this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
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Environment
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I'm saying electrical batteries are not environmentally friendly. Period.
It makes more sense to store energy from renewable sources in chemical batteries, such as plant-based oil or synthetic methane.
Gotta disagree on that. If you make a lithium battery, it lasts 10-15 years, and the recharge process is pretty simple. You plug it in at night, a wind turbine fills it up with ease.
Bio fuels are pretty intensive to make, and every time you need to refuel, you have to make new stuff, transport the fuel to a central refueling site, bring the thing in need of fuel, or your own container, to that site. And then the carbon from that bio fuel goes right back into the atmosphere.
The only advantage is that it looks similar to the status quo. But I think the status quo sucks
Its net negative. That's the point.
And the storage and transport just requires metal pipes and tanks, which can be infinitely recycled unlike electric batteries.
Well, the process as described in the link above does infinitely recycle batteries. But I'm not seeing where bio fuels are net negative, they're net neutral at best
Efficiently loss makes them net negative. But ideally they're net zero.
I don't think it works like that. When you lose energy in an inefficiency, it's neither deleted from existence nor stored in an inefficiency box, it's released as heat or chemicals back into the atmosphere. When your internal combustion engine only gets 40% of the energy from combustion turned into moving your vehicle forward, the only thing that means is that you need 2.5x more fuel and emissions than a perfectly efficient system would
That's true for fossil fuels, but not renewables.
If producing synthetic methane or biofuel pulls 100g of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, but the whole process of producing the fuel is only 80% efficient, then you can only burn 80g of carbon dioxide. That's net negative.
This is different that the efficiency of the ICE, which of course means the carbon still ends up in the atmosphere.
What so 20% of carbon in the production ends up as some kind of slag? That's a pretty slow way to sequester. For at scale sequestration, I would rather see more permanent and efficient systems.
I mean, I'm all for capturing the methane given off by farms and landfills anyway and using that to generate what it can, but I don't think that's a wise choice to base large segments of the economy on. It could account for maybe a few megawatts of the 200-400 giga watts we need.
Its a battery. So only to be used in off-peak or as a dense fuel where we havent yet built electric lines above roads to power busses and trains
Batteries are charged in off peak, but may be used during peak to flatten out the grid and to make up for low solar/wind days
I don't think biofuel is net zero or net negative at all. The production has byproducts (some of which are useful) and the use in cars still produces carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons, and VOCs. Some of those less than gasoline, most about the same or slightly less, but more when it comes to nitrogen oxides and VOCs. Here is a dense but very informative meta analysis on it.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7735313/
That's not power to gas. I prefer synthetic methane.