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.'

Comments

Stupid journalists

[Wonko the Sane]

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.

This cocking around is stupid...

[GPLDAN]

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.

Re:This cocking around is stupid...

[Grishnakh]

2. "Bad batteries". People worry about the idea of swapping out their good/brand-new (but drained) battery and getting a crappy used one in return. But this is because people are thinking in terms of owning the battery-packs. What would probably instead happen is that you buy a car and then sign up with some provider of battery-packs. You basically lease a battery from their pool, and can swap it at any participating station. You don't own any of the batteries but pay for the cost of the electricity and the battery packs together, and over time, either paying each time you get a new fully-charged battery, or having some kind of account/membership/bill that you pay monthly. The "bad battery" problem then amounts to a corporate reputation issue. Presumably there will be different suppliers/companies, some with better quality control (retiring old batteries) than others...

I still don't see quite how this will work, unless we move to a government-owned or monopoly service station. Otherwise, what happens when you get a swap at a Chevron station and get a bad battery pack, and then when it runs out (prematurely) you swap it at a Texaco station? How does Texaco get reimbursed by Chevron, without a legal fight and finger-pointing? These battery packs are going to be quite expensive on their own, obviously.

Surely you don't advocate only being able to exchange batteries at stations owned by the same company? What would happen if you're on a road trip and the only station in the small, rural town you're driving through isn't a participant in your lease contract, and your battery's nearly dead? The whole point of hot-swappable battery packs is to preserve the basically unlimited range that today's cars have (as long as a gas station (any brand) is around). If you're going to tie people to a certain company, then it would be unsafe to ever leave your town, and this means you'd never need to exchange your battery as you'll just drive home to recharge it.

Re:Misleading Summary

[hitmark]

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.

Re:Misleading Summary

[jpmorgan]

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.

Sick of perpetual motion machine articles

[PingXao]

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.

Re:Vapor?

[Doc Ruby]

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.