The United States has a “Strategic Petroleum Reserve” – large salt caverns that store millions of barrels of oil for rainy days. The United States is currently drawing from this reserve to help keep the domestic oil market somewhat stable.
Apparently, petroleum fuels like diesel are always being perfectly supplied to the world markets. There’s never really any excess, so the moment we have a disruption in the world oil supply, there’s instantly a shortage. Diesel is critical to shipping, farming, emergency power generation and more.
What if there was a way to create diesel without using crude oil?
Petroleum fuels are pretty simple molecules. They’re hydrocarbons. So they are just made of carbon and hydrogen. And really, it’s a mixture of different hydrocarbons that have different carbon chains. Like C12H23 and C10H24.
The air we breathe has oxygen, water and carbon dioxide in it. That means you can make hydrocarbons out of air. You have everything you need – carbon and hydrogen. And with solar panels, you can utilize energy from the sun to power the process of making those hydrocarbons.
Solar + Air = Fuel = Damn Clean Energy
Not only is this one of the cleanest ways to create fuels (instead of oil drilling, oil shipping and grimy refining), you’re taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to make fuel. One of the problems right now is that humans have released too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That’s one of the reasons why we have climate change issues at the moment.
Is anyone doing this?!?
Yes.
The first time I came across this concept was a story about a wind-powered refinery in Chile. It was a joint project by a company called HIF (Highly Innovative Fuels), Porsche and Shell. It looks like they have created about 70,000 liters of “e-gasoline” since the plant started. Not a mind-blowing amount, but it’s just a pilot plant. The fuel has been used in some Supercup races and with Antarctica 21 operations.
The other company doing this is Terraform Industries in Los Angeles. They make methane and methanol. Now, neither is making diesel, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility to add some steps to create diesel. And this is where I want to take this idea…
What if the Department of Energy made synthetic diesel to fill up a strategic reserve?
The reason no one is making diesel is partly that these ideas are in their infancy. The other probably comes down to cost. It takes a lot of electricity to produce these fuels and you might as well use that juice for electric vehicles. BUT there is another idea here.
We could make synthetic diesel for another strategic reserve. If it’s a government project, say a Department of Energy initiative, then it’s not about costs – it’s about stability and security.
In my mind, there could be a large area out West that hosts a large solar field, maybe even some wind turbines. This energy farm is paired with a hydrocarbon refinery with the explicit purpose of making strategic fuel reserves. The fuel isn’t ever put on the market, simply stored.
The United States spends trillions a year on defense and a lot of money and energy goes to securing Middle East oil routes and supply. And that shit doesn’t work anymore. This might be the smarter move.
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