Techno-Economic Analysis of Synthetic Fuels Pathways Integrated with Light Water Reactors

Can a Nuclear-Assisted Biofuels System Enable Liquid Biofuels as the Economic Low-carbon Replacement for All Liquid Fossil Fuels and Hydrocarbon Feedstocks and Enable Negative Carbon Emissions?

“…The CO2 from the gasification process or anaerobic digesters can be (1) recycled with the addition of hydrogen to produce a carbon-monoxide hydrogen mixture through the water-shift reaction to produce liquid hydrocarbons, (2) combined with water in a co-electrolysis cell to produce syngas [Knighton et al, 2020], (3) electrolyzed to produce carbon monoxide and oxygen [van Bavel et al, 2020] or (4) sequestered underground. Unlike fossil fuel electric power plants with CCS, the Fischer Tropsch process produces pure CO2.…”

The Potential for Electrons to Molecules Using Solar Energy

“…M. Liu et al 2020). Typically, the H2 to CO2 ratios required to promote the RWGS reaction or to produce a specific syngas composition range from 1 to 4 (Pastor-Pérez et al 2017;Samimi, Hamedi, and Rahimpour 2019;Dzuryk and Rezaei 2020;Knighton et al 2020;C. M. Liu et al 2020).…”

“…As shown in Tables 7-10, E2M ethylene synthesis could represent a significant demand for electricity from PV because of its large market size. (Knighton et al 2020) is used to estimate the syngas needed to meet annual ethylene demand. The UOP/Hydro and Sinopec MTO processes also have the flexibility to produce ethylene to propylene product ratios of 0.5-1.5 (Hongxing, Zaiku, and Guoliang 2013;J.…”

“…The catalytic conversion of syngas to ethanol has not yet been commercialized because of low yield and poor selectivity (Spivey and Egbebi 2007;Choi and Liu 2009;Dieterich et al 2020). The electrical production efficiency of ethanol via syngas is based on a syngas to mixed alcohols (primarily ethanol) route (Knighton et al 2020) with a reported CO selectivity to ethanol of 0.63. The methanol byproduct from this process can potentially reduce hydrogen and electricity demand numbers reported for direct methanol synthesis.…”