SYNTHETIC FUELS IN OUR FUTURE?

The gas Hydrogen is a very energy rich, non-polluting fuel whose only combustion by-product is water.  Also it is plentiful since it is the most abundant element in the universe.  On Earth, it is mostly tied up as a constituent of water--remember H2O.  As a fuel, automobile engines can easily be made to run on it. Unfortunately though, hydrogen is a very explosive gas that does no lend itself to be easily containerized. This means to become a practical transportation fuel a new storage system as well as a whole new automobile service station infrastructure would be required.

Happily, engineers and scientist have at least one solution to the problem*.  Chemically combine hydrogen and carbon dioxide to make synthetic hydrocarbons like our current gasoline of diesel fuels. This well known technology produces what are referred to as synfuels.

The total production of CO2 in the U.S. from coal-burning power plants is about 1875 million tons a year (2002).  If this CO2 were captured and combined with hydrogen to make synfuel, it would provide all the hydrocarbon fuel needed for our transportation economy. Shifting from a fossil fuel based transportation economy to a synfuel one could reduce our petroleum use by about 70% and reduce our carbon dioxide production by about 33% with no increase in coal use in power plants.

Such a shift to synfuels, however, would require about 23 times our current production of hydrogen that would have to be produced by the electrical decomposition of water.  Some of this hydrogen could come from other chemical processes, and some from using the excess capacity of our current electrical generating plants to split water.  However, the bulk of the new hydrogen would have to be produced by 100's of new non-fossil power sources like solar, wind, and nuclear.

As Dr. Uhig concludes in his article: "The advantage of using synthetic fuels are that neither the transportation vehicle engines nor the fuel-distribution infrastructure of the United States would have to be altered.  A synfuel hydrogen economy can be a bridge to a true hydrogen economy in the future."

*Implementing the "Hydrogen Economy" with Synfuels, by Dr. Robert E. Uhrig, et al, The Bent of Tau Beta, Vol.98, No. 5, Summer 2012.