instead of this insult of an article. Of course you can only find that through the YouTube video, because all the links go to Engadget. The definition of blogspam.
If the "small amount of electricity" required to kickstart this reaction is less than the electricity generated by burning the Ethanol, is this a perpetual motion machine? It's still a chemical process but the wording makes me think it's a net energy producer.
Don't pay atention to the press coverage because it's usually misleading or wrong. The energy to produce the fuel is more than the "useful" energy that it release in combustion. Some energy is "lost" as heat during the formation and some energy is "lost" as heat during the combustion.
These discussions are complicated because the energy is conserved, so you can't gain or loose energy anyway. But if you must consider also entropy that is more abstract and difficult to explain.
For example, if you buy energy from the electricity provider you can use all of it to do something useful, let's say raising an elevator. If you convert the electricity to ethanol and then burn it and then convert the heat back to electricity, then you will get less electricity after all the conversions and the elevator can't be raised as high as in the direct case. The difference is "lost" as heat that can't be used for something useful.
If you imagine a smart method to use the heat, then it will break the entropy conditions and after many calculations you will discover that it will not work.
Also, I don't think that you can use this to store the atmospheric CO2, as the other comment suggest. The problem is that after converting the CO2 to ethanol you must store it somewhere. (Burning it doesn't solve the problem.) You need some gigantic tanks to store it, or you can dig a gigantic hole and burry all the ethanol. But today people is extracting oil from the soil, so you only have reduced a slightly part of the carbon that is released. It's more efficient to not extract the oil than extract the oil, burn it to produce electricity, convert it to ethanol and the burry the ethanol.
Isn't ethanol from water and carbon dioxide endothermic? If the electricity is less than the energy of the ethanol then the rest of the energy comes from cooling off the reaction vessel and contents.
If that's true then you'd need a heat source, possibly waste heat from other activities, to keep the reaction cooking.
The main reason for my question is exactly that - if it's potentially self-sustaining we'd end up with less CO2 in the atmosphere without the expense of powering the system. Of course, we'd still have to figure out where to store all the Ethanol as letting it evaporate back into the air wouldn't be at all helpful.
Useless for removing CO2 from the atmosphere if we burn the ethanol. There are better methods of CO2 sequestration. That tidbit seems to have been thrown in there because climate change. Misleading or ignorant.
