Fuel from air and sunlight

Israeli development may slow down global warming

There is no doubt that one of the causes of global warming is carbon dioxide - CO2 - a gas emitted into the atmosphere from power plants, industrial plants, vehicles and practically every combustion process - including our breathing. Under normal conditions, the oceans and forests absorb most of the CO2 and recycle it. But today humanity emits into the atmosphere more than 30 billion tons of CO2 per year - an amount that nature has no chance of dealing with. In recent years, various ideas have been examined for handling the excess gas, from injecting it into empty oil wells to burying it in the ground. It is not clear if these ideas are technologically feasible, but it is clear that even if they are - it will cost a lot of money.

A possible solution to the problem may come from a development by the Weizmann Institute of Science. Professor Jacob Karni from the Faculty of Chemistry developed a method to recycle the excess CO2 in a process opposite to combustion: the gas is compressed with water vapor, and you get fuel and oxygen. The only disadvantage of the process is that its activation requires very high heat: more than 800 degrees. This is not a real problem for certain plants that emit large amounts of CO2, because many of them produce excess heat anyway. To transfer the process from the laboratory to an industrial scale, the company NCF (New CO2 Fuels) was established, which operates at the Weizmann Institute. The company is supposed to establish an experimental facility in Europe next year to test the process. "It's actually a reverse process to normal combustion, where fuel combines with oxygen to create energy, water and CO2," explains NCF CEO Dodi Banit. "We do the opposite process, and the energy is taken from renewable sources: solar energy or residual heat that is found in large quantities in industries such as steel, glass, ceramics, and also in the industry known as 'gasification', the production of gaseous fuel from poor quality fuels, such as coal."

high efficiency

The fuel created in the process developed by NCF is called syn gas (short for synthetic gas), and it is used as a raw material in the production of other fuels, such as natural gas substitutes, ammonia or methanol, which is already used today in the propulsion of many vehicles. The company says that the process developed by Karni reaches an efficiency of 40%: that is, out of ten tons of CO2, four will become fuel. This is five times higher efficiency and more than parallel processes developed by other companies. "The high efficiency in NCF's process is one of its two advantages over those of competing companies trying to produce fuel from CO2, because it allows for the production of cheap fuel," explains Prof. Karni. "The second advantage is the development of a complete system from the collection of CO2 to the very production of the fuel, which is built to work in the best economic way possible."

economic legs

In the coming years, most countries of the world are supposed to reduce CO2 emissions, as part of the global effort to slow down global warming. One of the possible tools would be setting emission quotas and imposing fines on factories that exceed them. Such a step would make NCF's method even more viable from an economic point of view, but even today, CEO Benit emphasizes, it pays off from a financial point of view. A factory that invests several hundreds of thousands of dollars in its installation will pay back the investment in about four years, even without subsidies or government support that it may receive for its contribution to the environment. "Solving environmental problems is important, but without solid economic legs these technologies will not take off," says CEO Banit. "The production of methanol using our method will cost approximately $300 per ton, while today's market prices are more than $500. Which means that customers who buy our product will use their CO2 waste, use the residual heat that today they don't use and will be able to enjoy additional income with prices that compete with the current market".

see the light

NCF has raised more than nine million dollars in recent years to promote the process it developed. Two-thirds of the ownership is held by Australian companies, and only one-third by Israeli investors who believed in the vision. However, the idea of ​​utilizing excess heat from factories is only the first step. In the longer term, the company believes that it will be possible to produce the heat needed for the process from solar energy. Experiments in this direction are already taking place today in the "Sunshine Tower" at the Weizmann Institute, where the sunlight from huge mirrors placed at the foot of the tower is concentrated into a single receiver. Even one such mirror, which has an area of ​​more than 50 square meters, provides enough energy to generate the heat needed for the NCF process. The company's solar vision is also based on processes that are being developed by other companies to absorb excess CO2 from the atmosphere, without the need to collect it from factory chimneys. "If you look far enough, we think beyond the solution we offer today for industries with high residual heat," says Benit. "This heat can also be produced from solar energy which is almost unlimited. In the long term of 10-20 years, it will be possible to produce large amounts of fuel apparently from air and the sun, and compete in the existing fuel market."

Meanwhile, as mentioned, NCF is only in the development phase, and has not yet sold a single facility. However, the company believes in the great potential of the process, and they say that the interest of investors and other parties in the "clean-tech" market is growing as the idea approaches realization. Even if everything goes as planned, and the solar process is also skinned and sinewed, it is not expected that NCF's production facilities will replace the oil wells, nor will they eliminate all the huge excesses of CO2. However, they are certainly expected to contribute to the environment, both in reducing the emission of CO2 and in reducing the consumption of polluting fuels, as well as generating handsome economic profits, all from air and sunlight.