The hydrogen though….seems like a lot of wasted energy. Take NatGas -> Hydrogen -> Gasoline(deriviative) catalyst for this process. Lots of energy used and hardly any gained back. I guess if oil ran out this would be like a last resort.

MrEnergyCzar

And let’s not forget that NaOH (sodium hydroxide) has to be manufactured as well to make AFS commercially viable! That’s another source of wasted energy!

IMHO, fuel cell is THE future technology. The conventional ICE has served us well, but on the long run, it’s time to look beyond oil.

More to the point, from a net energy point of view, this is just hydrogen “fuel” revisited. Hydrogen is NOT and has never been a primary energy source, since it cannot be extracted in a way that is net-energy positive. You always put more energy in than you get out.

In this case, they are doing the exact same thing with liquid fuels: they are using a high-energy-input process to manufacture an energy carrier. The energy inputs in this process will ALWAYS be more than the energy available from the resulting “fuel”.

Now, there may be value in this, if the efficiency is high enough. Certainly there are times and places when excess electricity is available. So if the efficiency of this process is as good or better than, say, pumped hydro storage (about 50%), then it would have some applications in that context. But based on the description of the steps required, many of which require an energy input, I think that’s very unlikely.

It is noteworthy that their site appears to say nothing about their end-to-end efficiency. I have emailed them to ask for that statistic, but I expect that they will not answer because the answer is most likely dismal (educated guess: less than 10%).