An even worse way to power mobile sources with electricity

Two scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory are working on a process to extract carbon dioxide from the air and turn it into gasoline, according to this NYT piece.  In a previous post, I show how plug-in electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are competing processes to deliver electricity from the grid to on-board electric motors--and suggested that hydrogen is likely to be the loser in that competition.  Here I put what the promoters call the "Green Freedom" car into the same energy efficiency context and find it much less plausible than hydrogen. 

The concept of the Green Freedom car is that it will run on synthetic gasoline made by absorbing carbon dioxide from the air and chemically "recycling" it into more synthetic gasoline.  Prima facie, it sounds "carbon neutral." But this "virtuous" scheme is not a closed cycle--a huge amount of energy must be applied from the outside to "push" the carbon in CO2 up the potential energy slope to elemental carbon and then to hydrocarbons.  Furthermore, the energy inputs are used with large inefficiencies that release waste heat into the biosphere, and there is an unavoidable increase in entropy (Second law of Thermodynamics). 

The authors assume all of the required energy inputs will be from a nuclear power plant.  Green Freedom, A Concept for Producing Carbon-Neutral Synthetic Fuels and Chemicals at 4.  On that assumption, they have a Rube Goldberg scheme for using nuclear reactors to produce electricity which is converted and stored in the form of liquids suitable for running cars and airplanes.  On the other hand, if they admit that in our real world electric power comes predominantly from burning coal and natural gas, then their scheme is far less carbon-friendly than using petroleum and natural gas for transportation fuels. 

Who pays for dreaming up stuff like this? You guessed it. "Los Alamos National Laboratory requests that the publisher identify this article as work performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy."