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Cake day: April 10th, 2025

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  • Kind of pretty important and relevant:

    The main reason why this process isn’t “something for nothing” is that it takes twice as much electrical energy to produce energy in the form of gasoline. As Aircela told The Autopian:

    Aircela is targeting >50% end to end power efficiency. Since there is about 37kWh of energy in a gallon of gasoline we will require about 75kWh to make it. When we power our machines with standalone, off-grid, photovoltaic panels this will correspond to less than $1.50/gallon in energy cost.

    So basically juat imagine a gas powered generator hooked up to this to power the process of pulling gasoline out of the air.

    Ok, see how that’s silly?

    Right, now, if you do run it off solar power, then sure! That makes more sense.

    Hate hyrdocarbon fuels all you want, they are very good at being dense, portable, and exist in the vast majority of pre-existing logistics infrastructure.

    But the thing isn’t magic, it takes energy to convert air into basically a form of liquid energy.

    And… you’d probably have to refine it or chemically treat it at least somewhat.

    I’m not a chemist, but I am guessing this is the case, if you want gasoline that is just equivalent to what your car would expect.



  • I mean… its worse than that.

    Its definitive proof that we live in an anti-meritocratic society, that is ruled by nepotism and violent and dangerous sociopaths.

    Yes, its violence if it goes through a complex system for the violence to happen, is done indirectly.

    So yeah, our lives are ruled (and ruined) by utterly incompetent dangerous sociopaths, who will gleefully destroy the entire economy because… they like buzzwords and feeling like they are smart.

    We either need to kill these people, or they will kill all of us, just give it a decade.




  • Bazzite is so user friendly that I could, and did, set it up on a Steam Deck…

    …without a mouse or keyboard, with just the Steam Deck as a controller!

    Then I figured out how to set up containers, and built a Debian environment, that can and did successfully compile different game engines from source.

    Again, without a mouse or keyboard.

    … Did I mention I’m currently crippled in the right wrist and shoulder and arm?

    Bazzite on a Deck is extremely usable.

    Just had to tweak the base Steam Control mapoing thingy a bit to be able to use common shortcuts, figure out how to do a kind of half southpaw layout for the mouse -> trackpad stuff.



  • Yeah pretty much, they’re basically, at their core, private contractors, whose nearly sole customer is governments.

    Governments outsourced the management and operations of the Torment Nexus, not because they were forced to or didn’t want or didn’t have the resources…

    … They were just too incompotent to do it themselves.

    So… yeah, now they’re now functionally part of the government, of multiple governments actually.

    This is how we … get to? Or have arrived at? … just actual cyberpunk dystopia, where the Corps just are, in every meaningful way, on top.




  • Well hey, ok, that’s what I asked for, its a detailed outline of the process!

    What that whole process ultimately is, is pumping a bunch or energy into a machine, a process, that outputs hydrocarbons, which are basically energy in another form.

    (Or maybe more accurately, precursors to being able to form more typical HC energy, or useful inputs to some other chemical sysnthesis process)

    So, for this to even conceptually make sense, overall, you’d need to have your … fusion reactor be able produce an over unity surplus of energy, at a constant rate, that is equal in $$$ value to… basically, the sellable price of the hydrocarbon fuel you are producing, at that same rate.

    And that’s simplifying out, assuming that you don’t need to further refine or otherwise transform the hydrocarbons produced by this process, which you probably would.

    They do outline output volumes and concentrations, as well as… enough info that you could work backward and figure out how much energy they’re actually pumping in to this process, to achieve said yields.

    So, from that, you could figure out what the required… ratio of over unity-ness of the fusion generator would have to be.

    But, also, note that prices of various forms of energy, input energy, output hydrocarbon, they’re a major factor in whether or not this whole idea is viable or not, and prices can and will fluctuate.

    It seems to me that this particular process … the authors seem to be describing it as not producing very high amounts of the most useful kinds of precursors for general fuel production, but is producing potentially useful amounts of precursors for other kinds of processes:

    The low DME concentration and high H2: DME molar ratio in the CO2-to-HC reactions in this study may facilitate hydrogen transfer for the chain growth termination step and therefore limit the C chain length of the products, leading to formation of isobutane and isopentane as dominant products instead of isobutane and triptane, as observed at greater DME concentration. These light branched paraffins (isobutane and isopentane), which are not ideal blendstocks for high-octane gasoline, are in fact versatile precursors for SAF synthesis via commercially available alkane dehydrogenation and alkene oligomerization processes.[29], [34], [35].

    They also seem to reference other attempts at modifying something like an FT process, that are more productive at producing precurors for, general fuel:

    Other research groups have investigated CO2 hydrogenation over similar composite catalyst systems…

    Hydrophobic modification of HBEA to improve water tolerance substantially increased C4+ HC yield and selectivity to 6.1% and 22.3%, respectively. [19] Using a 2-stage reactor system provided flexibility to control temperature of the reactors independently to achieve high CO yield in the first reactor which facilitated MeOH and MTH synthesis at the second reactor at 300 °C. The inter-stage water removal improved the activity of HBEA for MTH, resulting in C4+ HC yield and selectivity of 6.8% and 14.9%, respectively. [16]

    This is genuinely novel and interesting, so I do thank you for actually informing me of this, and rescind my earlier claim of ‘bullshit’, modifying it to ‘needs further research’, specifically in the realms of how you’d scale this up, and what surrounding infrastrucure and economic parameters you’d need for this to be economically viable.

    It is neat to learn that this is a thing that we can actually do… but you’d still have to work out the math of the conditions under which it would make sense to do, and be overall productive and useful… figure out how much over-unity-ness you’d need from a theoretical fusion generator for doing this to make sense.

    Also:

    We have termed this approach the high-octane-gasoline (HOG) pathway.

    I just want to take a moment and laugh at that, lol.





  • While I agree with you in theory, in practice, no, we could not transform that fast, to a significant degree, unless we first basically had something like a Maoist genocide of current landowners, burned all the existing building and land use codes, and started over.

    More than just the whole… rich people have way too much control over society thing…

    The amount of NIMBYism in the US is insane.

    (Not In My BackYard)

    Every single element of every city’s zoning laws and building regulations are designed to benefit existing property owners and existing properties, as they currently are.

    We would have to dismantle a whole lot of that to actually change the fundamental street grid system.

    … The problem is complex not so much in technical, engineering, how do we actually do this kinds of ways… but in the way of: there are way too many powerful groups and actors that will fuck up every stage of any process that is attempting to change anything about urban design.

    I guess you could say our governance structures are as gridlocked as the actual streets are.


  • … so you’re saying to use i guess infinite amounts of energy to … do abiotic synthesis and just literally produce hydrocarbons?

    … Like, just Fischer-Troph everything?


    I suspect you are wildly oversimplifying the complexity of the chemical processes involved…

    …for the general concept of what you are saying, to make actual sense…

    Your abiotic hydrocarbon synthesis process would have to be less energy demanding than the constant surplus energy production rate of a theoretical over unity fusion generator.


    Just getting any fusion generator than is any miniscule amount of truly over unity, thats not enough.

    Thats infinite energy… if you have an infinite amount of time to wait, and an infinite amount of some kind of battery system to contain that energy in.


    Synthetic fuel production is kind of notorious for being immensely energy intensive.

    And for FT at least, you need a feedstock of either biomass, coal or natural gas.

    If you want to just do some kind of variant of an FT like process, where your feedstock is ultimately ‘refined air’… you’re going to need even more energy, a fusion generator than is over unity by an even larger margin.

    It is a little more complicated than just ‘heat up CO2’.

    Unless you can point me to … somebody who has actually worked out the chemistry of how you can just synthesize hydrocarbons from… ambient CO2… that you’re scrubbing from the air… demonstrated this entire process at a tiny scale as proof of concept… and described the total amount of energy required to power this process…

    Yeah I’m calling bullshit.