- "Theoretically, the ionic liquid fuel could be used in any type of vehicle."
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."
A more sustainable and eco friendly fuel option is to simply use high test hydrogen peroxide passed over a red hot catalyst. It decomposes to hydrogen and oxygen and water. What could go wrong?
Isn't that the stuff where you have to make sure your pipe runs have gentle bends not 90-degree elbows because if it 'piles up' in a corner it spontaneously goes off?
Or is it the stuff that infamously dissolved pilots during ww2
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.
Youtube reccomended one of their videos and they are really well done with layman's explanations of everything and CG re-enactments, video evidence, and report evidence. They set a high bar for investigation videos
“You would make a ship sail against the winds and currents by lighting a bonfire under her decks? I have no time for such nonsense.” —- supposed quote from Napoleon about the first steamships.
Yes, of course it would need measures to make it safer than the naive, straightforward version of the idea.
Yes. Diesel fires are pretty rare. If a diesel truck crashes on the highway, the biggest risk is to the environment (it's pretty toxic), and to the road (diesel dissolves asphalt).
Never thought about the asphalt part, but makes some sense. From what I understand, bitumen is basically the part of oil distillation left over after you distill away all the aromatic(liquid) stuff.
It's actually pretty bad, because spilt diesel makes the asphalt much softer over the coming weeks until it's pretty much a pothole filled with gravel.
It's easy to miss a small spill, and only weeks later does a hole appear in the road.
I'm going to file this one for future reference, :p. I wonder if this is why a lot of residential roads where I live are bricks instead of asphalt. Smells much less worse in summer too.
Anyway, if you really hate someone, put brake fluid on their car, it'll melt the paintwork pretty thoroughly.
Kerosene is also very safe. Pprune is full of stories of technicians throwing burning cigarettes in kerosene to extinguish them (and to scare novice pilots)
Because the only actual problem in EVs is making a better battery. They solve a bunch of other problems. Far fewer moving parts, better packaging, massive gains in pure energy efficiency, no smog, a direction for Zero emissions. The Internal combustion engine, as someone who has owned multiple Manual Mazda Miatas, is seeing the end of it's times. It's a dead end in almost every situation. Additionally, this has none of the gains that are actually desired, they want efficiency and less emissions. Not chlorine gas.
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.
Air transport is different than ground transport in that mass matters much more. Therefore, the higher energy density your power system has, the better. Last I checked, batteries are still far behind fossil fuels here.
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.
My angle was entirely on ground transportation issues. As for aircraft, this is only really a thought for small piston airplanes, which is a minor detail in the grand scheme of things and might be solvable with solid state batteries. I would also note that engine development in private planes is...well..basically stagnant. I don't think this has any real application in jet/turbo prop aircraft.
One of the biggest advantages of combustion fuels for aircraft is that they lose weight as they’re consumed. Batteries don’t do that, so you’re stuck hauling the dead weight of all the drained cells for the entire trip.
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!
> 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.
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.
And smaller aircraft often have nearly zero useful load with full fuel. So if you want to actually carry something, you’re going to only filling up, say, half way. (The reason they do this is to have a useful ferry range when empty).
My angle was informed by the idea that this is only really applicable to gasoline fuel. Diesel and Jet fuel is not really changed by this. (Jet fuel because electrolysis at this scale requires heavy batteries or power draw.) To that end, the actual amount of gasoline edge cases get really small. Almost all small engines (lawn care, etc) are EoL due to better battery options. Motorcycles are an interesting use case but this likely requires too much electrical power to make sense. Once you get past all of that, the actual edge cases are tiny and nowhere in this report does it actually cover the impacts on efficiency or the fact that it makes chlorine gas.
Obviously perchlorate, etc, isn't great. I don't know whether this invention will find any use.
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.
I did not make the first comment above that so I read it a little differently, but the point, in this context, stands. Gasoline combustion, in the context of the article, is a dead end.
The fuel we're talking about isn't a really good gasoline alternative, anyways. Gasoline isn't mentioned in the article, except as an example of a very volatile, easily ignited fuel.
Diesel and thus jet fuel, which is mostly the same thing minus some variance in additives are both essentially kerosene + additives.
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 exception of note is private small aircraft. Most commercial uses of an engine(Trucks, boats, etc) are Diesel, which is not a fire risk. Almost all small engines are rapidly being replaced with electric powertrains.
~20% of final energy consumption comes from electricity [1], that's 80% that doesn't. Electric cars driven by green sources whose production create no emissions are a very very small part of the global energy mix.
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.
Please check the link. It's total global energy consumption, of which cars are a very small part of the mix, of which electric are most useful at displacing pollution from cities to production facilities, not reducing it. Just stop driving so much. Replacing use of car A for car B doesn't address the underlying problem of needing a car, it's like hitting 'favourite' on Facebook for a feel good cause and believing you've made a difference.
I checked the link, my point stands and your explanation makes basically zero impact on anything here. This invention is only applicable to gasoline. Nothing in that link is applicable. Additionally, an EV powered by coal emits less emissions than a gasoline car. That is a fact, additionally, it enables a world where you replace the coal plant with zero emission options.
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.
Even electric cars driven by non-green electricity are massively better than ICE cars from an emissions standpoint for at least two reasons:
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.
Heck, modern natural gas power plants can achieve up to 60% efficiency, which is far higher than a internal combustion engines. So even if you are charging electric vehicles from it, it will still be far more efficient than an individual petrol based car.
EVs don’t know or care where their electricity comes from. You can clean up the grid and EV emissions magically improve. This isn’t something ICE vehicles can do.
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.)
This is true but burning hydrocarbons is always going to be a dirty business. CO2 isn't the only nasty thing that comes out of a tailpipe. Theoretically improvements can be made with synthetic hydrocarbon fuels but you're not going to collect and resynthesize 100% of tailpipe emissions.
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?
Largely agreed, though let's also note that over the long term, the principle concern is CO2 emissions.
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.
Agreed. Hydrocarbon fuel is going to be hard to get rid of entirely. Especially in applications where energy density is important. But beyond aerospace I’m not sure what those applications actually are. Once (if?) we start accounting for actual costs the more energy efficient option should win out just based on economics.
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?
CO2 in seawater is in equilibrium with that in the atmosphere, so there's a constant exchange, and the ocean is a primary (short-term) sink of CO2.
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.
- "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...>
> The Internal combustion engine, as someone who has owned multiple Manual Mazda Miatas, is seeing the end of it's times.
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.
Petroleum companies and the even bigger oil companies are also working hard on diversifying though; the petrol companies can (are?) investing in charging infrastructure, hydrogen, etc, and the oil magnates are buying up and investing in real estate and related projects in huge quantities.
Working hard... may be overstating it. The thing they are working the hardest, for sure, is keeping their money fountain (petrochemicals) running as long as possible.
Diversifying or other future thinking, is far down the list. (As measured by investment allocations)
It is also possible that ICE engines will remain but burning climate neutral fuel. One of the approaches people are working on for carbon capture is to use CO2 from the atmosphere to make synthetic fossil fuels.
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.
Climate neutral fuel only makes sense for uses, like airplanes, where batteries won't work. For one thing, synthesized fuels will be expensive. For anything that can switch to batteries, it will be much cheaper to use electricity. Expensive enough that will have to force people to switch and not use fossil fuels. Nobody will use synthesized fuels for their car unless it is some special classic or sports care.
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.
I replied to comments to add nuance but I read it not in general, just in the context of this article. My original text was about ground transportation but the nuance is that almost all Gas use is in ground transportation or small planes and small planes are the only real exception and even that has nuance. None of my comments disagree with original take that was focused on ground transportation. The world is not black and white. EVs only ground transport problem can be battery development while there also being a number of other things happening in other uses of fuel that also change things.
EV have nothing to do with almost all of the items you mentioned and the last two are fully covered under 'better battery'. A Gasoline vehicle does the same things. I get your point, in urban environments they are absolutely relevant and should be pushed for. I fully think NYC would be better without cars. In the rural areas...they are basically unsolvable in any short term less than 30 years. That's just reality.
Cars cause problems, making them electric solves one problem but creates several more and does nothing to alleviate the others.
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.
Not the only problem. Internal combustion engines use oxygen from the air, so vehicles do not have to carry it. The reduction in mass is substantial, and directly translates to less tire and road wear. EVs carry all their chemistry all the time.
And the batteries which don't actually gain mass as they discharge. "Metal-air batteries", or a "metal-air electrochemical cell", as Wikipedia prefers to call it, rely on atmospheric oxygen as the cathode which is bound to the battery during discharge, increasing total mass.
Ground based? Doubt it, it will either be batteries or hydrogen (in case of long-haul trucks, but even those are getting viable battery powered alternatives). Sea-going? Already more difficult, and definitely beyond 2035, but there are alternatibes as well (hydrogen being one of those). Which leaves aircraft, there, at the moment, it seems SAF is the way to go as batteries are simoly to heavy to be used on transcontinental flights, not to mention that there aren'tvthat much commercial, battery-powered planes existing right now.
If you missed my comment edit, it's a lot less clear than I initially thought. Per Derek Lowe's blogpost, the ClO_x species supposedly don't migrate into the vapor phase. They're a component of the liquid fuel, but wouldn't necessarily end up in the exhaust.
- "...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."
None of the credible end products are good, though.
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.
If truly none of it ends up the gas, that's cool. But I don't quite believe it, because it's happening in the context of combustion. Maybe if you route the vapor away from the liquid before burning it?
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.
Combustion engines are still the only viable option for long-range, large-scale heavier-than-air flight, for marine transport (on oceans, and most lakes, rivers, and canals), for many mobile power operations ranging from handheld tools to remote power generation, and for much overland heavy cargo transport (trucks, much rail).
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.
There will continue to be uses for gasoline and similar, but the usefulness of an engine relates to the availability of the fuel. Making a new kind of engine that runs on a new kind of fuel is somewhat of a dead end unless you're 1) envisioning a niche application or 2) expecting a wide take-up. But people are largely switching away from combustion engines, and synthetic fuels seem to work fine for the remaining ones. So I think we're going to end up with gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel compatible engines, not whatever this stuff is.
So, you apply a voltage to the fuel to produce gas by electrolysis, and then you ignite the gas. But, if you apply voltage and produce a sufficient amount of gas before igniting it, you could still trigger a pretty big explosion, right?
So I looked it up. This group [a] had concerns about this ionic liquid class, because of the perchlorate, and they tried standardized impact- and friction- sensitivity tests. They looked at 1-ethyl-3-methyl-imidazolium perchlorate, [emim][ClO4]. The ionic liquid in OP is 1-butyl, [bmim][ClO4].
"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]."
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.
Combustion is a function of surface area, fuel/air temperature, mixing, oxygen supply. If you were to vaporize this fuel in a hot, high-oxygen environment, it would burn, like pretty much any other fuel.
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".
I suppose it is slightly misleading, but it still could be true for many intents and purposes. For instance, a fire marshal once explained that kerosene had a much higher temperature of evaporation than gasoline. You could put a cigarette out in the first but not the second. That can make a big difference even though kero will start on fire pretty quickly in other circumstances.
I suppose the ambient temperature makes a big difference. Shoot, I've been winter camping and even propane won't work because it's too cold. That's why the stove companies make special cartridges for winter camping.
Here's a question: what criteria would a substance need to meet in order to be properly termed a fire-safe fuel? I'm thinking that for combustion fuels, fire-safe fuel may be a contradiction in terms, where no such criteria could be written.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 407 ms ] threadLMFAO, 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.
https://www.youtube.com/@USCSB/videos
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).
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.
(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: < anon25783 ↗ > The Internal combustion engine, as someone who has owned multiple Manual Mazda Miatas, is seeing the end of it's times. Cthulhu_ ↗ Petroleum companies and the even bigger oil companies are also working hard on diversifying though; the petrol companies can (are?) investing in charging infrastructure, hydrogen, etc, and the oil magnates are buying up and investing in real estate and related projects in huge quantities. deeviant ↗ Working hard... may be overstating it. The thing they are working the hardest, for sure, is keeping their money fountain (petrochemicals) running as long as possible. tzs ↗ It is also possible that ICE engines will remain but burning climate neutral fuel. One of the approaches people are working on for carbon capture is to use CO2 from the atmosphere to make synthetic fossil fuels. ianburrell ↗ Climate neutral fuel only makes sense for uses, like airplanes, where batteries won't work. For one thing, synthesized fuels will be expensive. For anything that can switch to batteries, it will be much cheaper to use electricity. Expensive enough that will have to force people to switch and not use fossil fuels. Nobody will use synthesized fuels for their car unless it is some special classic or sports care. bratbag ↗ If that edit is true, then why did you reply to a question asking why combustion fuels in general are dead? agloe_dreams ↗ I replied to comments to add nuance but I read it not in general, just in the context of this article. My original text was about ground transportation but the nuance is that almost all Gas use is in ground transportation or small planes and small planes are the only real exception and even that has nuance. None of my comments disagree with original take that was focused on ground transportation. The world is not black and white. EVs only ground transport problem can be battery development while there also being a number of other things happening in other uses of fuel that also change things. carapace ↗ > Because the only actual problem in EVS is making a better battery. agloe_dreams ↗ EV have nothing to do with almost all of the items you mentioned and the last two are fully covered under 'better battery'. A Gasoline vehicle does the same things. I get your point, in urban environments they are absolutely relevant and should be pushed for. I fully think NYC would be better without cars. In the rural areas...they are basically unsolvable in any short term less than 30 years. That's just reality. dredmorbius ↗ Minor quibble: because of their increased mass for an equivalent-sized vehicle, factors such as tire-wear and impact effects are greater for EVs. carapace ↗ Cars cause problems, making them electric solves one problem but creates several more and does nothing to alleviate the others. p0w3n3d ↗ You think that all new vehicles will be EV, I think that this will be only a temporary hype, and will fade in 10-15 years or so. Time will tekl sobriquet9 ↗ Not the only problem. Internal combustion engines use oxygen from the air, so vehicles do not have to carry it. The reduction in mass is substantial, and directly translates to less tire and road wear. EVs carry all their chemistry all the time. dredmorbius ↗ And the batteries which don't actually gain mass as they discharge. "Metal-air batteries", or a "metal-air electrochemical cell", as Wikipedia prefers to call it, rely on atmospheric oxygen as the cathode which is bound to the battery during discharge, increasing total mass.
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.
[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]."
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.
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.
Do we really need this? couldn't we just add automatic extinguishers to the remaining combustion applications or something like that?