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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.'
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?
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.
What are you talking about, this technology has been around for millions of years. It works like this:
1) Plants take CO2 out of the air
2) Plants use water and the sun to convert the CO2 into glucose
3) Plants die
4) Plants get buried
5) Plants decay
6) High pressure and temperature cooks buried plant matter and converts to crude oil
7) Crude oil is distilled to separate out gasoline (This is the profit stage for those who were wondering)
Voila, gasoline from thin air! Only takes a few million years... Hope you weren't planning on driving too fast.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
The summary is far, far beyond ludicrous.
indeed, thats what gasoline is, a energy container. Its just that its the perfect combo as its highly stable (relative to just about anything else with equivalent energy density), yet will release the energy quickly if poked in the right way.
i keep wondering if one could turn a highway into a kind of electric railroad tho, by equipping electric vehicles with a system to tap supply system pretty much like a electric train do today. So for longer stretches, one would not drain whatever internal storage system one have available.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
True, but batteries suck. As much as they've improved in recent years, they're still far less useful than fuel. Carbon chains, especially hydrocarbons, are relatively stable, energy dense, easy to transport and comparatively easy to convert into mechanical or electric energy. If you can find a way to efficiently and easily produce hydrocarbons directly from carbon dioxide, water and an arbitrary energy source, you've basically just solved any energy crisis and cured global warming.
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.
Yes, and that guy will mysteriously die in 3, 2, 1....
I can think of one reason this will never work: People suck at driving. All it would take is one idiot to roll their car, snag a wire and take the whole cable system with 'em. It would severely hose traffic for hours since not only would you have the usual mess from the jackass's car, but now you'd have potentially hot cables all over the highway mucking things up.
Because we can burn natgas in Combined Cycle power plants at over 80% efficiency, instead of in cars at under 18% efficiency. So we should put all the natgas we can into generating electricity instead of using filthy, inefficient coal plants, rather than diverting that gas into cars at under 1/4 the efficiency. In other words, use under 1/4 the natgas to make electricity rather than wasting 3/4 of the energy in it in cars.
Just because T Boone Pickens has a plan to create scarcity in the glut of natgas he owns so much of, to drive up prices by wasting 3/4 of it, doesn't mean we should do it.
--
make install -not war
A year or so back Subaru introduced an aluminum boxer diesel. If it proves reliable that should help out with the weight somewhat.
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.