Sandia labs eyes carbon dioxide as fuel

MENLO PARK, Calif.--Carbon dioxide: It's the cause of global warming, and it could also become the cure.

Sandia National Laboratories is tinkering with ways to convert CO2 into liquid fuels or precursors to useful fuels, said Ron Stoltz, government relations manager for the lab, speaking here at a showcase for the 2007 California Clean Tech Open on Monday. At the event, organizations like Sandia, Lawrence Berkeley Lab and UC Davis showed off a few ideas percolating in their labs for alternative energy.

The idea is to heat carbon dioxide to about 1200 degrees Celsius with excess energy from nuclear power plants (or the excess heat from utility-scale solar power plants) and mix it with water or other substances. Some have proposed making hydrogen in this manner.

"You can make a lot of useful things out of CO2 and H2 or water," Stoltz said.

Making gas out of carbon dioxide is preferable to burying it underground, as many are proposing, he said, adding that Sandia knows a few things about burying poisonous substances. It oversees nuclear waste disposal.

Stoltz also said that the lab continues to work with LiveFuels and other start-ups on algae-based biodiesel. The difficulty is in getting the water out of the algae.

Like most alt fuels, developing algae fuels that can compete with ordinary gas or diesel economically won't be easy.

"It's hard to beat gas as an ideal liquid fuel," he said.

Another idea at the event: simplified daylight harvesting at UC Davis. The university has come up with a way to harvest sunlight to light offices. A lot of companies do this, but Davis has combined a harvesting system with dimmers and occupancy sensors so that the system efficiently spreads the light around to the offices where needed. In many of the sunlight systems, you don't get this level of fine-tuning. All of the offices get light, or none of them do. The amount of light fed to the building is controlled by moving the solar receptor, a disk, away from the sun.

[William Crow]

Is carbon dioxide the source of global warming?

My understanding is that the carbon dioxide glaciers on Mars are
receding and that the radiation from the sun has increased
substantially in the past 20 years.
To state as fact that carbon dioxide is responsible for global
warming is reckless and in light of increased questioning of these
theories is perhaps dishonest.

[Newspeak finder]

Logic crash

Logic busts do not an argument make.

[meh130]

He's a reporter

It's not like Kanellos is a scientist or something. Don't try to confuse him with the facts, as most reporters today will never let the facts get into the way of a story.

So what if Neptune, Pluto, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars and Earth are all experiencing global warming simultaneously. So what if the solar cycle is high. So what if increasing temperatures lead increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide increases by 800 years. Al Gore has spoken.

[nathanau]

Let's fix the "excess energy" thing first

Even better, let?s make the power plants more efficient so there is no ?excess energy? in the first place. It will likely be more expensive to convert CO2 into another form that is usable as an energy source than to not create the CO2 in the first place. It is preferable to leave the carbon buried underground than trying to rebury it or reuse it. It would seem to make more sense to make hydrogen from this ?excess energy? or use the energy to avoid making the CO2 from burning fossil fuels in the first place. Unless they use photosynthesis, it will take more energy to convert CO2 into fuel or some other ?useful thing? than you gain from this idea.

[carwaterguide]

it's has review many sites like gas for free,run your car on water etc.

http://carwaterguide.blogspot.com