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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."
does that really matter if they are going to power it using renewable energy?
If you have a net loss of 80% from this and a 50% net loss from batteries, then it matters 30%. That means you need 30% more "renewable resources", meaning 30% more windmills or solar. However, something like this might be a good way of handling the extra energy generated at night, and other off peak times, so we can increase the base load handled by nuclear.
Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
Bingo! If nothing else, it is a useful way to store collected energy that would otherwise (and is currently) going to waste.
Absolutely. But the key point here is not how much energy it takes to create a litre of petrol, or other hydrocarbon. It's that that energy can come from a static source - solar power, wind power, hydro, anything that can generate electricity but which is too difficult to put into a compact form - and turn it into an energy dense substance that we already know how to deal with. It turns hydrocarbons from an energy source into an energy storage mechanism.
So we could, hypothetically speaking, stick some massive solar farms in the middle of the Sahara, Death Valley, the Australian outback, and produce the world's petroleum needs by extracting the carbon and hydrogen from the atmosphere. The petroleum gets burnt; the carbon and hydrogen go back into the atmosphere as water and carbon dioxide, and the process starts again. No net change to the world's atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.
We are a long way from that goal, but this puts us a significant step forward toward that end goal.
and batteries cannot store at sane cost significant enough amount of energy. ...
There is a reason why massive battery arrays really don't exist
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Yes, but liquid is a really convenient way to transfer energy around the country and world.
It's much more than that, hydrocarbons, especially liquid hydrocarbons are really great ways to store energy. You just pour it into a tank and it stays there. Even a hydrocarbon gas like methane will stay put if you just seal it in. Until now we have heat (leaks away) hydrogen (leaks away even through metal) batteries (leak away gradually, very expensive, pretty rapid performance decay) kinetic energy in fast spinning things (gradually lost to friction, quite dangerous) pump storage (gradually evaporates; takes lots of space). The cost and difficulty of storing petrol is much lower than all of those and the technology is already widespread.
The best wind sources tend to be in areas with few people.
The other important factor is that transmission from those areas tends to be very expensive. If you build one of these plants at the end of the transmission line near the wind power you can then overbuild the Wind turbines so that they are almost always able fill the transmission lines. Spare capacity from the wind turbines goes into producing hydrocarbon fuel. On the other end of the transmission line, you can also build such a plant so you guarantee to run the transmission line at full capacity even during times when not much electricity is needed. If you can produce petrol, producing methane should be trivial, so you can also, at any point you want, pair hydrocarbon creation and storage with a rapid start up gas powered station which will then allow you to cope with peak demand.
Wind is already beating most other generation methods except for coal on cost. The main problem with it is that it's difficult to use for reliable base load supply. This is a perfect example of the kind of integrated interesting power solution which solves that and only becomes possible once there have been serious investment in building lots of alternative energy sources.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Maybe you should build a grid in the USA. Your current grid looks like one from a third world country. And you should stop thinking in a single source of energy system, which is appropriate for a grid with few big plants. The future is decentralized energy production and consumption. You have to combine wind, solar power, photo voltaic, water power, pumped-storage hydropower plant, compressed air reservoir plants, the many consumers, and a grid in between, which is able to handle energy flowing through it in various directions.
The energy companies are making money hand over fist. Why should they waste money on a new grid when this one is already a profitable source of revenue?
You're right. While we're at it, let's set a few more things straight:
- We will *never* power the entire world on hydro. Therefore we should stop building dams, and destroy all existing ones.
- We will *never* be able to power all vehicles on diesel. Therefore we should stop investing in diesel technology.
- We will *never* be able to persuade all hot women in the world to sleep with me. Therefore I should turn gay.
The energy landscape of the future will look a lot like today's: Lots of diverse generation methods, storage methods, transport methods... all mixed up and hotch-potched together. There will be no one-solution-to-rule-them-all, and nobody is expecting one.Just because this air-into-fuel gizmo can't power *all* of the world's cars (although that might be debatable) it doesn't mean it couldn't power some of them. And that would be very useful.
Given that nobody (except Iceland) is at 100% renewable energy, yes it does matter. Say you consume 100 TWh a year. Say 25 TWh of that comes from renewables, the rest from fossil fuels (ignore nuclear to keep this simple). Say petrol (gasoline) accounts for 10 TWh of your energy use. And say this process requires 2x as much energy as it creates in petrol.
If you create all your petrol using renewables to power this process, then you're reducing your fossil fuel consumption by 10 TWh, but increasing your renewable consumption by 20 TWh. However, you only have 25 TWh of installed renewables capacity. So the 20 TWh of renewables this process consumes displaces 20 TWh of other consumption which used to come from renewables. To make up for that shortfall, you have to burn 20 TWh more fossil fuels.
You might have a point, but it's entirely impossible to tell because the numbers are pulled directly from your ass. (No offense.)
You cannot pick and choose where your power comes from. If your renewables production is static and less than 100%, then nothing you do on the consumption side matters. Once you exceed that static amount of renewables production capacity, every new power drain you add comes entirely from fossil fuels.
I believe you are incorrect. Ask anybody who has successfully moved their house off the grid if they can pick and choose where their power comes from. Yes, if you have your big Air-to-Petrol plant hooked directly up to the grid, you can't choose. But there are plenty of other viable methods, and when you don't have a constant need for reliable power (like say a factory or even a house does) you can easily get away with a wind/solar farm powering your plant. This is even more true when you're in the business of converting excess energy into something transportable and easily stored.
This is the actual point of the program.
Storage.
You can store wind, solar, hydroelectric power almost indefinitely by putting the energy into hydrocarbons. Certainly orders of magnitude longer than batteries can hold the same amount of power.
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I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that this consumes far more energy than it "creates".
How is this insightful? This is an energy _storage_ system, not an energy generation system. The point is that it creates fuel that works in all kinds of legacy equipment like gasoline cars. Since all the material it uses can come from the atmosphere, the eventual burning of the fuel it creates is carbon-neutral. Since it can be created in situ anywhere using electricity, the infrastructure that transports petroleum around can go away, reducing the number of spills. Same for drilling accidents and spills. We still have to wait and see how efficient this can be in large scale production, of course, but mis-characterizing what this represents isn't helpful.
Indeed, amd what's more, it allows automobiles to use renewable energy without a carbon footprint, since the carbon it emits originally came from modern air.
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