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Gasoline From Thin Air
disco_tracy writes "An enzyme found in the roots of soybeans could be the key to cars that run on air. If perfected, the tech could lead to cars partially powered on their own fumes. Even further into the future, vehicles could draw fuel from the air itself. Quoting: 'The new enzyme can only make two and three carbon chains, not the longer strands that make up liquid gasoline. However, Ribbe thinks he can modify the enzyme so it could produce gasoline. ... [Perfecting this process] won't happen anytime soon... "It's very, very difficult," to extract the vanadium nitrogenase, said Ribbe.'
Vaporware, literally.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Yet another ground breaking technology just around the corner!
The actual article is about an enzyme. The chemical transformation still requires energy, just as charging a battery does.
What part of "A well regulated militia" do you not understand?
Cars powered by natural gas is an already proven technology. Why do we keep inventing more "alternative" energy sources when we've got ones that work now?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Sort of like a subway, train or PRT vehicle?
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
Sounds like a perfect investment
I highly doubt that the original inventor has claimed to produce perpetual motion, but the summary will certainly lead people to think in that direction.
They're converting carbon monoxide into hydrocarbon chains. The only energy you are getting out of the car's exhaust is what it didn't use the first time around due to incomplete combustion.
... if and only if someone can make a profit out of it. Hydrogen is the future as it requires you to fill up a fuel container of some sort in exchange for money. Who here really thinks all these multi-billion oil companies are going to let free and abundant fuel circulate without putting up a fight?? Be honnest: it would be against the nature of capitalis. I mean, free stuff is only good if you can resell it to someone else, right?
Yes! What the world needed, more gasoline!
i dont understand why we dont run things on vespene gas.
To produce the fuel, the energy that will be stored in it has to come from somewhere> .
That's why the idea of a vehicle creating its own fuel out of thin air is stupid, you'd want to use the input energy to drive the car directly. More efficient.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Look, this pie in the sky shit is bull. I appreciate R&D much more than most, but we're not going to start chaining carbon atoms on the fly anytime soon, any more than we are just around the corner from inventing the battery that powers Iron Man's suit.
Let's focus on the here and now. A guy named John Wayland who works for Dow Kokam built a 10 second car from LiON batteries, and is now going around to America's drag strips and laying waste to Corvettes and Nissan GTRs in his 1960s Datsun 1200. And when I mean laying waste, I mean a beatdown. Take a look at this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rVTIpS5zb4&feature=player_embedded
This is what we should be looking at. Building a power infrastructure that makes 208 twist locks as easy to get to as gas stations. Or converting gas stations to have a nice 200W 20Amp at every pump. Not this crap.
...and it sounds like a delicious sandwich spread! 1/3 the saturated fat of mayonnaise!
Turning carbon monoxide into hydrocarbon fuel is a trick that's been known for some time now. Presumably this enzyme does it at room temperature, which would be a useful trick, but it's not a new one. Show me the enzyme which can convert carbon dioxide and water to hydrocarbon fuel, instead... right now we need the whole organism to do it, it'd be a lot simpler if it was just one enzyme.
Time to start The John Galt Motor Company.
Website coming soon.
Conservation of energy: the power that you burn out of the gasoline has to come from something. Would it be the sun? Some form of energy from the chemicals in the reaction?
The summary is far, far beyond ludicrous.
light + CO2 + living creature.....that sounds so familiar, wait don't tell me.....
Another "new" tech break through that is nothing more than repackaged old tech.
If they could magically get the bacteria to live in a matrix of some sort, repopulate themselves as they die off without clogging up the matrix, produce a gas in usefull quantities (which happens to be toxic to them), presurize said gas, and all fit in a small container that allows light and air to reach then we could use this as a "free" fuel source.
Or here is a crazy thought. Use these things called tractors to "harvest" plants and put them in a big container called a "digester" which helpful bacteria eat the biomass and produce methane, which a small compressor pumps the methan gas into a line, which can tie into a system that already exists in every major city, which in turn fills a tank attached to something you most likely already own called a car.
What and you say we can do this with 1940's technology now?! The modification to exisiting infrastruture and automobiles would cost less than $3,000 per household. Sounds good but, T think I'll wait 50 years and a few hundred billion in government grants for the magic "free" solution instead.
Until extraction becomes easy, let's call it unobtainium nitrogenase.
Say hello to my little sig.
When i learnt Science in school, we were taught that "Energy cannot be created nor destroyed, but can be transformed from one form into another" (I know this doesn't hold true especially under Einstien's equation E = mc2), but i guess you get the point.
So if we are going to spend the energy doing "work" by travelling, then it begs the question where we would get it from all the time?
I don't think car would run just on its exhaust, if there is not external energy system,
If the scientist succeeds then he might be on a brink of discovering something we call as a "Perpetual Machine"
Common sense is not common
There goes the planet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics
If it does, then good luck!
I wouldn't want to have enough CO in the air to make appreciable fuel. Anhydrous ammonia can be made from N and H split from water. I seem to recall reading somewhere it's got about half the energy density of gasoline. It's just a lot more hazardous to fill your tank; but if we ever get that desperate to drive, you know we'll do it.
Oh, and while so many people are floating their own far-out ideas, I've always wondered why we can't find a way to power our cars with California brush. Every Summer, some guy from the FD in on TV talking about the "fuel load" up in the hills. Well, instead of letting it burn and pollute the atmosphere willy-nilly, why not do a "controlled burn" in our cars. A lot of that brush could be processed into methanol, terpentine, and various other volatile compounds. It would require building a different kind of refinery, and finding a way to harvest the hills without bringing in poison oak and other toxins; but it could be done.
Either that, or burn the brush in a regular power plant to generate steam. Control emissions at the plant instead of having the sun turn red from smoke every summer. We're getting off easy this time, because it's cool; but the last two summers were like something out of Blade Runner.
I considered modding down you post, but decided to mod it down with words instead.
Is it is ludicrous, please explain why. You might very well be right, but you also might just be a nine-year old who doesn't have a clue. Please elaborate.
And to the baffoon who modded OP up: "why?"
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
These are a staple on slashdot lately. Every crackpot scheme to extract energy from X very cheaply seems to get immediate front page coverage. There's at least one a month and they range from overblown PR at best to outright snake oil at worst. /. seriously needs a "Perpetual Motion" category for these stories so I can ignore them completely.
How are they supposed to get all the CO they need to fill up the tank to start with? By burning gas inefficiently? Duh.
What the hell is going on. Finally some one develops an Atmospheric Engine, but it is not John Galt? I'll just shrug and walk away.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Is it is ludicrous, please explain why.
The guy is criticizing the summary so I'll just attack that. It claims they want to 'draw fuel from the air itself', that means extracting carbon and hydrogen from the air and somehow assembling it into a long chain hydrocarbon. There is very little carbon in air and what there is will take a lot of energy to extract from carbon dioxide. Any hydrogen in air is held in water and again will take a lot of energy to extract.
This idea will fly like a lead balloon.
Running off your own exhaust? Like other have written I don't think that's legit. Still, if you could make gasoline out of air even if you had to add energy it could still be useful. Basically you're making a pumpable battery out of air. On top of that after you're done "discharging" your battery it turns back into air. Never mind the fact that if you could create this the infrastructure to use it is already here. (Let me guess, either they can't scale it up or it's no where near efficient enough.) Actually come to think of it if you could do that you could use it to solve issues with wind farms and solar power. (IE when the sun is out and the wind is blowing store the extra energy as gasoline in huge tanks and have your plant burn it when the sun is down or the wind isn't blowing.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Paraphrase of TANSTAAFL: There Ain't No Such Thing As Free Energy.
Diesel engines need to be physically stronger than gasoline engines, which is why they're heavier and more expensive. However they're actually simpler since you don't need to time the spark for each cylinder.
Yes, and that only covers the 50,000 foot view.
What solvent? What energy source for the reaction? What is the reaction rate? What concentrations of reactants and catalysts would be required for enough fuel output to be useful? How do you remove, purify, and dry (remove moisture from the resulting hydrocarbon fuel) the product? What kind of automated device will do this? Does anything like it even exist today? How much would it cost to purchase, operate, maintain, and dispose of? How big would it have to be? Does it need exotic materials (the summary mentions an enzyme with one or more vanadium atoms)?
It is utterly and irremediably ludicrous.
The actual article is worse than the summary and if completely implausible is ludicrous than ludicrous is more than appropriate.
1) Carbon MONOXIDE is also called "syn gas". And CO is called "syn gas" because you can make anything from it. No kidding. No enzyme needed. That this enzyme does it at RT is interesting but not remotely useful because:
2) These nitrogenases are really fragile proteins. Look at them wrong (or even expose them to air) and they are rendered inactive. They will not survive the conditions of the catalytic converter of your car. Ludicrous.
3) The article says "run on thin air" -- as if air contained much carbon monoxide --um we'd be dead. It's a very poorly tuned car indeed that emits much CO. Ludicrous. Carbon DIOXIDE is a different thing entirely. Confounding the two, ludicrous.
4) The study of nitrogenases is an active field because it would be really useful to be able to replace the Haber Bosch Process (100 million metric tones of the stuff a year and
a major consumer of energy ). What we need is a relatively simple robust catalyst> Study of nitrogenase may lead us there, but using notrogenase itself as a replacement is frankly just ludicrous.
Mod the parent up.
I'm telling you, the government has a car that runs on air, man! They just don't want us to know, because then, we'll buy all the air. Then... there will be nothing left to breathe but pot smoke! and the government knows that weed....will set us free!
This sounds to me like it's venturing into perpetual motion machine territory. Also, if this technology were eventually to become realistic and practical I'm curious to know what the impact would be on the environment given that such vehicles would be drawing their fuel directly from the air. I could be wrong, but it seems like the impact could be significantly worse than anything today's vehicles might do.
I thought hydrocarbons were bad?
This tech will not work on a large scale, we will not be able to run our car's off of air. This type of sensationalist 'news' doesn't belong on slashdot in my opinion. Or at least don't make things sound better than they are. Tell it to us straight, as in we can possibly make a few drops of gasoline from air over a period of hours using some enzyme that doesn't currently exist.
Am I the only one that sees using natural processes like plant enzymes or bacteria to convert a abundant resource we need to live into a fuel source that is flammable and toxic as dangerous.
This idea will fly like a lead balloon.
That well, huh? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_(2008_season)#Lead_Balloon
Carbon credits
"Smoking grass" has a new meaning.
6.8SPC TR of 550, l xwind at 6, drift rt at 26" drops 77". AT has 503 ft-lbs at 1403 fps. FT 0.86
Essentially, with current engine design, the _only_ disadvantage to diesels is their weight. That and their performance characteristics - you don't get high reving fun diesels.
Audi Would like to object about not having 'Fun" with diesel...
Diesel just outputs higher torque at a slower rate, and requires heavier parts to accomodate it (200bar per cylinder instead of 85). A well designed engine and more importantly a transmission designed for it could make a diesel perform the same or better than gas, with added benefit of better gas mileage due to its higher energy density.
-Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
Its right there in the summary. "Ribbe thinks he can modify the enzyme so it could produce gasoline" THINKS? *reads article*. "The new enzyme can only make two and three carbon chains" Wait.. how many carbon chains do we need? *googles* oh. http://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-efficiency/alternative-fuels/question1051.htm "The chains from C7H16 through C11H24 are blended together and used for gasoline" 7-11. So basically ... they are nowhere close. Tell me when they are dealing with efficiency issues of generating the gasoline or developing a system in which to recycle it. This is non-news. If they were talking about refining the tech they have to produce propane (which is what they accomplished) it would still be on the "oh another alternative energy idea that will probably still fall flat on it's face due to cost, efficiency etc"
insert funny sig here
Building HC chains requires energy. Where does it come from here?
Well, sort of, been around a long time. Not hugely practical, unless you have no other source of vehicle fuel, then it is *very* practical.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas
Gasoline is a complex mixture of hydrocarbon chains of various lengths and shapes. Why the heck would you take something like this and try to modify it to create gasoline rather than approaching the task from the other point of view. Here in Australia we have cars that run on LPG and I believe our standard mixture is about 70% C4H10 and about 30% C3H8. Why not take one of these engines and modify it to run on just the C3H8 that this enzyme claims to create then focus on the important aspect of increasing the efficiency and speed of conversion.
his comment is perfectly appropriate
of course we should work on all possible valid scientific avenues of work. emphasis on the word "VALID", not this hype bullshit in the story summary
and in fact, the guy you are responding to is asking you to do EXACTLY what you want him to do: look at some new technology
so i think your antipathy to his words is without merit
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Whoosh
The enzyme doesn't need any further engineering to make carbon monoxide into propane:
Since 2008 we've had simple technology (solar heated cobalt ferrite) that cracks CO2 into CO.
A combined reactor could efficiently crack CO2 in air into propane. Propane is the fuel that is easiest (lowest pressure) to store in homes, with an existing infrastructure servicing millions of American homes already. And 30% efficient propane fuelcells in 5KW (residential) sizes are on the market for $10K each (minus over 30% government credits). Which means solar panels could crack air into propane stored for use by the fuelcell at night and in Winter. If the thermal cracking phase matches the 80%+ efficiency of existing solar thermal water heaters, the overall cycle efficiency would start at 32% from sunlight to electricity, which is over 50% higher than current PV - with storage and discharge in the cycle. And fuelcells have a theoretical max efficiency of over 85%, even before the "combined heat and power" uses the thermal byproduct for home space heating and continuing the cracking cycle. Further fuelcell refinement could bring 65% or higher overall efficiency, even through the storage/discharge cycle.
This combination of technologies could solve practically all of our energy problems directly. Higher solar efficiency, easily distributed at homes with existing infrastructure, that is totally carbon neutral once the equipment is installed.
--
make install -not war
If the numbers are not realistic (e.g., we need 2x arable earth surfaces to keep up with current consumption), it is a non-starter.
Kinda neat, but not going to solve the world's problems.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
It sounds a little like the idea of a windmill-powered vehicle.
This enzyme needs a source of energy to work. Note that CO (Carbon monoxide) has some chemical energy left in it: it is, after all, the result of incomplete combustion. Is this enzyme converting 2nCO to nCO2 + nC, and connecting the carbon into chains? That would make sense. We can use heat to crack CO2 into CO, which would make sense of the 'fresh air' claims.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
Who is John Galt?
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Thought this was going be a story about the Gulf Coast making lemonade out of BP's Lemons.
Where will they put the meter?
Why?
One reason would be that liquid fuels have a far greater energy density. You can't get nearly as far on a tank of propane as on a tank of gasoline. Practically speaking, liquid hydrocarbons are the gold standard of portable energy storage.
An even greater advantage to liquid fuels is the volumetric efficiency of the engine. Injecting gaseous propane displaces a large percentage of the air you could otherwise induct into an engine. Less fuel + air = less power output. In order to get the same power out of an engine running on gaseous fuel, you either need to boost the heck out of it, or make it a whole lot bigger.
That's just to start ... there are good reasons that liquid hydrocarbon fuels have been dominant in the market for over a century. They have enormous technical advantages over the competing technologies, especially for transportation uses where power/weight ratio and range are important. Propane's got some advantages for indoor use (clean, breathable emissions), stationary use (run from large utility-filled tanks), etc. But for transportation, it's got some serious disadvantages even if this enzyme could magically create the fuel for free.
Well that is the point isn't it. The theory is that the enzyme could magically create fuel for free. Range, density and power will ultimately become a function of how well the enzyme works and not how much energy you could store in a tank, if the car is actually able to convert this energy on the fly.
... in mass. I haven't seen a cab on the road which didn't have a little red triangle on the licence plate here indicating it's gas powered (except for a few priuses), and every petrol station here including small independents have a gas bullet outside.
If it isn't done on the fly it's no big deal either. As I mentioned running cars on a mixture of C3 and C4 is something that is actually being done, today
All the negatives doesn't change the fact that this is how cars are being used right now simply in places other than America where not everyone runs on the gold standard of the biggest most powerful engine possible to get the little kiddies to school. I don't think anyone's claiming that this will replace diesel for bulk transport, but it's a great solution for getting around the local streets.
I actually have already invented this. But I'm such a cunt... I'm keeping it to myself.
Can't you simply add liquids to re-charge the battery? Whats the ratio of electrical fluid energy vs. that of carbon energy?