Project Foghorn: Turning Seawater into Carbon Neutral Fuel
I don’t need to extensively list out the disastrous effects of climate change — Everyone already knows that we’re living on borrowed time, and we need to find a solution.
But unlike many people, I’m quite optimistic about our future. You know that kid that doesn’t do anything until the due date but still manages to work well under pressure and submit a good project?
That’s what I think will happen to humanity in regard to climate change.
I mean, we’ve always been pretty good at solving problems — especially when there’s a pressing deadline (Parkinson’s Law, anyone?)
We’re at a point where small, incremental changes won’t be enough. We need solutions that aren’t 10%, but 10 times better than the status quo.
Astroteller, the Captain of Moonshots at X (Google’s Moonshot Factory) says that 10x gains are almost easier than making 10% gains, because when you’re working on the latter, your focus is on the existing solutions and assumptions, but the former is based on bravery, creativity, and passion.
With the problem of climate change, that’s precisely what Project Foghorn aimed to do.
Project Foghorn: The Moonshot
There are 3 main parts that contribute to a moonshot- a huge problem, a breakthrough technology, and a radical solution.
The team aimed to take take carbon and hydrogen out of seawater and combine it to create a carbon neutral fuel. This fuel would essentially fulfill the same tasks as fuel today, minus the carbon dioxide emissions. If the project worked, it could completely revolutionize the future of the green energy industry.
The Story of Project Foghorn
After reading a PARC research paper, the team at X was very excited and wanted to evaluate if the Sea Fuel could become commercially viable. Although there remained a lot of uncertainty, the X team was dedicated to turning this idea into a reality.
When they first started working on this project, there was a working proof-of-concept, but it wasn’t economically viable, so the team built a bigger prototype that could provide them with more accurate measurements for the economic analysis.
What the team realized early on, is that building the Sea Fuel wasn’t hard — making the Sea Fuel affordable was the real challenge.
“We knew if you could make a carbon-neutral fuel at a price point that would allow for commercialization, you would have such potential for impact.”
- Kathy Cooper, team lead
The Technology
- Absorption: The ocean, absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. As carbon dioxide concentrations increase in the atmosphere, it also increases in the ocean, and can lead to ocean acidification, which has its own set of negative effects.
- Processing I: Ocean water is collected and made more acidic to form bicarbonate, which is collected as a gas.
- Processing II: Through solid oxide electrolysis, hydrogen is produced. As a result of this process, we’re also able to create drinkable water through desalination methods.
- Synthesis: Hydrogen and carbon dioxide (from bicarbonate) react inside a catalytic reactor to create the liquid sea fuel.
- Consumption: The sea fuel can be used to power vehicles, and CO2 from the vehicles is re-absorbed by the ocean.
The Issue with Cost
In order for the sea fuel to be widely accepted, it needed to be economically incentivized — for both investors and customers. This means that sea fuel has to be more affordable than gasoline.
When the team was first assessing viability, economic models estimated that the cost would be between $5–10 per gasoline gallon equivalent (gge), so they set their goal for $8 gge, and developed a plan to reach $5 gge within 5 years. This would make sea fuel competitive in markets like the Nordic countries where gasoline is very expensive.
After building a larger prototype and getting more data for their economic models, the cost turned out to range between $8–16. There were two main barriers regarding the cost:
- Pumping large amount of sea water is expensive: They thought of partnering with desalination plants to avoid the expense of building pipes through the ocean, but there are very few desalination plants — even if they partnered with all of them, it would produce a very small amount of fuel, enough to offset ~ 4 coal plants worth of emissions.
- There is no cheap source of hydrogen: Solid oxide electrolysis was the best option, but experts within the field said reducing the cost of SOE would take 5+ years of research and a large amount of capital.
The End of Project Foghorn
In January 2016, after 2 years of working on this problem, the team decided to discontinue this project based on the current and projected costs of hydrogen.
For the people at X, it’s always a question of economics and opportunity costs: there’s virtually an unlimited number of problems to solve in the world, but there aren’t enough resources available to do so. They’re looking to place these limited resources in opportunities that can make the largest impact.
Although Project Foghorn didn’t work out, they’ve written research papers detailing their process and cost breakdown in hope that one day, once hydrogen creation processes become more cost efficient, this idea can truly become reality.
Additional Resources
- Project Foghorn; Google X
- CO2 extraction from seawater using bipolar membrane electrodialysis — The research paper that inspired this project
- Foghorn — Liquid Fuel from Seawater; engineering.com
- Research Papers detailing the Project Foghorn Process: Part 1(Technology Prototype) + Part 2 (Cost Breakdown)
- Why Alphabet’s Moonshot Factory Killed Off A Brilliant Carbon-Neutral Fuel; fastcompany.com
- Embracing Failure at Google X; fastcompany.com
- Kathy Hunnan’s Top 3 Lessons after working on Project Foghorn
