Synthetic Fuels — Cutting-Edge Ideas on Energy Storage

Here’s a short follow-up to my piece on synthetic fuels the other day, in which I mentioned that I would be driving up to San Jose for another “Craig Shields…At Your Service” session.

I spent the day with Dr. David Doty (http://www.dotyenergy.com/), the developer of a proprietary set of processes for formulating liquid fuels from off-peak wind energy, water, and carbon dioxide. Soon after he and his wife (also incredibly sharp), met me at the appointed place and time and exchanged a few pleasantries, we launched into a fascinating discussion on the issues associated with each of the major forms of energy generation and storage available now and for the foreseeable future.

I listened to their viewpoints on how even things that sound good to me (like CSP with molten salt) won’t scale and come down in cost effectively.  I’m not sure I’m completely onboard with all of this — after all, the businessman in all of us tends to pull forward the facts that stand in the favor of our own ideas. Having said that, this was a terrifically compelling presentation — particularly when we got into a potential solution to all this: Doty’s unique and patented approach to synthetic fuels.

I suppose you could say it’s similar to what the “ammonia as fuel” folks are talking about, but

a) using CO2 (a greenhouse gas, but more difficult and expensive to acquire in high concentrations than atmospheric nitrogen), and

b) aimed at developing using a much higher-grade (energy dense) fuel.

His presentation makes a great deal of sense in terms of the chemistry and thermodynamics, and he’s gotten the endorsement of some of the other top researchers in the field.

Of course this still leaves us burning hydrocarbons, even if they’re carbon-neutral. But, as a pragmatist, I often ask myself: Even if we have millions of electric passenger cars on the road soon, how long before we have electric Class 8 trucks? Electric airplanes?  In my estimation, this approach to eco-friendly liquid fuels may be a solution with a great deal of impact on our civilization for a century to come.

Yet we need to acknowledge that skeptics will dismiss the idea out of hand, given that so many other attempts to develop synthetic fuels scaleably and cost-effectively have failed outright –  or at least languished in obscurity and unmet expectations.   “You must run into people who write you off as a crackpot or a charlatan,”  I ventured.   Doty smiled graciously.  “Only once or twice a day,” he grinned.