If that's true, your point #3 is moot. And if the nano particles can be captured by a filter, maybe we could design filters specifically for iron oxide nano particles that would allow the nano particles to be extracted
> but I imagine it's actually more scalable and healthy to burn jet fuel and reproduce it from renewable powered carbon capture, where density is needed.
You're saying capture carbon from CO2 and turn it into kerosene? I tried googling around and everywhere I look it seems like this is currently way more difficult than renewable iron fuel (https://www.planet.veolia.com/en/how-produce-kerosene-co2).
As for the disposal of HEPA filteres loaded with air-stable inorganics, that still is pollution, only the kind of waste you store safely, and if not give people cancer, but highly localized so.
I am more concerned/confused by the fact that they use hydrogen to reduce the iron. That seems like a very convoluted process, why not use the hydrogen generate heat instead? Yes, it has much lower density, but it has advantages to make up for it, for instance the fact that you don't need to worry about evaporation, leakage, filters, all that at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_isomers_of_hydrogen
freshly liquefied hydrogen contains a lot of stored energy in that form which will be released over time and cause quite a bit to vaporize, for long term storage you have to release that energy.
Thus people have looked at all sorts of schemes for storing hydrogen such as absorbing it in metals like palladium, metal hydrides, chemical carriers such as ammonia, methane, etc.
Sodium has higher energy density (3.5 kWh/L) than liquid hydrogen, there is no energy needed to store it and no catalyst is needed for the fuel cell because sodium is so reactive with water. The fuel cell is rather easy to construct (I know somebody, who has done it in a garage). NaOH solution is very caustic but also neutralizes well naturally without long term effects at least in comparison to crude oil that seems to be the better proposition. And of course sodium is everywhere, where NaCl - table salt is.
I'm also somewhat concerned about the nanoparticle's effect on living things. It is likely that it is only a question of local exposure, as in general once they get out they should still rust in some relatively short period of time, and as Earth is the aforementioned big ball of iron, a bit of rust in the environment is quite unlikely to hurt anything because if it could hurt a thing that thing would already be dead, but locally nanoparticles would be something weird and I could see breathing them could be problematic. It is also entirely possible that it is safe up to surprisingly absurd levels too (your body is familiar with iron, and while there are toxic doses of iron you're not getting to them with nanoparticle exposure any time soon), it would just be something that would need some study.
Nanoparticles of iron oxide are already rust.
There is certainly some inorganic phenomenon that will turn it into normal, aggregated rust. It probably requires water and some time.
But those particles sound like the kind of thing that will stay for years on the atmosphere, and contaminate every living thing. And yeah, they are probably safe in some surprisingly large amount, so whatever direction it goes, we will only know after we start doing it.
No it's not.
Inside the crust both Si and Al are more common.
There is plenty of Fe, which is all in oxide form. Mining and processing required.
Iron is abundant on Earth, including within the crust, where it's the fourth most abundant element (after Oxygen, silicon, and aluminium), roughly 5% by mass. And yes, considerably more prevalent in the core. Iron and oxygen account for roughly 32% of Earth's total mass, each, the largest proportion of any element.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_mass>
Sure, not as abundant as silicates. But nowhere near as rare as gold, platinum, and rhodium. Or even copper, silver, or lead.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...>
There's even a fair bit of it flowing though your veins and arteries right now.
And yes, the major ore deposits are old. Most are BIFs (banded iron formations), and date to 1 bya or 3.5 bya, laid down by early oceanic algae for the most part.
Sometimes it's more than fine to allow a slight exaggeration to pass without litigating it to death.
Crust iron is all oxide. Fe at 5% average. In some locations obviously more concentrated up to 90% ore. Not all sites are viable for mining, and this is very important to understand. Just because there is plenty of iron out there doesn't mean all of it is commercial grade.
This means energy input to turn iron oxide into iron, which the article claims could be used as fuel and/or long term energy storage.
-Fuel I don't believe for a second.
-Energy storage it's a maybe. It needs to commercially beat plenty of options. Which to me seems unlikely since the path still includes heat and steam engine which would incurr at a cicle loss of at least 50%. And this being conservative etc. Would mean a steam engine operated in a very narrow power band - which would mean a baselevel powerplant not a peaker powerplant. And didn't yet consider other possible losses, as for one, the Fe degradation over time. Energy cycles that count on heat and engine are wasteful. Could this waste be compensated by a much cheaper capex and/or opex relative to Li or similar batteries? That's a big Maybe.
I myself want to believe there is a solution to renewables intermittency. But on this one in particular, I'm quite bearish for the reasons above.
To that extent, it resembles other synfuel concepts. The principle difference being that iron-as-energy-storage entails reduction rather than synthesis.
There's a lot to be said for options which provide long-term, "shelf-stable", environmentally-benign, high-volume energy storage. I've looked with interest on petroleum-analogue hydrocarbon synthesis (Fisher-Tropf) and alcohol (Sabattier) processes for some years. Both have long (multi-decadal, approaching a century) of established use. Yes, the overall process is lossy (as little as 15% net energy recovery), but there are applications for which there are very few alternatives: powered heavier-than-air flight, marine transport, mobile use, off-grid primary or back-up power systems, heating, and industrial applications.
I think I'd made abundantly clear that the abundance question is pedantry.
Can this scale up? Or is this a small scale only solution?
Transportation. How much energy would a truck be able to move? How does it compare to a tank truck? Weight is absolutely relevant here.
Also, production. Consider that reducing iron is measured by millions of tons per year per plant, and right now, it's done burning it with plain old coal.
Seems very odd to me the subtitle of the news is 'carbon free fuel'. That alone is a massive bullshit indicator, but I digress.
How something that may have a 10% global energy recovery efficiency could beat a pure redox power storage solution? This question has been avoided so far.
I became aware of the prospect of synthesis from captured CO2 + hydrogen (from electrolysis) from a US Naval Research Lab study around 2015. Those papers had ... misleadingly-truncated citations, dating back only to the 1990s. It turns out that hydrocarbon synfuels were first proposed in the 1960s, by M. King Hubbert and studied at Brookhaven National Labs and M.I.T.
Google had an X Project devoted to the idea as well, though ran into insurmountable cost barriers.
Scaling seems to be a major concern, though the process does work at experimental scales, and produces usable fuel. It seems worth continued research based on the potential advantages, even if costs remain higher than fossil fuels. (The USNRL research suggested "competitive" costs, particularly for in situ military fuel generation, notably in aircraft carrier task groups which have ample supplies of nuclear energy, but need fuel for aircraft.)
Battery storage has numerous limitations: low energy density by both volume and weight, and the fact that whilst fuel burns off during flight (and accounts for 50% or more of take-off weight), batteries don't. In the case of metal-air batteries (iron and aluminium have both been proposed), as the redox reaction progresses, the battery gains mass as oxygen from the atmosphere is bonded to it. This poses problems for flight, and even ground-based transport tends not to work well with batteries at large scale.
Where does the Iron go??? It's not like Fission or Fusion is happening, right?!
This is a totally useless thing to say unless you have secret technology for core mining.
You need to extract the feedstocks for any energy-to-fuel system. Iron is cheap and simple to extract, compared to say carbon from the atmosphere.
The nanoparticles do not get released to the environment. Emissions from burning carbon based fuels also include pollutants that are hazardous to human health.
Which do get released into the environment in quite large quantities!
At that rate, 50% of the initial iron will be gone in 333 cycles of iron -> iron oxide -> iron.
This a hard type of energy source to reason about:
1. It's not a pure fuel and acts like a battery most of the time, but it's also not renewable
2. Iron is extremely abundant on Earth, but it requires mining and processing to extract
3. Iron oxide in nanoparticle size would likely be a pollutant and hazardous to human health, not something that will break down quickly and harmlessly.
The high fuel density and low explosiveness may make it a good use case in some niches, but I imagine it's actually more scalable and healthy to burn jet fuel and reproduce it from renewable powered carbon capture, where density is needed.