Scientists Turn Air Into Petrol

rippeltippel writes "The Independent reports on a scientific breakthrough which would allow us to synthesize petrol from thin air. Quoting from the article: 'Air Fuel Synthesis in Stockton-on-Tees has produced five liters of petrol since August when it switched on a small refinery that manufactures gasoline from carbon dioxide and water vapor. The company hopes that within two years it will build a larger, commercial-scale plant capable of producing a ton of petrol a day. It also plans to produce green aviation fuel to make airline travel more carbon-neutral. ... Tim Fox, head of energy and the environment at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in London, said: "It sounds too good to be true, but it is true. They are doing it and I've been up there myself and seen it. The innovation is that they have made it happen as a process. It's a small pilot plant capturing air and extracting CO2 from it based on well known principles. It uses well-known and well-established components but what is exciting is that they have put the whole thing together and shown that it can work." Although the process is still in the early developmental stages and needs to take electricity from the national grid to work, the company believes it will eventually be possible to use power from renewable sources such as wind farms or tidal barrages. "We've taken carbon dioxide from air and hydrogen from water and turned these elements into petrol," said Peter Harrison, the company's chief executive, who revealed the breakthrough at a conference at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in London."

Comments

Not so fast

[rhadamanthus]

Buried at the bottom of the article is this tidbit:

"Although the prototype system is designed to extract carbon dioxide from the air, this part of the process is still too inefficient to allow a commercial-scale operation.

The company can and has used carbon dioxide extracted from air to make petrol, but it is also using industrial sources of carbon dioxide until it is able to improve the performance of "carbon capture"."

Re:cold fusion fraud again?

[gsgriffin]

Boy! You're beating an uninformed drum. The US grid is very diverse, uses most methods you state and more, had power generation spread out across a huge area serving lots of people, and it is not expensive and very rarely goes out. I've spent a lot of time in India and all over Africa. Not sure what 3rd world country you have so much experience and knowledge in, but the US appears to be your dart board for everything. Be open to facts that can sway your opinion.

Re:cold fusion fraud again?

[bdwebb]

You are so far off base that you must have done absolutely zero research here. I'm going to go down the list of why you're wrong point by point:

1. Population density is slightly lower in Brazil than in the US - Brazil has an approximate population of 194,429,773 while the US has a population of 312,488,000. Given the area measurements of each country, the population density of Brazil is 22/km (57/sq mi) and the US is 31/km (80/sq mi). This indicates that the population density of the US is approximately 40% greater than in Brazil which is a SIGNIFICANT difference. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil%E2%80%93United_States_relations]

2. Brazil has a national power grid that covers every part of the country that's physically possible - Please cite your reference for this information as I can find zero information supporting this. Regardless, the US has a very similar system in that failure of a single reactor does not typically create a permanent outage scenario. My next point also illustrates why your argument is flawed at its base.

3. The US grid is much, much worse than Brazil's - Brazil produces a total of 484,800 GWh while the United States produces over 4,325,900 GWh of power yearly (from 2010 numbers - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_production). Over 80% of all electricity generated by Brazil is Hydroelectric which sounds great at first until you consider that regional droughts can and have caused serious power issues in the past (2001-2002 crisis - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Brazil). This makes Brazil's entire power grid so heavily reliant on a single resource that it cannot sustain the demand for power in the event that weather conditions are not hunky-dory. In other words, this is much less reliable and much more prone to system-wide failures or outages than the US grid. Granted, Brazil's energy production is more renewable and 'greener', however hydroelectric damming is known to cause widespread ecosystem problems by interrupting spawning paths for fish and other animals that rely on the uninterrupted flow of water along natural riverways.

Ultimately, I'm not saying Brazil's grid sucks, I'm just saying you're wrong and you have no idea what you're talking about.