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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."
Not having to import oil from middle eastern countries would be a worthy goal.
might there not be something of value 20-30 years down the road?
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Thats why we use gasoline. While hydrogen does have a higher specific energy, Octane and other hydrocarbons of similar lengths have some of the highest energy densities of any readily available compounds. Hydrogen has a specific energy of about 142 megajoules per kilogram, while gasoline has about 48mj/kg. BUT, a kilogram of gasoline is about 1.4 liters, and a kilogram of liquid hydrogen is a little over 14 liters. so not only would you need a fuel tank nearly four times the size for a car of similar range (and thats assuming hydrogen would be as efficient as an internal combustion engine), but hydrogen is only liquid at 20 degrees kelvin, or about 250 degrees below zero. Maintaining that low a temperature requires even more energy.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Complete BS. This will not solve any energy problems because it is not a new energy source. This process will only transfer energy from one location to a gas tank, at a net loss of energy.
Yes, but liquid is a really convenient way to transfer energy around the country and world. The best wind sources tend to be in areas with few people, and most people don't build homes inside volcanoes. Even nuclear power is difficult from a regulatory standpoint when you try to build close to where the need is. We don't have the grid for it. But using that energy to pull CO2 from the air and generate easily-transported (and stored) liquid fuel does seem like a pretty cool thing.
E pluribus unum
Same thing can be said of Hydrogen, which I suspect you'd agree with.
Assuming it's real and works - and I can't think of any physical reason why it'd be impossible - what this could be is a way to store and transport energy. Gasoline is quite energy dense and easily transportable. There is a massive infrastructure already build out for it and it's something everyone is familiar with. There's no reason you couldn't use a renewable resource to power this process. Currently you can't put sunshine in your gas tank - but with this maybe you can.
I agree that using renewable electricity directly is better, but this could be (again, if it's real/works) yet another piece of the puzzle. It seems like it would be more efficient and direct that biofuels. It's presumably carbon neutral once you power it from renewable electricity. Only issue I'd have with it is, if we were to replace all fossil-petroleum derived fuels with this stuff, it would do relatively little to reduce pollution in population centers. Might eliminate sulfur contamination but NOx and particulates from poorly maintained engines would still be a problem. I'd still advocate electrification of vehicles over this by itself, but a hybrid running off of renewable gasoline seems like a terrific way to fill the "EV range" gap.
=Smidge=
Well, imagine a world where we have so much energy being created through hydro, wind, solar, nuclear (fission and fusion) that we have a true net surplus. We could make oil with this then pump that oil back into the wells we originally got oil from. True sequestration.
The problem we have today is, fundamentally, that we are outrunning nature's ability to handle our activity. The true, long-term value of this then is that we can speed up nature's process to meet our desires.
Even if burning it releases 100% of the CO2 it took to make it, you're still carbon neutral. Current sources are a long, long way from carbon neutral as they take non-atmospheric carbon and turn it into atmospheric carbon.
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.
That is, your renewables consumption remained at 25 TWh. Your fossil fuel first went down by 10 TWh, but then increased by 20 TWh. So powering this process with renewables resulted in a net 10 TWh increase in the consumption of fossil fuels.
Don't make the mistake of mixing up consumption with production. 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.
Yes, I will strap a wind turbine on the back of my motorcycle so I can be propelled directly by wind power.
Or maybe a tidal barrage. My bike will be tres cool with a tidal barrage to power it!
Collecting energy from a place where there's tides or consistent winds and converting it to some chemical storage that I can pour in a tank and run a heat engine off would have no advantages at all...
(Because you're such a fucking moron, you may or may not realize it, but the above is sarcasm.)
What you meant to say, or rather would have meant to say if you had a brain, is that we can substitute the inefficient middle man with a somewhat less inefficient middle man and use that power indirectly via transmission lines and secondary batteries, instead of converting it to hydrocarbons. And when you put it that way, it becomes obvious that which middle man is "best" depends on the relative importance of efficiency vs. energy and power density in your specific application.
Hydrocarbons are a crap way to store energy if using that energy means burning it in a heat engine with typical efficiencies of 25 to 30%
If they were synthesising alcohol out of pure air, at least then
a) you could drink it
b) you could use it in a fuel cell at higher efficiencies to recover the energy, prefferably not after having done too much of a).
This would at best be a Rube Goldberg like effort at storing and using energy.
This is not free energy. However it is converting it from one form to another.
We can use Green Energy such as Solar and Wind, which has the energy but really cannot be stored, and doesn't have 24/7 constant supply of power.
More to the point. Is this or can this, be more efficient than making batteries?
However this could extract carbon out of the air, and if we take more then we use, we can rebuild up our reserve, and reduce the carbon in the atmosphere.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Embrace the power of AND.
None of this obviates the need for portable power. Why do you think we should embrace all these other technologies to generate power, but, not look to many technologies to store it? Are batteries to be the be all and end all of energy storage?
Why not do this too?
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Hydrocarbons are a crap way to store energy if using that energy means burning it in a heat engine with typical efficiencies of 25 to 30%
Wikipedia claims that gas power stations have up to 60% efficiency, that a fuel cell is generally between 40-60% efficient (though heat capture can improve that), and that fuel cells can work for hydrocarbons as well.
I'm not able to guarantee that that's all right but it seems reasonable. If true then I really don't see that much difference with alcohol, though I have to admit that I always thought alcohol from some kind of biological system would be a likely way to go.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
And where do his words express a violation of this? Why do you assume that there has to be "free energy" for him to be excited. Try this on for size.... combustion is a carbon releasing process. It extracts energy from the bonds between atoms in hydrocarbons, releasing simpler carbon compounds, like CO2.
ie Turning CO2 in the air back into hydrocarbons.... sequesters CO2 from the atmosphere. Burning those hyrdocarbons then, is a carbon neutral process itself, leaving the energy generation as "loose end", and if it can be run from solar, geothermal, wind, or other renewable resource, and if it can be feasibly done on a large enough scale, could be a big win.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
That all sounds very profound and true and intelligent but since we still don't have any cars running on ethanol and fuel cells yet (yes yes except from a few laboratories on wheels) we have to make do with what we have.
By the way I saw a documentary once with Captain Slow (aka James May) in which a few people had built a nice big solar collector to make petrol out of air. So this whole thing is not that new. And they didn't need the grid for it either. Look here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ5mpQqmZaM&feature=related
-- Cheers!
A conventional car can't recapture this energy - but a hybrid can
Actually, petrol-powered Formula 1 racers have recently been made legal with regenerative braking. It was illegal before. And no, they don't have hub motors that turn into generators, nor big-ass batteries to charge up.
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Batteries don't grow on trees- they cost energy (and some fairly scarce and/or toxic materials) to make.
You've got to compare the overall cost of building a car with a petrol-based engine and powering it with synthetic fuel, with building a car with great big battery cells and then transporting energy to it by wire.
I bet the batteries still win, but then this is a brand new technology. It'll be interesting to see if they can fulfil their promised efficiency improvements as the technology progresses.
The other obvious use is aviation fuel. I'm not aware of any sensible design for a practical aeroplane powered by batteries. Bio-fuel is the main competitor in that space, so the same logic applies.
Most gasoline powered cars emit very little soot. Diesels (particularly the redneck black smokers purposely de-tuned to produce more smoke) emit much more.
But all vehicles generate brake dust and tire dust. Over the years the brake vendors have been trying to make the stuff less toxic, but since you "live next to a main road and the soot/dust is horrendous" you can expect a higher incidence of certain illnesses in your family. If police cars and emergency vehicles use the road a lot, that's even worse, because they are usually allowed to use high-performance brake pads that are loaded with known carcinogens.