Slashdot Mirror
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."
make your bets
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that this consumes far more energy than it "creates".
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
...net energy gain -200%
Ethanol production is making car fuel from thin air. Plant matter is mainly carbohydrate produced from CO2 and solar energy. Nothing new here.
cause that having too much air thing was bothering me...
Not having to import oil from middle eastern countries would be a worthy goal.
How much does it cost to make a gallon / ton of this petrol?
Exclusive: Pioneering scientists turn fresh air into petrol in massive boost in fight against energy crisis
Since this process absorbs and converts CO2 which is one of the gases responsible for the greenhouse effect, if they use a renewable energy source to power the process, I'd say this is a good fight against global warming and not against the energy crisis.
In other news? Mel Brooks assures everyone that there is absolutely no air shortage what-so-ever.
The sealand process back in the 1970's.
They used a stirling cycle engine (another old tech for you young whippersnappers) to liquify the CO2 then made methol alcohol.
Hydrogen was obtained via splitting water.
(And as for "cold fusion fraud" or "net energy" upthread:
1) it may be garden-common fraud as in "investors told X and X is a lie made to seperate them from thier cash" instead of "press announcement made and turns out can't be reproduced." Unless you mean that cold fusion works and the frand is that most think it does not
2) VS what - having photons make plant matter long before humans were around, that plant matter gets compressed and heated then far, far, later Man shows up, finds a pool of oil/hunk of coal and declares "Net energy of this stuff I found starts off at 0" vs "Hey! the amount of photons needed to make the coal/oil is far more than the amount of photons needed to make this 'air to fuel' process work. And to do this calculation don't we need to assign a 'time value' to a photon from centries ago?")
Of course, on the downsite, it will cost more energy to produce than you get out of it, and the electricity it would consume will need to be supplied by...other green house gas emitting processes.
From an energetic point of view, this is utterly pointless. They use electricity which was produced at 40% efficiency from fossil sources, to turn the same CO2 which came from those fossil fuels back into a fuel at much lower than 100% efficiency.
To go from coal to a fuel, there are processes such a the Fischer tropsch process, as used in South Africa on industrial scale, which are far more efficient.
If you want to use sustainable electricity to produce a fuel, for heaven's sake, just make hydrogen, and be done. Or better still, use the electricity directly - by the time we have excess sustainable electricity, electric cars will be a reality too.
...imagine using energy that cannot be used for internal combustion being used to produce petrol?
This could be a great help during civilization's crossover from hydrocarbon energy to wind/solar/fusion.
Loading...
You were wrong dad, you were wrong.
Take care of that! In a few years, we will not have any carbon dioxide in the air and then all plants will starve to death and then within a blink of an eye we all will follow!
The importance of something like this (assuming the report is true) is for use as an energy storage mechanism, not as a means of "producing" energy.
Imagine a PVC power plant out in the desert someplace. Electricity from the plant is used to generate liquid hydrocarbons that can be stored and burned for fuel for use when the sun isn't shining, or that can be used in circumstances that are necessarily off-grid such as to power an airplane. The "gasoline" thus produced can be thought of more as a battery than as an energy "source". It is merely storing the energy of the sun for later use. And it is completely carbon neutral since the CO2 released when the fuel is burned was taken out of the atmosphere in the first place so there is no net change in atmospheric CO2.
The Achilles's heel of many renewable energy schemes has always been that they are inconsistent and do not generate energy when and where it is needed, and that there is no efficient way of storing the energy for later use. If the reports in this article are true (and that is a BIG IF) then this could be a huge win for renewable energy.
So the idea is sound. The question becomes whether or not the report is real (I have serious doubts) and if it is real, is the efficiency sufficient to make it worthwhile.
Thermodynamics says that's going to be some very, very expensive fuel. But more immediately, doesn't this sound like the green version of the lead-into-silver scams of the 1700s? If they say they need a canal built: run.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Unless your entire supply chain is renewable, this isn't even good for renewable (regardless of the efficiency). Here's why:
Currently, all of our renewable energy requires that we build ways to harvest that energy. That's done by mining and manufacturing which generally runs on non-renewable resources. For example: on a small scale, PV solar costs about 12.5c per kWh, amortized at 0% over the life of the panel (0% is the the most conservative number, at 5%, it's closer to 25-30c). Since solar panels take (effetively) 12.5c/kWh worth of energy to create, and that's mostly from fossil fuels, we're essentially burning non-renewables in order to create a solar collection system which manufactures fossil fuels.
As things get better, this may change, but for the time being this it the "green" equivalent of money laundering.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Does it require fresh water? If so, where is all the water going to come from?
Proverbs 21:19
Lets build a petrol power plant, direct its exhausts to this new CO2 -> petrol power plant and feed the created petrol back in the petrol power plant...
If we are efficient enough, we might have discovered a way to burn petrol without any pollution or energy created
Wouldn't it be more efficient to turn thick air into petrol
specifically the CO2 exhaust of a fossil fuel power plant)
BTW has someone asked Romney if he supports the repeal of the Laws of Thermodynamics
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."
The process actually works, the chemistry is more than a century old. However, for reasons, pointed out by other posters, the economics suck.
We are right now the Saudi Arabia of natural gas. We have lots. It makes a reasonable transportation fuel. It puts much less CO2 into the atmosphere than gasoline or diesel. It renders electric cars pointless. It also renders the technology in TFA pointless.
So what do the plants/trees breath when we remove all the carbon dioxide from the air ?
A quote from a professor comparing the retail price of a CD when they were invented, to the stamping cost of a CD today, in order to illustrate improvements in efficiency in a physical process.
One is something that someone made up because they thought it was what people would swallow. Rather like the claims in this article that this is an important technology for the energy crisis.
It's a useful excuse to delay research into electric vehicles and prolong the fossil fuel economy.
Oh, great ... now we'll take the CO2 out, induce the negative greenhouse effect and create the mother of all ice ages. Better buy some uber mukluks, a sled and stock up on the blubber.
In Russia ???
http://en.rian.ru/mlitary_news/20121019/176747388.html#close
No one ever talks about the carbon cost of converting every car in the world to run entirely on batteries. New methods of petrol creation may not be the ideal solution, but dammit, we've already got the cars. The great thing about this is that the process itself is no longer contingent on exploration and dino juice -- you plug it into the infrastructure and then can focus on improving that end environmentally.
Fast charging of electric cars is a nice idea, but this works now.
This smells fishy. Certainly, there are no laws of nature violated... carbon dioxide can be hydrogenated to hydrocarbons, alcohols, etc., that is well-known technology ...but why would anybody trying to build a commercial company presumably trying to earn money at some stage go to the expense (both financially and energy-wise) to isolate carbon dioxide from air (0.04%), when it is readly available for example from the exhaust of tradional power plants and other fuel-burning processes (>22%, up to 100% with 'clean coal' tech), or, if you want to go fully biological, from fermentation operations (100%). That does not make any economic sense at all.
Also, the point about the lack additives is strange. Original refinery fuel is almost pure hydrocarbons and minor oxidation products, too - the additives are not a side product of the distillation process from oil. The addititives are added (immediately before filling the delivery trucks) because they improve the burn characteristics, lubrication, waste product accumulation - which are needed for synfuel in the same fashion.
It's interesting but it's doubtful that it will see much use (at least in the near term). I'd bet this will always be significantly more expensive than our current most expensive source of conventional oil (tar sands). So it can only be viable in the face of high carbon taxes and/or sequestion subsidies or when conventional oil sources can no longer meet demand. When we are in the full blown energy crisis then it could be embraced fully, but I would bet it will either fill a niche roll or be discarded completely. I doubt we will collectively choose to continue to prop up our existing fossil fuel infrastructure at that point, we'll decide to switch to electric and make the necessary cultural changes to adapt in the face of the costs. This process is essentially a way to convert renewable energy into a format that work with conventional infrastructure. My bet is that this process (or a similar one) will end up as the primary fuel supplier for hobbyists, rich dillettants, and other groups (planes? nascar?) that have a special need for fossil fuels.
Howeer, this might be a dead end technology if a competing technology proves to be fundamentally more efficient (and thus cheaper), for example, it might be more efficient to capture the carbon from methane released from rotting compost and sewage treatment.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Bussard Collector
Needs to be a little smaller and more efficient though, maybe Seven of Nine could help.
....water will be turned into wine!
It requires energy to produce the fuel. In other words, it's like hydrogen fuel that can already be synthesized, except hydrogen combustion produces less emissions than petrol.
So TFA doesn't say, but I wonder if this is includes the same "Sabatier reaction" that's part of Robert Zubrin's "Mars Direct" plan -- in the Zubrin case, you send a nuclear reactor and some hydrogen to mars, and use that plus martian CO2 and a catalyst to make methane and oxygen, which become the basis for bootstrapping your martian chemical industry.
Obviously, these guys have more dilute CO2, and their other reactant is H20, not H2, but it seems likely to be closely related.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
If they take CO2, H20 and solar energy to produce sugar that in turns is transformed in to ethanol, they just "re-invented" the photosynthesis and then alcoholic fermentation.
Now lets see if they do it efficiently... It usually takes a long time, use huge amounts of space (call it farms, forests, etc) and then the industrial process of producing the ethanol...
Higuita
....what are they going to do with all the free oxygen radicals?
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Then in this near-utopian future, time travel is finally discovered .. though it's one-way, and you have to go millions of years at a time. So, we create a huge amount of oil, and pump it into the ground through this one-way time vortex ... ooooh.
given that they dont mention the efficiency one can only assume that it is bad.
even if the CO_2 + H_2O -> petrol part very efficient, concentrating CO_2 from 400ppm to a useful amount must take a fair amount of energy (otherwise CCS would be cheap and easy).
Given a big enough electricity supply and a plentiful supply of air and water for feedstock and cooling, this would be a great way to produce a bottomless petrol station.
Ideal for aircraft carriers, in other words.
I seem to recall that DARPA was looking for a way to do just this. The idea is to put a small nuclear reactor at a forward operating base (such as in Afghanistan), and use the excess electricity to provide for the fuel needs. One of the most expensive and dangerous parts of operations is trucking in the fuel, so making it on-site, even if the efficiency is bad, can still be a huge win.
An article on the request for proposals mentioned that nuclear reactors don't adjust quickly to demand, so there's lots of excess power in places like France, so there's interest in something like this to use the excess power. Of course, now you're getting into a situation where efficiency matters, as you can sell the electricity outside the country at a loss or use other methods of storing it for later.
The the resulting petrol os just icing on the cake. If we can build enough to take down CO2 levels to a reasonable degree thta would be wonderful in and of itself.
OTOH, I have seen many single experts get fooled. Lets get a lot of experts in the relative fields looking at this.
Sorry, Tim, but you can be fooled. And I'm not sure what this would have to do with you're expertise in Mechanical Engineering. Wouldn't this require a chemical engineer to look at and try to reproduce?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
One really great advantage to this is the energy density of gasoline. Though the process for producing is inefficient, gasoline and other hydrocarbons are still really good at being stable and energy dense. That is one reason why we've been driving hydrocarbon fueled vehicles instead of battery powered vehicles for so long. Gasoline is fairly stable for a long time and quite energy dense. A gallon in an efficient vehicle can go many miles, using relatively simple technology.
Only recently has battery technology become competitive in this regard. Of course, this doesn't solve the atmospheric CO2 level problem. Or the problem of obtaining energy in the first place. This (if it works at all) could be another tool in making renewable energy more viable.
How do they synthesize the benzene ring economically? That would be a breakthrough.
if this is actually a working system then
1 IT MAKES OIL (which is most likely cleaner than the stuff we dig up)
2 This can be done locally (so no depending on THEM) for Oil.
3 we need Oil for Stuff also (plastics use Oil)
4 it takes a nonzero amount of energy to refine Oil (and then truck/pipeline it to where its being used)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
The U.S. Navy is doing similar research creating jet fuel from sea water. This would allow aircraft carriers to stay on location longer because they wouldn't have to worry about running out of fuel for aircraft. Basically the only things that would need to be delivered would be supplies for the crew (food, toilet paper, etc.).
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Well if you had ever breathed the air we get round here this would not surprise you: all you need is a condenser :-)
We sacrifice efficiency for overall economy all the time. All around us is the conversion from one form of energy to another, at a loss. Take a look at my tool bench with over a dozen pneumatic tools that are powered by converting electricity into compressed air. Talk about a loss. However if I were to replace each of them with their electric equivalent I'd be out a ton more money.
If you look at most utility bills you'll see it broken down into usage and delivery, each typically about half the bill. So half your costs are simply infrastructure. I'll take a slight raise in the cost of energy as opposed to completely redoing infrastructure any day.
1) Build machine to turn air into petrol.
2) Use machine's output to power itself and make more petrol.
3) Profit!
It sounds like we've got a case of
*puts glasses on*
vaporware.
YEEEAAAAAAAHH!
...for the Governments to tax breathing air.
Sigh...
(OOOOPS!)
Acid Batteries are an absolutely horrible way to store energy.
Gasoline is a great way to store energy. Sure, it's not really any better, but this allows all CURRENT gasoline vehicles to be powered from renewable sources. Also, compared with regular patroleum, you can MAKE IT ANYWHERE YOU WANT, as long as you have power, air, and water. Small countries could essentially become energy independant for a relative low investment. This could spawn thousands of micropetroleum factories around the world, challenging the massive oil hegemonies. They would even be able to undercut the big guys by producing on site. No tankers to ship it from Arabia, nor pipe lines, big rigs, etc. all of which consume massive amounts of fuel, which drives the price up even further, and all of which pose the risk of creating massive environmental disasters. This would literally allow us to have petroleum fuel, without having to even have it touch the ground once. The carbon would all be recycled.
Once the oil hegemony has been broken, there wouldn't be anyone to further bribe car companies and law makers, which have kept the electric car back for at least 20 years, if not 200.
Why the hell is everyone bagging on it so much?
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"."
Slashdot needs to interview Natalie Portman.
Sure, put 10 tons of coal into the power plant and get 1 ton of oil out of our plant.
(Perhaps a direct coal to gas plant would work better.)
If you run it on electricity from the sun or wind, then you are preventing that electricity from going to the grid for other purposes and so still incurr the 10 ton coal hit.
They need to figure out how to make it work directly from sunlight.
Maybe a pond full of critters that ooze oil.
Seems like there are some trees that do that.
Maybe a little gene splicing with some simple organism like algae.
Hey, what could go wrong in that?
Hopefully the planet will survive the folks trying to save it.
...air..
Given battery and other storage already do store enough energy for backup, I fail to see how you can claim they cannot.
However the technology could draw it's energy from Offshore Wind Farms, which often stand idle because wind doesn't coincide with peak demand; this is potentially real winner.
What byproducts are produced and in what form. Yes we extract CO2 and hydrogen. Is the byproduct Oxygen enriched air? Come on guys, no process is that clean.
So I fail to see how this is converting a form of energy you can't use (what energy can't be used?) to a form you can.
You can already use renewable sourced electric to power your electric lights, heating, toys, cars.
If we were on effectively 100% renewable (i.e. no other source of power than renewable), then you could build up to 120% and get 10% of fossil fuel (if -200% EROEI) to use in something that would otherwise have been unfeasible.
"capturing air and extracting CO2 from it based on well known principles"
"needs to take electricity from the national grid to work"
"We've taken carbon dioxide from air and hydrogen from water and turned these elements into petrol"
Esentially;
- Capture CO2 from the air.
- Add water vapor (from the air also) and electricity.
- Generate petrol.
- Profit!
Oh, and:
- Recycle CO2.
- Recycle H2O.
- Essentially, your petrol-dependent vehicle is now powered by electricity,
FTW!
We must never give up on the Internal Combustion Engine!
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Nothing that an oil-producing plant can't do. The key will be efficiency - how will this compare with some of the "alge to fuel" systems
Yeah, mine is going off bigtime...
Because your car turns them into waste heat and noise.
You also need a transmission with that engine that includes gearing, differential and for the US market an automatic gearbox. This weighs somewhere around the 200-300kg mark.
With that electric engine you could put the engine in four pieces on each wheel and do away with all that heavy rod and gear stuff.
And the energy required is the same as lighting a small town for a month....
'Efficiency has sunk even better 'processes' than this one.
And that energy would likely come from (I love to tell electric car fanbois this) burning fossil fuels (as there is nowhere enough of the other energy sources to generate even a simple majority of any power used for such things -- even lower efficiency when you add in typical power line losses)..
In other world pretty worthless hype for something that even after we get cheap fusion power there will be better alternatives.
I would be more impressed if they made something useful like gasoline, instead of this petrol stuff!
love is just extroverted narcissism
Man, if they could make gas this way...abundant and cheap, we could get away from all the stupid gas regulations on cars, and get back to building cars with BIG engines that are fun to drive around again!!!
Bring back the muscle car!!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
... will see this and push to end all development of non-internal-combustion-based transportation technologies. And he will tout this development as the solution to climate change. (You know, the climate change that he denies is taking place.) Anyone want to bet on how long it takes for him to crawl out from under his rock to hold a press conference telling us about his intention to offer up legislation to that end?
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
There is plenty of sun. You can replace 100% of the US electrical power production with a collection of solar thermal plants covering a square 67 miles on a side in New Mexico. Transportation and industrial processes each consume a similar amount of energy, though there will be some losses in the process of conversion. The world does not lack in deserts.
But when will they be able to make GASOLINE from air ?
As a solution for the dense stored energy part of the problem ----
Have to compare this to something like liquid nitrogen (from air compression AT the powerplant to eliminate power line losses then transported/distributed as liquid to local 'filling' stations)
Cryogentic hazards ?? might be same magnitudeas /equivalent to flamible gasolene
You use air motors to drive the car wheels off the liquid nitroben being expanded back to gas form (works even in most terrestrial cold climates though at some lower efficiency to warmer ones
Saw a documentary on it 20+ years ago.
----------------------
Still does not solve where the energy originally comes from (today would require burning fossil fuels or atomic and the others are far less efficient/scarce)
My hope is someday commercial fusion power plants competative with existing technologies (even better if cheaper once it matures)
That loop is a failure from the start. Suppose we have a power plant burning fossil fuels. We take the main combustion products - CO2, H2O - and pipe them next door to one of these fuel producing plants to close the loop and turn that stuff back into fuel. The problem is that you'll also need to channel ALL of the power plants output into the fuel plant and bring in external power as well. Un-burning fuel takes more energy than you get from burning the fuel - theoretically it takes the SAME energy, but the reality is that neither the fuel-to-energy process nor the atoms-to-fuel process are 100 percent efficient.
The possible advantage for this only exists in a world where clean electricity is vastly cheaper than pumping oil out of the ground AND we still need hydrocarbons as a transportation fuel. Also at that point, it may be better to leave the CO2 in the air to grow food.
Consider Iceland, which has a great source of cheap renewable electricity with Geothermal power. The issue is them finding good uses for it--you can only smelt so much aluminum before the price goes down. This process would be ideal, as this process would let them create carbon neutral fuel. Other areas have good sources of Geothermal power as well, but often, they are too far from where the power is needed to make them useful in exploiting.
Because regulations on engines are because of petrol shortages and not carbon emissions. Oh wait...
And this will do nothing to solve carbon emissions, you are taking it out of the air, to put it back again while loosing 75% of energy in the process.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Hydrogen emits clean water when you use it. This petrol emits all the same harmful crap as regular petrol. Petrol is dense but using it is very inefficient, a car is lucky to use 20% of the energy in a useful form. But it emits 100% of the carbon and other crap regardless.
It is an intresting hybrid solution, if it works but I think you are going to see an energy conversion ratio that would make a SUV user cry and all the same polutants.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Trees take carbon dioxide and water together to make wood which we can then burn to generate energy. Much simpler and cheaper than setting up some complicated refinery.
Crocodile Dundee called. He said, "Not in my Outback yard!"
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I know chemistry isn't everybody's thing, but being able to produce hydrocarbons from renewable sources is *huge*. We don't just use them for energy, they're important for manufacturing everything from fertilizer to ipads. One of the un- talked about dangers of the end of cheap oil is that we will no longer be able to use hydrocarbons for manufacturing. Nuclear power is useless if you can't afford to insulate the power cabling to get that energy to where it's needed.
Along the Jersey turnpike? Or is their more hot air/CO2 along the Jersey Shore?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
As many have mentioned already, such an air-to-petrol might be viable in the middle of the Sahara where sunshine is plenty and access is poor. Anywhere where plants grow well, and can be dried, there a more efficient way...
(1) Grow plants to create biomass
(2) Let the biomass dry
(3) Put the biomass into a sealed container
(4) Add heat to evaporate the biomass
(5) Pump the air out of the container through a condensor
What you end up with is a mix of hydrocarbon oils that can be refined into petrol and many other things. The collection of the CO2 is done for you by vegitation in the sun. You can use waste biomass (stems and leaves) from a crop that actually produces something useful besides biomass.
Here is another idea... the UK is experimenting with storing energy as liquified air (1), which can be heated later to propel turbines just like steam. One of the byproducts of freezing air (at 77K or lower) is solid CO2 which freezes at 174K. The dry ice is a concentrated source of CO2 that can be liquified at pressures above 5 atmospheres and chemically combined with hydrogen to produce hydrocarbon oils.
Of course, such a system would require more energy input than it would produce, but this is about energy storage and the production of clean hydrocarbon oils rather than energy efficiency. There are a few locales that will be able to produce more clean energy than needed and might have difficulty selling/exporting it -- such places might eventually be able to produce their own hydrocarbon fuels for more self sufficiency.
(1) http://www.ecogeek.org/component/content/article/3819
Religion is poison to rationality, and we lose sight of that at our own peril. -- Lurker2288
Brewing alcohol generates carbon dioxide. If they used that as a source instead of air, it would be more energy efficient and create alcohol for fuel too.
This article reminds me of the BBC show titled "Bread from the Air, Gold From the Sea", which is mostly about the development of the Haber Process for manufacturing ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen.
Fritz Haber won the 1918 Nobel Prize for this; it is the key step in the manufacture of fertilizer and currently it's estimated that today 3.5 billion people are dependent on it for their food supply.
Tragically Dr Haber later turned his abilities to the manufacture of poison gasses for use in war, misled by misplaced loyalty to his country. Both his wife and son ended committing suicide because of the horrors associated with his work.
It is one of the most poignant stories of the 20th century.
The only good thing about Stockton is that it's not quite as bad as Middlesbrogh, which is not saying a lot as drowning yourself in a slurry tank is not as bad as living in Middlesbrough.
I'm amazed any engineer would work there when he could get a relatively cushy job being a bomb disposal expert in Afghanistan, where at least it doesn't rain all the time.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Even if it's not very efficient, could this be a missing step in making solar/wind/etc farms work in off-production hours (e.g. when there's little wind or sun).
For example, with solar:
During sunny days, use some of the solar power collected to run a process collecting CO2 and creating petrol. During the night, burn the petrol to continue power generation.
I wonder if this might be more efficient than the "molten salt" approach? At the least it would also work for power sources other than solar (wind, wave, etc)
Converting water and CO2 to hydrocarbons is not new...but...it takes energy and a lot of it. The reverse of this reaction is very widely used in industry to make hydrogen via steam reforming and the water gas shift reaction. TFA says that the petrol synthesizers are using electricity from the national grid but does not bother us with any details of how much electricity they are using. It is unquestionably a lot of electricity, though. So why isn't this a great discovery? I mean, it takes electricity and converts it into a hydrocarbon fuel that we can easily store and use, right? Well, this process is certainly a large net energy consumer in that the energy in the synthesized petrol is only a small fraction of the electrical energy used to make it in the first place. This means that we would need to generate huge quantities of electricity to produce the petrol. The very reason that we extract hydrocarbons (oil, gas, and coal) out of the ground in the first place is to obtain the energy contained within them so a process that consumes a lot of electrical energy to reproduce a small fraction of the original hydrocarbon energy used to create the electricity is...ridiculous...and would accelerate the generation of carbon dioxide. Now, if we lived in a world that did not generate electricity from hydrocarbon fuel directly or if we had large quantities of electrical energy that was unused and available from, say, wind turbines or tidal generators, then we could consider a process to create hydrocarbon fuel from carbon dioxide and electricity...but that is not our world now or in the forseeable future. Electricity generation from wind turbines, solar energy, and the like is expensive, heavily subsidized, and would result in extremely expensive hydrocarbon fuel if it were used in a process such as that described in the article.
Fuel from thin air? This must be the internet.
Great!!! Now give everyone in Congress a pitcher of water and sit back and wait for the free fuel........
Why not remove the carbon from coal instead of air? How much heat is required to extract carbon from air? Let's suppose that some energy must be used to gather carbon from air, then we combust the new product. How many calories are added to the environment by the making, transport and use of this new fuel? If heat is a global enemy we need to even be concerned about the heat lost by motors and appliances. For example even if I have magic fuel to generate power the compressor in my air conditioner and its fans still shed heat into the environment.
At the bottom of all of this there is one fact. We must limit human reproduction and bring the world back to a sane level of population. No matter how much science and technology we develop over population will kill us all if we allow it to.
Much lighter than current batteries... but is it more efficient?
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Need to clear out the gunk.
Maybe Shell nitrogen-enriched gas will help
Do you think it will always be cheaper to manufacture batteries to store renewable electricity than to store renewable electricity in hydrocarbons?
If you want to use sustainable electricity to produce a fuel, for heaven's sake, just make hydrogen, and be done.
Because clearly the millions of cars that exist *right now, today* can just start sucking down hydrogen. The strength of this is that we can hook it up to a variable-output renewable energy source like a wind farm and make fuel when the grid can't use the excess electricity. Way to miss the forest through the trees.
"We've taken carbon dioxide from air and hydrogen from water and turned these elements into petrol," said Peter Harrison
Why not just skip taking CO2 from air and use the hydrogen? It's every bit as powerful as gasoline, even works in the same engines given a bit of carb/injector tuning.
Oxygen-producing bacteria were fed M&Ms and started crapping plutonium.
Need I say more?
Carbon dioxide and water vapor? That's awesome! Just hook it up to the exhaust pipe: Voila! Perpetual motion!
(I'm assuming a winky face is not necessary here)
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
Fossil fuels in the last century reached their extreme prices because of their inherent utility; they pack a great deal of potential energy into an extremely efficient package. If we can but side-step the 100 million year production process...
- CEO Nwabudike Morgan
To think, in 1999 when the game came out, this was predicted to be a tech we wouldn't see for at least another century and a half. Not quite 14 years later, we're already researching it and making serious progress!
Of course, there's the last part of that quote which I left off:
... we can corner this market once again!
Hopefully not. I'd really like to see this become a widespread technology. If we (for all values of "we", not just the US where I happen to live) can eliminate both the need for foreign oil and for domestic drilling, that will be two huge wins for the world.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
This is nothing; I personally hand-craft individual gasoline molecules and sell them on Etsy. Each one includes a certificate of authenticity and a knitted wool cozy.
Pay no attention to the delicious but highly radioactive fig pudding byproduct.
I read an article in the past month that the US Navy was experimenting with similar technology to produce Jet Fuel
Here is a copy of one http://www.navytimes.com/news/2012/10/navy-turn-sea-water-into-jet-fuel-101312w
They are extracting the CO2 from the ocean because the concentration in the ocean is higher than the atmosphere.
and the surprising result: air + petrol = petrol
Every barrel of oil that the United States buys from Canada is a barrel that someone has to buy from the Middle East instead of Canada. So if the United States stops buying as much oil from Canada, other countries can buy oil from Canada instead of the Middle East, which would give certain Islamists less international political power.
is a definite issue here. FTA, it took 3(?) months to get 5 gallons. Also, FTA, they expect to be able to scale up to an installation that can produce 1 ton of petrol (gasoline?) a day. With 1 gallon of gasoline weighing approx. 5.87 lbs (US, natch), this gives a whopping output of: 340 gallons per day So, move along, nothing to see here.
--- Void where prohibited. Your mileage may vary. ---
We've been turning petrol into air for decades
No reason someone can't do the reverse
the best ''natural'' lubricant, if I remember well, is the oil extracted from hemp
The traditional objection to hemp is that hemp plants are too good for camouflaging pot plants.
I think one of the most significant aspects is that this method essentially recycles the CO2 currently in the atmosphere, instead of churning out new CO2 that wasn't there to begin with. It could neutralize the segment of CO2 emmissions currently represented by humans burning fossil fuels. So all the anthropogenic global warming criers would have to find someone else to blame when climate change marches steadily on.
When Humans compete with cars, cars win. Every time!
Consider what happened last time when we tried using Ethanol to fuel cars? Food prices went up. More people starved to death.
What do you think will happen when cars start consuming air? :) Funny but true.
In my view, the most important thing about this is the fact that this could feed all the petrol based chemical industry that just needs petrol as reagents.
No, it's not about energy efficiency or carbon emissions. For that, you have fuels made out of sugarcane or corn that harvest all the energy they need from sunlight. Period.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Gives new meaning to "burn and return".
This could lead to Global Cooling!
In addition, the main point of this storage (as it is probably net loss, at least initially anyway) is that you can harness alternative power sources that unlike Hydro, and Nuclear, Gas, Coal, etc... which is pretty constant, stuff like wind only works when it is windy, and solar, only when sunny.
Using hydro storage is already used (and I am sure it isn't all that great for loss either), to enable the use of these non-constant or stable sources of energy to be used usefully in our electrical grid. The big differnce here is the storage is also portable, so suitable for use in mobile situations like cars, etc...
The big question is how efficent it is. Not that I read the article or anything, but usually these bleeding edge stuff is concept only, and needs a lot of further development to make it viable from an efficency perspective.
You better go patent it before Google, Apple, or MS!
I even have a name for it for you. I would call it a (air quotes) "Sail-Boat"
You could use a windmill to charge you car battery. It would just take you forever to charge. Also don't ever run out of charge in a non-windy area.
Can you not picture it, how beautiful would it be to see gridlock of thousands of spinning windmills on the highway! Utopia!
I propose we call this new manufactured form of gasoline/petrol "Energon"
Oil companies will sweep this under the rug as to not lose any profits.
This is directly opposed to all of Capitalist society. Beware the Curse of the Pigeon!
Drunk History Vol. 6 - Nikola Tesla
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gOR91oentQ
Amidst the glorious and triumphant Soviet Gorbechav era, a few government officials from britian started a company known as tnk-bp. Enslaved by Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbechav, they gave birth to this technology initially. It is the pride of Yeniseysk.
They talk about making petrol, which means hydrocarbons with 8 carbons, give or take. Is there another hydrocarbon that they could produce that has better conversion efficiency both in production and when in use in the auto? Sure, if it turns out to be methane, then we need to adapt cars to take natural gas and have pressurized tanks, which is inconvenient, but it may be worth it.
Now, this conversion efficiency may be a matter of production rate more than anything else. We "waste" massive amounts of solar energy anyway -- who cares if there's a 10% conversion from solar energy to petrol energy or a 5% conversion. But one hydrocarbon (or other fuel) may be quicker to produce, making it a better replacement for natural petroleum. We have to optimize for the size and expense of the conversion facility, the energy density of the fuel, storage requirements for the fuel, the efficiency of conversion to mechanical energy, and the peak power we can get out of it for a given engine displacement.
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.
It doesn't make economic sense to have both oil burning power plants and an oil generation plant operating simultaneously, since you are doing wasteful conversions for no net gain. Granted, gasoline isn't the same as oil, but it's close enough. Either society places higher economic value on electricity in the grid than oil, or on oil instead of electricity. If oil is really so useful for cars and what not, then stop burning it for electricity! It's true that the oil generation plant can run on alternative energy. That doesn't change the point because electricity is extremely fungible. The alternative energy could be used to power whatever you were burning oil to power.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars
Just add water.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
We have NOT found ways of extracting more energy out of gas to make the cars move forward, we have just done more with the 10% of energy we get out of exploding gas.
I'll just leave this here:
Solid Oxide Fuel Cell
These are very flexible in extracting energy from various hydrocarbons. In fact, because they don't involve combustion of the fuel, they aren't a heat engine. Because they aren't a heat engine, their peak theoretical efficiency is determined by basic thermodynamics and can exceed Carnot efficiency.
There are actual products shipping, but they are currently facility-sized. Smaller, vehicle portable sized models have been demonstrated, but I'm unsure if anyone is actually pursuing vehicle development yet.
My ideal transportation economy would be giant, nuclear-powered reverse combustion plants that synthesize liquid hydrocarbons for use in SOFC-powered electric vehicles. All the benefits of electric cars (zero rpm torque, regenerative braking, etc) coupled with the incredibly high energy density & storage stability of hydrocarbons. Also, the petroleum distribution infrastructure is already present and well-understood; this implies the approach would be a drop-in replacement that doesn't leave legacy ICE vehicles stranded without fuel.
high-performance brake pads that are loaded with known carcinogens
You mean like the Raybestos company that doesn't--heh-heh--sell their asbestos brake pads over the counter anymore?
No need to spend billions on government subsidized electric cars, government subsidized windmills, government subsidized solar panel companies....
now that gas is a renewable resource, it's every bit a "green" as everything else :-)
Hybrids (prius etc) don't have to emit brake dust and instead can use regenerative breaking to collect energy.
The Prius one doesn't work under 8 miles per hour or during maximum braking, but the principles are sound and it wouldn't take much engineering effort...
EVs and hybrids produce less bake dust too, thanks to regenerative breaking.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
How do we know this method has a sane cost? The cost and efficiency numbers are conspicuously absent from the article which states only "the process is still too inefficient to allow a commercial-scale operation". Without numbers the whole better/worse than batteries argument is pointless, except for the fact that if it were more efficient/cheaper than batteries they probably would have made that claim.
You generally use batteries where you need portable supply of electricity.
Most applications of liquid hydrocarbon fuel (petrol or diesel) that I'm aware of are in vehicles, which do need a portable supply of power.
How often do you buy a fridge or dining table?
Rarely. How often does the household buy groceries? Much more often.
Don't the shops deliver things like those?
I thought grocery delivery shops went out of business a decade ago when the dot-com bubble burst.
But some people seem to think they need to choose their vehicle based on edge cases that occur once a year.
Some people formed their habits when they didn't qualify to rent a car. Where I live, there is an eight-year gap from becoming eligible to drive and own a car (17 years) to becoming eligible to rent one (25 years). And for people who work the Sunday shift, the edge case occurs once a week.
I just dont undertand why half the country demonizes just being slightly nice to the environment.
Does car insurance cost substantially less for people who drive to work 150 days a year and cycle 100 days than for people who drive to work 250 days a year?
Plants convert carbon dioxide into usable energy on a scale we can not compete with. That alone makes me feel this venture is impractical, except maybe for PR.
Underground flywheels would work far better for soaking up off-peak power in principle, since electric motors and generators are so efficient.
Gasoline has about 40 kWh/gal of energy in it. So if the process takes no more than 100 kWh to produce a gallon, then the energy cost is a dollar a gallon per cent of cost per kWh.
So penny a kWh power will provide dollar a gallon synthetic gasoline. (Plus capital cost for the plants of perhaps 10%).
http://www.htyp.org/dollar_a_gallon_gasoline
I think I know how to get the cost of power down into the 1-2 cents per kWh level. It involves power satellites and laser propulsion to get the cost of lifting parts to GEO down. If you want to know more ask. hkeithhenson@gmail.com The previous iteration is here. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7898
End MGM. Get prospective parents of boys to Google: Men do complain
First we turn corn into fuel alcohol... and the price of food goes up.
Now...?
In Reason We Trust
Stop importing oil from the arab world, and see their horrendous ideology dry up and disappear!
Three shopping bags is not a large load unless you're a pixie.
How often do you return to the store to buy three more shopping bags' worth of food? Some households in my survey sample habitually buy 1 or 2 weeks' worth of food at once.
If you buy more groceries in one go than would fit in a normal car you'll probably get scurvy
Orange juice has been known since 1593 to prevent scurvy, and with modern refrigeration, it lasts far longer than two weeks. Other packaged fruit juices are usually fortified with vitamin C as well. Milk and bread are the limiting factors. Another limiting factor is not wanting to cycle with a trailer on any road as wide and fast as a state highway, and in my case, the way from home to Walmart includes at least a mile of a road that becomes a state highway once it leaves the city limits. Furthermore, my survey sample includes someone old enough for U.S. Medicare who takes her elderly mother to the store every two weeks, and I don't see how that'd ever happen on a bicycle.
There's a better way to do this. Just grow a bunch of plants, collecting solar energy in chemical form. You can then convert that plant biomass into natural gas and oil via an exothermic process (requiring no energy to be added).
Basically this process would be a version of the Fischer-Tropsch Synthesis used by the Germans in WW2. This may surprise you but WW2 Germans knew how to power conventional cars with wood! First, subject your biomass to a process know as gasification where you burn it in a low-oxygen environment. Such a burn produces a ton of smoke, which contains methane (natural gas) and complex hydrocarbons (oil/tar) as well as other components like carbon monoxide (flammable), hydrogen gas (highly flammable), water vapor and carbon dioxide. If you do this in a refinery environment you could separate out the non-flammable elements, the flammable gasses, and the oil/tar. You can then use the flammable gasses (natural gas plus some others) and oil/tar for anything you typically use fossil fuels for, including producing plastic from the oil which would amount to carbon sequestration.
I just solved the world's energy and carbon pollution problems with smoke. Petrol from air and electricity? Good luck making that as efficient as plants already are.
"Quoting from the article"
Bullshit. You don't change the spelling of words when you quote something, arsehole.
This is a necessary technology for powering devices (not cars - given the conversion/efficiency/pollution costs) that need portable and dense energy sources - such as planes and ships (fast movers - since robotic sail freighters can work off of solar/wind). The idea that we could replace current fossil fuel usage with hydrocarbon-based fuels from sustainable energy sources is possible but rather idiotic. Conversion losses would be significant and would only perpetuate a system that was only possible due to our amazing bounty of fossil fuels.
ALL of our energy comes from solar (fossil fuels, wind, solar energy), radioactive isotopes or in some cases gravity-based (geothermal - though you could consider this solar since the sun is the largest gravity sink affecting us). Of course, we need to convert it from the original source to something that is fit for purpose. Hydrocarbon-based fuels are fit for purpose for high-density energy needs. If we come up with better high-density energy sources, we'll no longer need to convert some of our wind/solar/geo/tidal/... to hydrocarbon-based fuels.
BTW - wouldn't it be amazing if we could price our energy usage based on total cost (e.g. environmental, without government subsidies, military support needs, oil-financed terrorist activity/response, long-term health,...). I wonder how many dollars/gallon gas would cost taking that into account ($10, $15, $20).
From Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air, Chapter 31, Pages 240--
First, the energy requirements for carbon capture from thin air are so enormous,
it seems almost absurd to talk about it (and there’s the worry that raising
the possibility of fixing climate change by this sort of geoengineering might
promote inaction today). But second, I do think we should talk about it,
contemplate how best to do it, and fund research into how to do it better,
because capturing carbon from thin air may turn out to be our last line
of defense, if climate change is as bad as the climate scientists say, and if
humanity fails to take the cheaper and more sensible options that may still
be available today.