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

Call me when it's in production

[Red Flayer]

Vaporware, literally.

Re:Call me when it's in production

[cthulu_mt]

It should balance out those Prius drivers that love the smell of their own farts.

Misleading Summary

[dfetter]

The actual article is about an enzyme. The chemical transformation still requires energy, just as charging a battery does.

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.

Re:Misleading Summary

[LWATCDR]

The higher compression means that the they must be built stronger. AKA more expensive.
Also they use a high pressure fuel injection system which is also more expensive and complex than a simple spark plug and carb.
So yes they tend to be more expensive to build and more complex.
But they do not need to have their spark plugs replaced or have your typical tune up.
Thing is that modern electronic ignition and spark plugs have made gas engines also about as user low maintenance as a diesel.

Re:Misleading Summary

[Smauler]

Modern diesel engines are exactly as complex as modern petrol engines. No mainstream petrol engines now use carboretters (that I know of). The only big disadvantage with diesel engines is that they are heavier - they require a little more ironmongery.

Diesel engines are generally simpler to run and way less sensitive to water. There's a reason all commercial vehicles are diesels. The weight is also a reason why we haven't seen diesel bikes hitting the mainstream yet either.

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.

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...

[russotto]

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.

200W? The flow through a gasoline fuel hose can be expressed in watts if you care to. Gasoline has about 32 megajoules per liter. Maximum gas pump in the US is 10 gallons per minute, or 0.63 liters per second. Thus the energy flow rate is 20 megajoules per second -- that is, 20 megawatts. If a gasoline engine is only 1/4 as efficient as an electric engine and there are no charging losses, you can derate that to 5 MW to get the equivalent electric power needed. So, you can keep that 20 amps... provided you're willing to charge at 250,000V. Good luck with that.

Re:This cocking around is stupid...

[Rei]

That's not it at all. The main problem with swapping battery packs is an infrastructure management problem.

First off, if there was only one type of battery pack, that would be rough enough. Stations would have to have large stores of surplus battery packs, which cost $10k or more each, take up a large amount of space, and weigh hundreds of pounds. But there's not ever going to be just one kind of battery pack, and it's not for a lack of interest. Different vehicles have different needs. Luxury car owners can afford better, longer-range battery packs than owners of economy cars. RWD cars need the weight in the rear, taking up part of the trunk area. Depending on the layout, a sedan either needs a pack under the floor or in a T-shape down the center tunnel. Pickups have different layout needs than SUVs than cars and so on. Want to try to fit an SUV pack into a motorcycle?

Now factor in that battery chemistry is a huge moving target right now. Even drivetrains and inverters are a moving target. You can't standardize on a single voltage charge/discharge profile in such circumstances. Really, you're talking about stocking dozens of each of dozens of different types of battery pack at every station, and having these stations dense enough to support long distance travel. It's just not going to happen. And as if that's not bad enough, there's also some real engineering challenges, like making such an integral part of the vehicle's structure readily removeable and reattachable over many cycles, and especially the removal and reattachment of the electrical hookups.

Battery swapping was an idea envisioned when rapid charging was much more difficult. It no longer is. So there's no need for it any more. Modern li-ion cells can charge in minutes without ruining the pack's lifespan if you can provide sufficient A) power and B) cooling.

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.

Yet another "breakthrough"

[russotto]

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.

Re:i dont understand why

[danbert8]

It's because then you'd constantly require more vespene gas, and imagine how annoying that would be!

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?

[camperdave]

I'd be more interested in splitting the CO2 into carbon and oxygen, for breathing purposes rather than fuel. Spacecraft and submarines use lithium hydroxide "scrubbers" to remove carbon dioxide from the air. It has the side effect of keeping one of the oxygen atoms of the molecule as well as the carbon. The lithium hydroxide is also used up in this process, meaingin a limited supply of breatheable air. If the CO2 is can be cracked back into carbon and oxygen, then you could develop a continuously renewing cycle for the air. This means fewer supply runs for ISS and other outposts.

Re:Yet another

[MJMullinII]

Derr... if it gets too hot, we just turn up the A/C. A small increase in fossil fuel consumption to produce the required electricity is expected, which may increase AGW, but we can just turn up the A/C to compensate.

Solving the problem once and for all!

ONCE AND FOR ALL!!!

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.