quote:
Capturing carbon dioxide is technologically doable, but prohibitively expensive for power companies, at least with today’s technologies. For example, the most mature CO2-scrubbing technology, called amine scrubbing, consumes a full 30 percent of the energy produced by burning coal—energy that would otherwise have produced electricity, said Liang-Shih Fan, a professor of chemical engineering at Ohio State University, who developed the new clean-coal technology.comment:
That gives an idea on the costs of using captured CO2 as opposed to using biomass itself. With respect to that question, biomass' cost is at best about $30 ton. On the other hand, thirty percent of the energy for carbon capture must mean about 30% of the coal. That would be 30% of $15.69 per ton in the year 2000, giving $4.70 ton. According to a source which I cannot recollect nor bring up on the internet, carbon dioxide can be had today for about $8.00 ton. Either number is significantly less that the $30 ton for biomass.
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| source: http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2005/CarolineGeorges.shtml |
Dynamotive makes drop-in fuels from biomass and claims that they are able to get the costs down to less than $2.00 a gallon if the biomass is at the low end at $30 a ton.
Can we do better with the LFTR? Intuition says yes.
Besides, Dynamotive uses some of its own fuel as process heat. That is relatively expensive.
With the LFTR, you can make methane with the carbon dioxide feedstock at $8 a ton and hydrogen created on the spot with nuclear energy at near 50% efficiency and energy cheaper than coal itself. This will produce the methane at a cost that I predict would be lower than the biofuel costs that Dynamotive claims for their drop-in fuels.
The methane can be shipped to distribution points where it can be stripped of its hydrogen and used in fuel-cell powered autos that are twice as efficient as gasoline powered cars.
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