Carbon Monoxide and other Essential Nutrients - AKA the Danger Zone

[Doctor Love]

Syngas is a mixture of hydrogen (H2) and Carbon Monoxide (CO) - it's produced by burning carbon with insufficient oxygen with a little water squirted in, and capturing the result.

Syngas is a real shocker - you can use it for a power supply off-grid, and opens up the entire world of synthetic liquid fuel if you can upscale it. It has a bizarre history - being the only field of technology that I'm aware of that was adopted exclusively by racists. In an open fire, coal and wood loses most of its combustion potential because the volatile gases don't react - they escape. If you seal it all up and harvest the gases, you get a little less energy compared to a better burner, but you can use the products for a lot more.

Syngas can be separated by a few methods, the simplest is just gravity - Hydrogen is extremely light - and CO is the one to focus on, for now, because of its incredibly wide number of uses.

So, Iron, Copper, Zinc, Tin - if you have the syngas, you can blast iron ore into pure iron with waste CO2. CO2 can be run back through some hot coal, to make even more carbon monoxide. You can also open into organic chemistry - methanol, ethanol, propanol, all the way up by just blasting it with more syngas. Obviously, it's more complex than that, but the point is - gasifiers are one of those tools which can rebuild a modern standard of living relatively easily. Since most zombie apocalypse movies are unaware of the syngas routes, it's important to explain the history.

The two countries which are most important to think about are, coincidentally, the two countries which were more famous for other work. Germany, from around 1939 to 1945 - and South Africa, from 1945 to about 1994. It was developed as a method to produce petrol and diesel for countries which had very little of either, and had some issues with importing it. In South Africa's case, it was efficient enough to produce the vast majority of their domestic supply at one point - it has since fallen to 25%. Yes, the country which has "AIDS gangs" also produces 25% of its oil from coal. Right now, rather than lick the balls of Arabs like the Americans do, the Chinese have wisely pushed into this area. It's actually rather fucking horrifying, since the "oil economy" has a huge workaround that can be used, effectively, to avoid Arabs in general - and this implies that you do it because you love the taste of Arab semen.

The same steps used by the Germans for their other gas endeavours are available to anyone who has a gasifier - the technology exists at a small scale, but is rarely used. It can be used to run normal generators, but that's just the tip of the iceberg for the syngas potential.

Just be warned, once you wander into the world of syngas, you can make some real crazy shit which the Geneva Convention specifically requests you don't.

 

[indomitable snowman]

Woodgas generator! Can use wood or hay or any other biomass really.
Here's a page and video where someone made one

https://www.instructables.com/How-a-Wood-Gasifier-Works-and-How-I-Built-Mine-Out/

Attached is the FEMA instructions on how to make one as well.

 

[Otis Mallebrok]

Woodgas generator! Can use wood or hay or any other biomass really.

Woodgas is not technically syngas because the former contains lots of nitrogen.

Syngas can be used to make ammonia with the Haber process, or methanol, which can be used to make acetic acid and/or formaldehyde.

 

[Doctor Love]

Syngas can be used to make ammonia with the Haber process, or methanol, which can be used to make acetic acid and/or formaldehyde.

That's what makes it so nice! My shit isn't for the lost hiker hiding from bears, this is for the guys who want to make a new civilisation in the outback. Canadians, South Africans and Australians with a whole lot of land, and not a lot of prying eyes.

I'm going to call it syngas because it's still H2 and CO. The different words are just different compositions, really, and if you can separate them with a column you can get the same results "downstream" - If you want to throw in some natural gas or extra steam, all it will do is change that outflow composition. I am curious to see if you could DIY the Haber Process, but that pressure requirement is absurd to say the least. Everything else is ~10atm, then there's Haber at like 500.

It's a method to produce, practically, limitless hydrocarbons from the basics (real basics, C, CO, CO2, O2, N2, H2O) and can be expanded upon for sodium, chlorine, potassium, sulphur, phosphorous - you can make a woodland refinery, surprisingly easily, if you can nail the basics.

It's best for someone to think "Well, we have all of this syngas, let's see if we can make ammonia" - you're talking about one of the most important discoveries in the entirety of human history. If you can get that working off of a syngas generator, then - copper also works as a catalyst for the Ostwald process if you can't find a catalytic converter - at which point, you're probably not far off of developing your own atomic bomb.

Spoiler

Seriously, the Haber process is the most important invention of the 20th century, and certainly the most influential. Obviously Otis knows this, but don't worry if your backyard woodgas generator isn't the primary source of food for the majority of the world's population. What's important is that - yes - it can - you can remove the carbon monoxide and oxygen by burning them to form CO2.

CO2 doesn't spoil the components and can be readily dissolved into water to scrub it. This would also work as a soda stream, if you want some bubbles in your drinks. You can also burn excess hydrogen and condense the steam - process scrubbing is basically eliminating certain pollutants. Pure carbon is the highest quality, but you can actually get silicon, calcium, aluminium and iron from coal in decent quantities. Iron is obviously magnetic, so you can double up if you have a guy who can make steel. Coal can be readily sourced across most of the planet, and you can buy several tonnes of it to store. It's not like it's going to go out of date.

Aluminium and Titanium are the main two which you can't get this way - you need to use specific methods for those.

Same goes for coal - you can get almost perfect syngas with steam and hot coal, too, if you can fire up the steam in a copper pipe first so that it's hot enough to split. That's more complex, though, and better for someone to discover after they have rigged an ICE for use with syngas. Fischer-Tropsch is the main line of thinking, but my organic chemistry could do with improvement.

That is the most interesting part of the whole thing imo - engines can actually run on carbon monoxide. It was an old method used in the Great Depression, and during both world wars - it is a combustible gas, less effective than others, but you'll get some leccy out of it if you have a generator. It's that "self-sufficiency" breakthrough where, once you have it, you can build off it.

Fun fact - house coal is illegal in the UK. If you ever wanted to understand how fucking absurd and tyrannical the UK truly is, underneath the "cuckery" is an iron fist of genuinely psychotic tyrants who would rather you freeze to death than ever dare challenge their power.

 

[IdiotPlusPlus]

Low tech magazine has a recent article posted on a setup that uses plastic as feedstock to make liquid fuel.

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/11/plastic-waste-in-the-fuel-tank/

 

[Otis Mallebrok]

I am curious to see if you could DIY the Haber Process, but that pressure requirement is absurd to say the least. Everything else is ~10atm, then there's Haber at like 500.

Many commercial ammonia plants use a converter running at 150 atmospheres, but this is still extremely difficult to run at 400 C in a strongly reducing hydrogen atmosphere. Most steels develop cracks and become brittle very quickly.

But I definitely think you could jerry rig the birkeland eyde process with a windmill, to make your own nitrate fertilisers with slaked lime. Ie diy CaNO3. And nitric acid of course has many other uses.

 

[Doctor Love]

Low tech magazine has a recent article posted on a setup that uses plastic as feedstock to make liquid fuel.

Oh so that is the same thing as:

Attached is the FEMA instructions on how to make one as well.

The principle is that burning carbon in an oxygen-restricted, well-insulated environment will produce syngas of some composition. If you can get a really sophisticated operation going, you can get it to do all sorts of crazy shit. Over 1000K inside the vessel will produce ~100% carbon monoxide. It's an equilibrium, and as a general rule, equilibriums will respond to environmental changes in the opposing direction.

So - equilibrium reactions - pressure increases will result in the reaction favouring the largest molecules, reducing the pressure. Higher temperatures will result in the least energetic reaction being favoured - if they were sentient, the molecules would say "Shit's hot in here, let's not contribute to that"

Carbon combustion is two-step, C-->CO, which is -110kJ/mol, and CO-->CO2, which is -283kJ/mol. H2O is similar, at -286kJ/mol. You can add more steam to keep the H2 levels high, too. You're looking at around a 15% reduction of total energy compared to solid fuel, for the luxury of having a gas system with flow rates, pressure and fancy chemical uses. If you insulate it well, you may even be able to keep the high temperatures from that 15% alone. You can blast the CO through water to make pure H2 if you need to - it'll be hot enough to split water with some magnetite as a catalyst, and the CO2 will dissolve into the water. Hydrogen will bubble up to the top, safe and pure - there's a reason they made Zeppelins with hydrogen, it is really easy to get a lot of it.

I ended up gathering over 50 different uses from syngas, most of which are organic chemistry.

But I definitely think you could jerry rig the birkeland eyde process with a windmill, to make your own nitrate fertilisers with slaked lime. Ie diy CaNO3. And nitric acid of course has many other uses.

That'd be the Ostwald Process - you can skip over the ammonia synthesis by using Urea, so AdBlue/DEF, diluting it and then heating it up under pressure. It'll pump out ammonia gas and CO2, which you can bubble through water for a solution. Ostwald is a bit easier since it uses oxygen and ammonia. I did do a post somewhere about Urea to Potassium Nitrate, using leeched wood ash.

As I mentioned a little bit of - you can theoretically use brass, and pump syngas in with air. You'd need your syngas to be pretty much exactly 3:1 mol H2:N2, and have a way of removing oxygen. Coincidentally, H2 can pass through porcelain, but realistically the best way is just to pass water through to get rid of any CO2. It's all a lot of very precise cuts on a piece of metal at the end of the day, so there's a lot of options.

Spoiler

I'd try investment casting of brass for this shit. Seems like you could get it done a few ways if you completely abandon your relationship with cylindrical piping. You can also, apparently, use plastic bottles for investment casting. Melt them, reshape them, job done.

Brass doesn't really get reduced as much, and it's really handy for making cartridges.

The nice part is that the hydrogen separator is much easier to get than any other separator - porcelain works to help - so there's a surprising amount of options. I think about this exact problem a lot.

 

[Otis Mallebrok]

That'd be the Ostwald Process

No, the Ostwald process oxidises ammonia to make nitric acid in the presence of a platinum (if I remember correctly) catalyst.

The birkeland eyde process was used before that, to make nitrate salts directly by oxidising n2 with an electric arc. It does not involve ammonia. It's not as energy efficient as the Haber + Ostwald route, but you don't need pressure chambers or special catalysts. You just need a high voltage transformer and an absorption tower. Regards

 

[Doctor Love]

No, the Ostwald process oxidises ammonia to make nitric acid in the presence of a platinum (if I remember correctly) catalyst.

I think there has been some miscommunication. Yeah, that's exactly right - it also works with a copper catalyst - I'm Bonglandic, so our pennies are copper-coated steel. Platinum is generally better, but you can scrape that out of a car. Haber uses iron oxide, which is not hard to get - the pressure vessels can be made on small-scale, if you're able to get it all out onto a flat sheet.

Spoiler

At some point, I'm going to try it on an A3 or A4 plate of brass to see if I can make a long, snake-like reactor between two plates, like a fat-as-fuck plate heat exchanger

The catalyst in a catalytic converter uses the same input - urea via AdBlue - but at a different equilibrium. If you change the temperature and pressure, you push that equilibrium to produce NO2. In the same vein, if you can cut the catalyst out without damaging it, you can slip it into a nice pressure vessel and use it for a bunch of other shit, like the Contact Process. Actually, a lot of the shit from the syngas can be used with that same catalyst.

If you have the ammonia, Ostwald is the way to go. BE is for when you don't have much Urea around - but since Urea can be used to store CO2 and Ammonia as a powder, it's probably best to store as much urea as possible. You can decompose it when you need it, and keep it sealed up.

You can get a lot of it just by drying out some DEF and whacking it in a jar. It's £10 for a few kilos of ammonia and CO2.

You just need a high voltage transformer and an absorption tower. Regards

Definitely worth considering the BE if you don't have access to Ammonia - but there's so much Urea around that it's genuinely better to go that way. Haber itself is the main one - I was a bit iffy on the use of catalysts, but the only ones I've had any issues sourcing are Vanadium-based. Everything else is commonplace - most surprisingly, catalytic converters. In an off-the-grid kind of situation, the others are much easier to source - it's just so handy that there's a fucking premade high-temperature platinum catalyst already on-the-market for everyone.

 

[IdiotPlusPlus]

Oh so that is the same thing as:

I thought it was serendipitous that I came across it after reading the thread, wouldn't surprise me if they used the FEMA guide or a older equivalent lol

You can blast the CO through water to make pure H2 if you need to - it'll be hot enough to split water with some magnetite as a catalyst, and the CO2 will dissolve into the water.

Tbh I love the idea of making H2 that way, and then sending the CO2/Water to a greenhouse for recapturing into more Biomass(or refilling the CO2 in the Israeli Bubble water tank[Sodastream]), dunno what the losses would be tho, tbh I'd be a bit retarded at the reactions since it's decades since I've done any real chemistry and not just the "cooking" style of throwing stuff together from recipes without actually understanding what is going on xD

 

[Doctor Love]

Tbh I love the idea of making H2 that way, and then sending the CO2/Water to a greenhouse for recapturing into more Biomass(or refilling the CO2 in the Israeli Bubble water tank[Sodastream]), dunno what the losses would be tho, tbh I'd be a bit retarded at the reactions since it's decades since I've done any real chemistry and not just the "cooking" style of throwing stuff together from recipes without actually understanding what is going on xD

It can be efficient enough, if you think in terms of construction equipment, not glassware. It's essentially just a circuit board, but hot and wet.

You can always brick everything up, if needed. I'm content using the A4 standard - just draw everything on a big piece of paper, and copy that on metal. Like a circuit board, you can just polish it up on a desk when needed. At a small scale, you don't need to take height into account often - only for the odd hopper.

It "works" for its purpose. You can recycle the CO2 by dumping it through hot coal, to make more carbon monoxide (Temp ~750C) - your energy source is still the carbon, but this way, you can seal off a large amount of solid fuel and keep the oxygen inside the vessel - it lets you control pressure quite well and it minimises losses - except for hydrogen, which seeps through a lot of materials and fucks them up. You can take advantage of that in some ways - porcelain "conducts" Hydrogen through it without much damage iirc, so you could have a hydrogen generator which is almost entirely sealed except for hot hydrogen out, and hot steam in. In theory, you'd only need to burn a little bit of hydrogen to keep the reactions going - which you'd do by burning it to heat it and other water molecules up.

As I mentioned a bit of, above - you can get a lot of shit from this.

 

[Otis Mallebrok]

Everything else is commonplace - most surprisingly, catalytic converters. In an off-the-grid kind of situation, the others are much easier to source - it's just so handy that there's a fucking premade high-temperature platinum catalyst already on-the-market for everyone.

This is a very interesting point. The Ostwald process runs at 800 degree Celsius and 10 atmosphere pressure. This would be difficult, but doable, I think. You could use off the self air compressors, and rock wool to insulate the pressure chamber on the inside, to keep it cool.

 

[Doctor Love]

This is a very interesting point. The Ostwald process runs at 800 degree Celsius and 10 atmosphere pressure. This would be difficult, but doable, I think. You could use off the self air compressors, and rock wool to insulate the pressure chamber on the inside, to keep it cool.

Heating it would give the pressure, too, so you may not need more than a small compressor. You'd get 4ish atm from the temperature alone

 

[Cirrhosis_of_Liver]

How do I make breathegas?

 

[Doctor Love]

How do I make breathegas?

Electrolysis of water. That's more of a leccyman job though