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Small Scale Autogas Production instead of Batteries?
  • Propane is usually made from natural gas and petroleum refining, but what if it was used as a means of energy storage for electricity? This is basically the same thing as producing hydrogen through electrolysis and using it in a fuel cell, without the problems. Autogas vehicles are practical and have a real world precedent and infrastructure already in place, so it doesn't seem so crazy to me as a means to overcome the battery problem. Having ten thousand pounds of batteries in a vehicle to give it the range, speed, and power of a fossil fuel vehicle just doesn't work and fuel cells have their own problems. Propane, on the other hand, has an energy density very similar to gasoline and no technical hurdles to overcome.

    The idea would be to produce electricity through renewable means, and then combine energy, 4 H2O and 3 CO2 to become 1 C3H8 and 5 O2. As a bonus a wood gasifier could produce carbon monoxide/dioxide and electricity simultaneously, then get O2 fed back into it for more efficient burning. Butane production would be okay, as autogas contains that as well as propane, but methane would need to be avoided. Is such a thing possible/practical?

    Thanks for reading!
     
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  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer-Tropsch

    This seems related, but it creates a cocktail of much larger hydrocarbons like diesel and jet fuel rather than autogas. It has an upper efficiency of 50%, all by itself, as well. Before the necessary steam cracking to reduce it back down to the desired product, and after the electrolysis for hydrogen production.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_to_liquids

    The mobil process creates gasoline from methane, but neither process efficiently produces propane because they were conceived of for synthesizing gasoline and diesel fuels.

    It's possible methane could be good enough, but it doesn't store nearly as well as propane does. Most compressed natural gas vehicles only get a range of 200 miles. Better than batts, but still not enough. Propane seems best.

    On the final note, as long as gasoline was renewable and DIY, there's no reason that synthetic octane would be a problem. All the infrastructure, ubiquitous technologies, and convenience of gasoline ICEs, without the high price and unsustainability. Of course, the challenge would be scaling that industrial process down to a DIY scale without losing so much efficiency that it became impractical.
     
  • A ratio of 6 butane to 4 propane (autogas)  could come from a ratio of 23 H2O and 9CO2 producing a whole lot of O2 in the process. CO2 could also be hydrogenated via a catalyst, and then the CH4 could be stepped up to autogas with slightly less of the inefficiency of an O2 heavy bi-production.
     

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