Infinium and Electrofuels: They Might Be Giants

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) ... “Major players in the fuels and chemicals industries have begun serious development of [new] processes that produce intermediates and finished products from carbon dioxide. One of the most interesting areas is in the many developments that use renewable electricity to convert CO2 to chemicals or fuels.”

Welcome to the electrofuels, which have been pursued in far-out development circles for more than a decade. In recent months, the activity has intensified. The reasons are three.

1. Maturing technology, and investable players emerging such as Infinium and Twelve.

2. The prospect of abundant renewable power by the late 2020s, leaving electrons available to split water to make hydrogen.

3. CO2 and water are the only feedstocks that have can match the cost and scale of petroleum, and the ultimate platform for liquid fuels at the kind of volumes that support all the Net Zero commitments.

Feedstock, technology and energy — add in the high price of carbon credits, and you have the ingredients for explosive growth. Perhaps now. Perhaps massive.

Here’s the key thing. Water costs around a penny per gallon at wholesale rates, and CO2 has a permanent cost cap, more or less, and it’s free forever, if you own a means of production.

Bottom line, there’s 11 pounds of CO2 for every fermented bushel of corn, and its paid for by the sale of ethanol, corn oil and animal feed. Hence, if you own the means of production, you can make CO2 for free. I might add, high-grade, low impurity CO2.

In a gallon of fuel made from CO2 and water, the yields are low because all the oxygen is jettisoned, and its going to take 20 gallons or so of water to make a gallon of fuel, which is to say that there’s around a 30 cents of inputs. That’s roughly the cost of the inputs when you have $12 oil and you’re making fuels the old fashioned way at the refinery. Refinery size should be expected to be smaller, and with capex and so forth, carbon credits are going to be welcome, and necessary at times of super low cost oil, such as the $15 figure seen in 2015.

But here’s a technology that carbon credits were made for. At worst the carbon score will be in the single digits or low teens, and it could go negative depending on the source of the CO2.

How does Infinium do it? Well, think of three technologies. First, splitting hydrogen using commercial electrolyzers. Second, carbon dioxide and hydrogen — that’s the reverse water gas shift, you get water and carbon monoxide with that. Now, take that CO, add more hydrogen, now you have syngas, and now you can do some catalytic hydrogenation, also known as the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis.

Unfortunately, one of the challenges with F-T is that you get a lot of wax — converting that to fuel is not for the faint of heart.

Fortunately (and now we enter into the world of secret sauces and claims, which is to say the world of Mysterious Catalysts), Infinium says they have a proprietary catalyst that makes little wax, and a lot of liquid hydrocarbons.

Unfortunately, there’s not much independently-verified evidentiary proof that verifies the tasty claim. Just yet.

Fortunately, Infinium’s in good company. No one reveals anything, ever, about the catalyst,