it needs to be balanced by a positive charge somewhere.
So that leaves HCl? Hydrogen chloride gas is fairly nasty.
The best outcome I can think of for automotive use is to carry around a bunch of calcium carbonate, AdBlue style, and try to arrange for the end products to be CaCl and CO2, and to declare that this is somehow a good thing because the cars all emit a steady drip drip drip of deicing fluid.
- "at the anode, the perchlorate gets oxidized to chlorate and chlorite ions, but none of that shows up in the gas phase"
There are other questions: What's the toxicity in a spill? What does refilling look like?
It's an interesting piece of work, no doubt, but this is nothing that looks production-ready.
I don't have access to the original paper (even through SciHub) and it might answer some of these questions.
Some of those can be electrified, but there are likely always to be exceptions in which that is not possible. Electrification is most viable where usage is heavy. Tracked vehicles electrify more easily than road-based ones (though yes, trolley busses are in fact A Thing). Canal traffic can be electrified through use of onshore "mules" (electrified traction), though passing and overtaking become concerns. River and lake traffic is less suited to this (again, possible in cases but not entirety).
High-latitude sites as in Siberia, Alaska, Northern Canada, and Antarctica cannot rely on solar power, and would require either a fuel-based or nuclear-based generating capacity. (McMurdo Station on the Antarctic coast had a nuclear plant, that didn't go so well.)
Mind that not all of these uses have a high demand for low-flammability fuels, which applies most specifically to aircraft. But all tend to rely strongly on fuel-based energy systems, and substituting for those is exceedingly challenging. The alternatives are effectively:
- Continue use of fossil-based hydrocarbon fuels.
- Find an alternative non-fossil hydrocarbon fuel analogue. There's been interesting work, and commercial industrial creation, of synfuels dating to the 1940s, though that was coal-to-oil conversion in Germany and South Africa. Generating fuels from CO2 sourced from seawater or the atmosphere has been researched since the 1970s at M.I.T. and the U.S. Naval Research Lab (USNRL), with technical proof but to date no commercial success. Google's X Labs attempted commercialisation under Project Foghorn, but failed on economics: <https://x.company/projects/foghorn/>
(I've reasons to argue that it's the economics of fossil fuels, not synfuels, which is principally to blame here.)
(Biofuels are often suggested. The problem here is that the net likely capacity is at best a small fraction of present fossil fuel usage. We might feed 5--10%, with the upper bound being highly optimistic, but we're not going to replace 100% of present fossil fuel usage, let alone the future growth required to bring under-developed regions of the world to even a small fraction of industrialised nations' consumption.
- Substitute non-combustion energy plants. To date that's nuclear, which ... has its own challenges. For larger fixed-site locations, that's possibly viable, though there are numerous cautionary tales to heed. For mobile applications such as rail or marine transport, the compounded risks of already probable accidents make this highly unattractive.
- Substitute renewables. The prospect of resuming sailing ships for international sea cargo is floated, though cost and scale of ships would likely be impacted (rising and falling, respectively) tremendously.
- Drastically curtail or cease such activities. One of the realities of economics is that as expressed costs change, so too do activities in which those costs are incurred. The fossil fuel age has made transportation unbelievably inexpensive compared to pre-industrial times. It's possible that we'll see considerable back-sliding on both personal and cargo transportation as fuel costs rise. This will of course profoundly re-shape the world, in much the way that cheap transportation re-shaped in our recent past.
For those who don't pay much attention to ionic liquids, 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium, or "bmim", is one of the most common — if not #1 — ionic liquids used in organic chemistry. This property is rather unexpected, but the compound is not itself new or unusual.
As for the perchlorate anion, it's a little surprising, but given the cost of bmim (which is unlikely to come down), I don't think the authors expect it to be cost-effective outside of safety-critical environments where a fume hood could be employed.
It's easy to miss a small spill, and only weeks later does a hole appear in the road.
Anyway, if you really hate someone, put brake fluid on their car, it'll melt the paintwork pretty thoroughly.
The title is a little misleading, the fuel is most certainly not fire-safe. It is, after all, a fuel. A better title might be "Scientists vaporize ionic combustion fuels using an electric current".
It's amazing how we live through our teenage years sometimes.
[a] https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1002/ejic.201100529
"Stability of [emim][ClO4]: With respect to the hazardous nature of organic perchlorates, we tested the stability of I according to the UN Test Series UN 3a to UN 3d..."
Here's their conclusion :
- "Despite being relatively stable against mechanical stress, the friction test leads to the conclusion that I has to be categorized as a hazardous explosive material. Therefore, I would not become a commonplace ionic liquid like [emim][NTf2]."
Do we really need this? couldn't we just add automatic extinguishers to the remaining combustion applications or something like that?
LMFAO, the university press office suggests burning chlorine compounds in street cars.
edit: I think I might be wrong. Here's Derek Lowe's commentary:
- "...This mixture spontaneously ignites under the decomposition conditions, but it does not thermally decompose the underlying liquid. Meanwhile, at the anode, the perchlorate gets oxidized to chlorate and chlorite ions, but none of that shows up in the gas phase."
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/instant-flames-saf...
Or is it the stuff that infamously dissolved pilots during ww2
Pretty sure it's one or the other
I had to search that one and found this nice article:
https://ig.space/commslink/me-163-komet-the-rocket-powered-g...
A reminder of the YouTube channel of the USCSB for those who've not watched any of the excellently produced and narrated case studies there. Even if you're not in that industry, there are a lot of parallels to be seen in the negligent decisions made leading to disaster and how e.g. ignoring proper patching practices can lead to a much greater incident than simply doing the work when it needs to be done. If you're of the personality type that enjoys reading or watching air crash investigation reports this will almost certainly appeal to you.
Yes, of course it would need measures to make it safer than the naive, straightforward version of the idea.
It's already high time we address the distinction between modern cars (EV) and legacy cars (ICE).