Blue Fuel Energy Renewable liquid Fuels
This report is really all about the productive recycling of Carbon Dioxide; but, there is some preamble to wade through first, which we hope will be of at least moderate interest.
Initially, we want to call your attention to an older report from our USDOE's Energy Information Agency, as accessible via:
CO2 Emissions Report;
"Carbon Dioxide Emissions from the Generation of Electric Power in the United States; July, 2000."
In that report, we're told, that:
"Emissions of CO2 from the generation of electricity at natural gas-fired plants were 337 million metric tons in 1999. Natural gas-fired plants were the only fossil-fueled plants to substantially increase generation from 1998 to 1999. Generation increased an estimated 15.0 percent, with CO2 emissions increasing a corresponding 15.7 percent. Emissions of CO2 from natural gas-fired plants represented 15.0 percent of total CO2 emissions from electricity generation in 1999, while natural gas-fired electricity generation accounted for 15.2 percent of total generation.
The output rate for CO2 from natural gas-fired plants in 1999 was 1.321 pounds CO2 per kilowatthour.
The national average output rate for coal-fired electricity generation was 2.095 pounds CO2 per kilowatthour "
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Due to related factors, apparently, there is an almost one-to-one, "15.0 percent of total CO2 emissions from electricity generation", relationship in the emissions of CO2 arising from the use of natural gas in electricity generation, relative to the amount of electricity generated by natural gas, i.e., "natural gas-fired electricity generation accounted for 15.2 percent of total generation".
And, in other words, given especially the relative CO2 output rates of "1.321 pounds CO2 per kilowatthour" versus "2.095 pounds CO2 per kilowatthour", switching from Coal to Natural Gas for the generation of electricity would only reduce the emissions of Carbon Dioxide specifically from the generation of electricity by significantly less than 50%, perhaps much, much less, if the above current CO2 emissions versus percentage of total electricity generated figures are accurate - which we presume them to be.
The issue of the far higher costs for that Gas-based electricity aside, researchers have concluded that Shale Gas, especially, since it exists already contaminated with a usually large percentage of Carbon Dioxide, would actually result in, relative to Coal, greater emissions of Carbon Dioxide than Coal, overall, per unit of electricity produced, if Shale Gas were to replace Coal in the generation of electrical power.
We'll get to more on that further on, but, first, a caveat:
Within this dispatch, we bring to you "facts" as reported and published by a couple of different entities, and by a couple of different reporters.
Almost certainly, especially in regards to various units of measurement as they are applied to the generation and consumption of electrical power, and as those factors relate to the processes of Hydrogen generation by the electrolysis of Water and subsequent Carbon Dioxide hydrogenation in the synthesis of Methanol, there is some information missing. It might be that reporters simply repeated things they were told without really themselves understanding what it all meant; and/or that, in combination with fully-qualified sources of information assuming too much knowledge on the part of the reporter whom they were addressing and/or the reporter's end audience.
We'll get to that issue as well a bit further on, since it does bear directly on the feasibility of applying technology disclosed herein in places where it might actually mean something directly to the people of United States Coal Country. And, it represents yet another opportunity for supposedly fully-functioning Coal Country journalists to get off their dead cans and do a little research and reporting on the genuine behalf of Coal Country consumers - consumers of not just the Coal Country news rags, but, of those Coal Country news rags' key display advertisers' products and services, as well.
All of it does directly bear, however, on the issue of Carbon Dioxide in general; and, on the way we really should start to view Carbon Dioxide: i.e., as a valuable raw material resource from which - - at least in certain places, given certain sets of circumstances - - we can, using environmental energy to drive the necessary processes, manufacture liquid hydrocarbon fuels.
As we have, in supplemental reports and commentary not intended for publication in the West Virginia Coal Association's web site Research and Development compartment, documented for a limited group of addressees, that: the emissions of Carbon Dioxide from the total process of extracting, cleaning and combusting what is generically known as "Shale Gas", can be expected to actually exceed those from our use of Coal, on an energy invested versus an energy returned basis.
That is despite all the silliness you have been told concerning the use of Shale Gas as some sort of "bridge fuel", to take us from where we are now to wherever it is we're supposed to be headed, to whatever fantasized land of Carbon-free and perfectly clean energy lies at the other side of the "bridge", or rainbow.
Natural Gas itself - - and we'll lump it under the label "Methane", although that isn't accurate since Natural Gas does contain other hydrocarbon gases as well, but, Methane serves as a good representative - - does emit less Carbon Dioxide when it's combusted, on a per-Btu basis, than does Coal.
Not a lot less, as seen above; but, still a little less.
And, that is what all the drivel concerning it being a "bridge fuel" seems to be all about.
That is aside from all of the fracking-caused groundwater contamination and other pollution issues associated with the extraction of Shale Gas.
But, what all the news reports concerning Shale Gas we've seen, almost without fail, neglect to mention is that Shale Gas, as it exists in it's geologic reservoirs, is already contaminated with a certain amount, in some cases a large amount, a large percentage, of Carbon Dioxide.
There have been reports of Shale Gas, as it exits the ground, consisting in excess of 20%, and in some cases even of 30%, or more, of Carbon Dioxide.
And, where the Carbon Dioxide in the produced Gas exists in quantities that would impact the economics of simply shipping the Gas on to the end use customer, that is, putting it into a pipeline, the CO2 is routinely stripped out of the Shale Gas, and then just vented to the atmosphere.
The reduced-CO2 content Methane is then shipped on, let's say to a power generation facility, where it would still then, as seen above in the USDOE report, result in the production of more than 50% of the Carbon Dioxide as would Coal during the generation of the same amount of electrical power.
Now, while all of us xenophobic folk in Appalachia are being wowed by the press's slavish touting of the revolutionary Shale Gas miracle, it's sort of old hat to other folk around the world. The extraction of it, through the processes we use here, by the way, has been banned in some other nations; France, for one example.
One of the "outer world" places Shale gas is being exploited, though, is in the northern part of the Canadian province of British Columbia, in a deposit and area known as the "Horn River Basin".
And, the amount of co-produced Carbon Dioxide from the Shale Gas extraction there, before the Gas is burned for whatever purpose, is expected to be, simply, enormous.
More can be learned via:
The Tyee – Shale Gas Gives No Emissions Edge over Coal;
"'Shale Gas Gives No Emissions Edge Over Coal; Studies sweep away clean image of the blue flame'; The Tyee; by Andrew Nikiforuk, July, 2011;
(First, Nikiforuk is an accomplished journalist, as a quick web search will reveal. The Tyee, as can be learned via:
The Tyee - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia; is "an independent online Canadian magazine that focuses coverage on news and media of British Columbia (that) was founded in November 2003 by its editor-in-chief, David Beers, an award-winning writer and former features editor at the Vancouver Sun";
which, even though you've likely never heard of it in the heart of US Coal Country, isn't a rural mom and pop, family news letter, mimeograph machine on the kitchen table, type of journalistic enterprise.)
For years now, everyone thought that natural gas was cleaner than coal and more benevolent than oil. The blue flame just burned purely and wasn't nearly as complicated or carboniferous as a lump of, well, bituminous coal.
And so groups like the Natural Gas Supply Association advertised the blue flame as "the cleanest of all fossil fuels" and a brave climate change fighter to boot. Burning gas produced 50 per cent fewer carbon emissions and just decreased "harmful pollution levels" all around.
But shale gas, methane trapped in hellishly deep rock formations, has challenged this dated perception. In fact, the very stuff that energy experts champion as North America's new energy wunderkind may be dirtier than coal, if not as extreme as Alberta's dirty bitumen.
In other words, the so-called "bridge fuel" to renewable energy sources may be one troubled bridge, or perhaps another energy destination as perversely questionable as industrial wind farms.
The whole unbelievable shale story emerged piece meal from a series of often startling reports, all populated with unconventional facts.
A brief advisory: shale gas depends on a highly energy intensive technique known as hydraulic fracking to release methane trapped in rock. Fracking blasts open the pores of dense shale formations with millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals at high pressure.
This brute force tool, never a precise science, can contaminate groundwater with methane and chemicals, and even cause local earthquakes. As a consequence, France and New Jersey have banned shale gas in their watersheds, while Quebec declared a moratorium to protect its farmland. The European Union is thinking about restricting the difficult resource ... .
Meanwhile, petro states highly dependent on shale gas revenue such as Texas, Wyoming and British Columbia keep on drilling with nary a word of debate or a sober second thought.
Individual scientists and researchers have ... started to ask some tough questions. Al Armendariz at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas and now a regional manager for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, got things off to a roaring start in 2009. That's when he calculated that the compressors and equipment required to drill the Barnett Shale (a 5000 square mile region in north Texas) released more smog-forming pollutants than all the cars, trucks and airplanes in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Bad numbers in BC: Next came an eye popper from British Columbia. The province claims vast reserves of shale gas, but many sources such as the Horn River Basin contain up to 12 percent CO2. (That's about six times dirtier than conventional gas.) Venting the climate warmer (Carbon Dioxide) to the atmosphere, the industry's traditional form of garbage disposal, will acidify the ocean, unsettle the climate ... and kill the province's climate change strategy.
(And, again, that CO2 is already a component of the Shale Gas, which, as a step in initial processing, they simply strip out and discharge to the atmosphere)
A 2010 study by Mark Jaccard and Brad Griffin for the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions concluded that adding 4 million tonnes (MT) a year to the province's GHG inventory, at time when the province needs to subtract millions of tonnes, means 'that the B.C. government will sustain a 20-year Canadian climate policy tradition -- failure to meet its GHG emission targets.'
The report told the government that it had several options: shut down shale gas development, abandon its climate change targets, restrict shale gas to low carbon plays or mandate all projects to "to include CO2 capture and storage," a largely unproven technology. It also recommended a comprehensive analysis on shale gas and its big tar-sands like carbon footprint.
Then came a real myth buster from Cornell University. The ecologist Robert Howarth crunched some numbers and concluded that methane leaks and venting from shale gas wells (3.6 per cent to 7.9 per cent of production or twice as much as conventional gas) made the resource's carbon footprint 20 per cent to 100 per cent greater than coal over a 20-year period. (Methane has a 72 to 105 times greater impact than CO2 over a 20-year timeframe, but only a 25 to 33 times greater impact over a 100 year timeframe.)
Howarth concluded that a lot the methane burped into the atmosphere during flow-back from fracking fluids and well completion. Substituting shale gas for coal or oil, he concluded, "may not have the desired effect of mitigating climate warming."
Green promises turn brown: Around the same time, a U.S. energy think tank (Resources for the Future) looked at the abundance of shale gas and concluded that a free market policy wouldn't generate many green benefits for a bunch of reasons.
"We find that abundant natural gas supplies increase use in most sectors of the economy, but do nothing by themselves to create a bridge to a low-carbon future. Without a carbon policy in place, abundant and inexpensive natural gas fosters greater energy consumption and displaces the use of nuclear and renewable resources to generate electric power.
Even though coal and oil use fall, the result is higher CO2 emissions."
But the Howarth study really took the starch out of the industry. Shale gas promoters have now overhyped, overdrilled and overproduced a fundamentally dirty but abundant resource that has now created a veritable natural gas glut. The surplus could be as troublesome as the great oil glut of the 1930s that paralyzed the Texas oil patch. That price free-fall, caused by rampant over drilling and greed, forced prorationing or an OPEC-like quota system.
Now the last chapter in this unconventional story, for the time being, hails from Canada's David Hughes, a former Natural Resources Canada scientist who has studied natural gas and coal most of his life. In a July paper for the Post Carbon Institute, Hughes contrasted Howarth's peer reviewed science with a recent PowerPoint constructed by the National Energy Technology Lab (NETL). The NETL, where standards must be falling, contested Howarth's findings but didn't provide a lot of source data.
When Hughes checked out the NETL findings, he found that the agency had low balled estimates for methane leaks and overstated production from shale gas reserves. Once these corrections had been made both the NETL and Howarth studies arrived at the same bloody conclusion: 'shale gas has higher emissions than coal on a 20 year basis, and equal or lower emissions on a 100 year basis.'
Expect a game-changing announcement any day now from the American Coal Council or the Coal Association of Canada:
'Coal is cleaner than shale gas.'"
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All of which bring us to the real point of our discussion herein.
As we've documented in many previous reports, including, for instance:
West Virginia Coal Association | Iceland Recycles Even More CO2 | Research & Development; concerning the Icelandic company "Carbon Recycling International", CRI, and the "ground-breaking of the George Olah Plant (that) took place on October 17 2009 in Svartsengi, Iceland. CRI will construct an Industrial Scale Plant to capture carbon dioxide from emissions and produce Renewable Methanol (RM) which can be used to power existing automobiles without requiring new gasoline station infrastructure";
Carbon Dioxide, no matter where we get it, whether from Shale Gas or the fermentation of Corn for Ethanol production, can be converted into the versatile and valuable alcohol, Methanol; and, preparations were being made to do just that on an industrial scale at one place, at least, where genuinely abundant Carbon Dioxide emissions, from both natural volcanic and human industrial sources, were available.
And, although we don't yet have current news to offer concerning the "George Olah" CO2-recycling plant in Iceland, we see herein that another company has been formed that intends to apply the same sort of Carbon Dioxide utilization technology to the truly astonishing amounts of CO2 that are being and will be emitted from British Columbia's exploitation of their own "clean energy alternative", natural Shale Gas, in the Horn River Basin, which, as noted in the above report, can "contain up to 12 per cent CO2" as it comes up out of the ground.
Comment follows excerpts from the initial link in this dispatch to:
"Blue Fuel Energy - Liquid Electricity (TM)
Powering our world with renewable, ultra low-carbon liquid fuels: Blue Fuel Methanol, Blue Fuel DME and Blue Fuel Gasoline
Blue Fuel Energy proposes the production of renewable, ultra-low-carbon fuels - - Blue Fuel Methanol, Blue Fuel DME, and Blue Fuel Gasoline - - using the abundance of renewable energy and concentrated carbon dioxide emissions that are available side-by-side in northeastern BC.
(The above "concentrated carbon dioxide emissions ... available in northeastern BC", i.e., Canada's British Colombia, are, we emphasize, being generated just by the production and processing of Shale Gas, not by it's subsequent combustion. )
The process (will): Use renewable electricity - from hydro, wind, ... solar, and geothermal energy - to:
- power an array of electrolyzers to produce hydrogen.
- catalytically combine the hydrogen with carbon dioxide captured from industrial processes to produce methanol.
- dehydrate the methanol to create dimethyl ether (DME).
- dehydrate the DME over a zeolite catalyst to produce gasoline.
The technology is mature, with roots extending to 1920s Germany. Currently, around 40 million tonnes of methanol is produced worldwide per year, mainly by passing syngas (a mixture of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen) through a catalyst bed to create a reaction that converts the mixture to methanol in very high yields and releases heat. Blue Fuel Energy plans to use this technology with a purposely blended mixture of carbon dioxide and hydrogen, just as Nobel prize-winning chemist George Olah promotes in Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy.
(Note, in the above, as we've previously documented, that the synthesis of hydrocarbons from synthesis gas is an exothermic process which generates heat energy; and, although "Blue Fuel" doesn't suggest it, others have designed similar processes in which that heat energy is captured and, one way or another, used to help drive other processes in the synthetic fuel production process.)
Blue Fuel Methanol will be renewable because the production process can utilize waste carbon dioxide from any source and hydrogen generated with renewable electricity.
The production of renewable methanol is gaining momentum, and Blue Fuel Energy's approach is by no means the only one. In November 2011 in Iceland Carbon Recycling International commissioned the George Olah Renewable Methanol Plant, the output of which will be blended into gasoline.
In the early 1970s a methanol to gasoline (MTG) process was developed by Mobil, leading Methanex to build a facility in New Zealand in the 1980s. This plant was a technical success, but was shut down in the early 1990s, when oil dropped to $10 per barrel. Blue Fuel Energy will use the ExxonMobil MTG process to produce gasoline from methanol. Given oil’s current price of over $80 per barrel, and projected prices well beyond that, the economics have changed significantly over the last 15 years. So too have regulatory environments. Given that Blue Fuel Gasoline will be derived from renewable, ultra-low-carbon methanol and not natural gas-based methanol, in jurisdictions with low-carbon fuel standards, Blue Fuel Gasoline will be inherently more valuable than conventional gasoline.
(Concerning the above-noted "ExxonMobil MTG process", see, for just one example, our report of:
Mobil Oil Coal to Methanol to Gasoline | Research & Development; concerning: "United States Patent 4,447,310 - Production of Distillates through Methanol to Gasoline; 1984; Mobil Oil Corporation; A process for producing a wide slate of fuel products from coal is provided by integrating a methanol-to-gasoline conversion process with coal liquefaction and coal gasification. The coal liquefaction comprises contacting the coal with a solvent under supercritical conditions whereby a dense-gas phase solvent extracts from the coal a hydrogen-rich extract which can be upgraded to produce a distillate stream. The remaining coal is gasified under oxidation conditions to produce a synthesis gas which is converted to methanol. The methanol is converted to gasoline by contact with a zeolite catalyst. Solvent for coal extraction is process derived from the upgraded distillate fraction or gasoline fraction of the methanol-to-gasoline conversion".)
BC’s burgeoning CO2 emissions problem: 117 Tcf - one hundred seventeen trillion cubic feet. That’s the amount of confirmed extractible shale gas in northeastern BC’s Horn River Basin, the largest unconventional gas field in Canada. Raw shale gas from the basin contains about 10 -12% CO2. The processing of this raw gas could release some 600 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. From all sources (industry, transportation, etc.), BC annually emits about 69 million tonnes of CO2. Potential Horn River Basin CO2 emissions thus equal almost nine years of total BC emissions.
(The above is one place where we get into trouble with the numbers. The "600 million tons of CO2" sounds like a lot; and, it is. But, we don't know over what time frame it would be released; or, if that is the total amount that would be released from full exploitation of the Horn River Basin over time, or, if it is the amount that would be discharged from projected Shale Gas operations during a given, or set, but unspecified, amount of time. And, in fact, the claim that it equals "almost nine years of total" British Colombia "emissions" might or might not be accurate. We haven't researched the data, but, intuitively, since BC has only one genuinely major metropolitan area, Vancouver, emissions of "69 million" tons of CO2 per year in British Colombia from human activity might be overstating it. We just don't know.)
For obvious environmental and financial reasons, all that CO2 simply can’t be released into the atmosphere. To date, other than small-scale enhanced oil recovery, carbon sequestration is the only solution being proffered. But carbon sequestration is only a partial solution - at best. Geological formations in the region can accommodate but a fraction of the emissions and costs are punishing.
Carbon sequestration? “Cash sequestration” is more like it.
Rather than sequester carbon, a better solution is to recycle it - to make something useful out of it.
This is exactly what Blue Fuel Energy plans to do: use waste CO2 to produce methanol - clean-burning, renewable, low-carbon Blue Fuel Methanol. The concept is simple - and proven. The roots of CO2-based methanol reach back to 1920s Germany, where the first gas-to-liquids process was developed. In the 1990s, prize-winning scientist George Olah (USC) extended the concept, propounding the use of renewable electricity and CO2 to produce methanol.
Blue Fuel Energy will use renewable electricity to electrolyze water, and then catalytically react the hydrogen isolated through this process with waste carbon dioxide (captured from natural gas processing plants) to produce ultra-low-carbon methanol and gasoline.
The first plant will produce about 10,000 barrels of methanol, or 4000 barrels of gasoline, per day. This level of production requires 280 tonnes of hydrogen and 2100 tonnes of CO2 per day. Producing 280 tonnes of hydrogen per day requires 500 MW of renewable electricity to power a huge array of 265 2MW electrolyzers. Getting the 2100 tonnes of CO2 poses much less of a challenge. As a result of BC's carbon tax and a cap and trade regime (as of 2012), Spectra and other natural gas processors are more than willing to capture, purify and deliver to the plant all the CO2 required - at no cost to Blue Fuel Energy. At its Pine River plant near Chetwynd, Spectra emits about 2200 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every day - almost exactly the amount our first plant requires each day.
Northeastern BC has sufficient feedstocks to build at least four or five such plants. The only limiting factor is the amount of renewable electricity available to power the electrolyzers: the CO2 is near-limitless and water consumption is minimal. Today, the vast majority of the renewable electricity available in the region is hydro-generated, and BC Hydro has committed to supplying Blue Fuel Energy with 4200 Mwh of hydro-electricity, at set pricing, for the first plant.
Fortunately, northeastern BC also has an extraordinary wind resource that is currently being developed ... . Much of this wind will be stranded unless it is converted into “liquid electricity” — fuels such as Blue Fuel Methanol and Blue Fuel Gasoline. Wind farms dedicated to fuels production will thus become part of the BC energy landscape in the not-too-distant future."
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Now, we gotta confess, the "500 MW of renewable electricity" needed "to power a huge array of 265 2MW electrolyzers", is a bunch of juice.
But, that is "500 MW" per day, or, about 21 MW per hour.
And, we think, that the nameplate capacity of electricity generating facilities in the United States is stated in terms of that capacity in amounts of electricity which can be generated per hour.
Thus, as can be seen in:
AES Wind Generation and AES Energy Storage Announce Commercial Operation of Laurel Mountain Wind Facility Combining Energy Sto; concerning: "(The) AES Laurel Mountain (wind farm) consists of 61 GE 1.6 MW wind turbine generators capable of a combined power generation of 97.6 MW and 32 MW of A123 Systems energy storage devices. The 61 wind turbines are mounted on 80-meter towers deployed along a 13-mile stretch of Laurel Mountain located in Randolph and Barbour counties near Elkins, West Virginia";
and:
Hydroelectric Plant a Good Source of Clean Energy - News, Sports, Jobs - The Intelligencer / Wheeling News-Register; "(The) New Martinsville (WV) Hydroelectric Plant ... produces 36 megawatts of electricity, which is about enough electricity to power a city of 50,000 residents";
generating "500 MW of renewable electricity", or 21 MW per hour, in Coal Country could be seen as something that, though a bit of a challenge, might be feasible. However, they are intending "to power a huge array of ... electrolyzers" up in British Colombia; and, the Canadian Shale Gas field in question will be producing a truly huge amount of Carbon Dioxide.
We submit that a relatively-small hydroelectric retrofit of an existing navigation locks and dam, as the New Martinsville facility is, might be more than sufficient to power all the electrolyzers needed to derive Hydrogen from the river water to recycle the Carbon Dioxide produced by a consortium of several of the Coal-fired electric power plants that operate in that same vicinity of the Ohio River Valley.
Those several Coal-fired power plants would be co-producing far less Carbon Dioxide than the Shale Gas processing and producing plants associated with the Horn River operations up in British Colombia. Much less. One researcher, in commentary related to the above-cited "Carbon Dioxide Emissions from the Generation of Electric Power in the United States; July, 2000", calculated that the average US Coal-fired power plant generates "1.2 million metric tons of CO2 per year".
Which means that one average US Coal-fired power plant would have to churn away for half a millennium, fully five hundred years, before it could compare in Carbon Dioxide emissions to just one Shale Gas extraction field.
And, if you read the text closely, you'll note that BC's "carbon tax", applied to the Shale Gas processors, encourages delivery of "free" CO2 to the Methanol production facility.
Which gets us back to our above conjectured "consortium of several of the Coal-fired electric power plants that operate in that same vicinity of the Ohio River Valley".
There are some complex economics and production figures involved in all of this; but, it just seems more logical to us, that, rather than pay a "carbon tax" to begin with, maybe it might make more sense for some of the Coal-based power generators operating in the general vicinity of each other to put their heads, and their wallets, together and - - instead of being taxed or just finding a way to cheaply "dump" their Carbon Dioxide - - hammered out a way to, utilizing the technical concepts outlined herein, create a new Coal Country profit and employment center, by communally collecting and recycling their own Carbon Dioxide, which they don't have to buy, and producing Methanol and/or Gasoline, right in their own neighborhoods.
We note, too, that, as seen for two examples in:
Exxon Methane and Hydrogen from H2S and Carbon Monoxide | Research & Development; concerning: "United States Patent 4,517,171 - Synthesis of H2 and CH4 from H2S and CO; 1985; Assignee: Exxon Research and Engineering Company; Abstract: Hydrogen and methane are synthesized from a gaseous feed comprising a mixture of H2S and CO"; and:
More NASA Hydrogen from Water and Sunlight | Research & Development; concerning: "United States Patent 4,051,005 - Photolytic Production of Hydrogen; 1977; Assignee: United Technologies Corporation; Government Interests: The invention described herein was made in the course of a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; Abstract: Hydrogen and oxygen are produced from water in a process involving the photo-dissociation of molecular bromine with radiant energy at wavelengths within the visible light region. A process for producing hydrogen from water which comprises: forming a water-halogen gas mixture, dissociable in the presence of radiation ... wherein the source of radiation is sunlight";
there are some potentials available for the economical production of Hydrogen. And, that is an issue, as we have once or twice previously promised to address more fully, that we will eventually get to.
In sum: It is feasible to conceive of recycling Carbon Dioxide on an industrial scale, and of producing liquid hydrocarbon fuels from that Carbon Dioxide.
Blue Fuel Energy's phone number is available on their web site; and, we can't imagine why a supposedly fully-functioning news reporter in US Coal Country wouldn't want to get on the horn with them, right now, and start trying to figure out how feasible application of the Blue Fuel Carbon Dioxide recycling technology might be, right here, in the heart of US Coal Country.
It's time someone did.