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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."
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.
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.
Assuming you mean metric ton, the cost of a ton of this petrol would be around 380 times the cost of a gallon of the stuff.
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?")
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.
It probably costs an insane amount of money, like most new technology on a tiny scale does. Refining the techniques, finding better ways to power it, and ramping up to a commercial scale could make a real difference, especially when you consider the fact that oil will become more expensive and scarce over time.
...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.
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You were wrong dad, you were wrong.
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?
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.
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."
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.
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
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.
To be fair, gasoline has a decent energy density and there's a lot of legacy equipment that runs on it. If you convert sunlight + CO2 + H20 into gasoline, and burn it, at least that's better than digging it out of the ground, refining it, and releasing more CO2 into the atmosphere.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
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
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=
The energy crisis it solves will be for stuff like jet planes.
I think this technological branch has a better chance of producing solar powered 900+kph airliners than improvements in battery and motor technology. At least it'll do it earlier.
....water will be turned into wine!
Cold fusion violated the known principles of nuclear physics (quantum tunneling and Coulomb repulsion) to produce fusion. This technology only uses electricity to assemble CO2 and H2O into octane (C8H18) in an endothermic process. Anyone who has solved a Gibbs free energy equation could tell you how it works. This technology is actually well suited to being powered by unreliable wind farms and solar plants since it doesn't need a reliable source of power, only a net number of joules supplied. On the other hand, if you use coal to supply it then it is beyond idiotic.
What portable energy source doesn't take more energy to produce than you get out of it? It's just the cost tradeoff of portability.
Add the 60% Tax for the UK market. You've got a bargain!
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
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=
There are also plenty of really important edge cases where this is important anyway - aviation fuel is a notable one (a lot of biofuel research is geared towards finding ways to produce aviation-compatible fuels).
There's also the obvious benefit that if you can make petrol, then you can make pretty much any other type of hydrocarbon. Being able to do that with processivity is a huge breakthrough in and of itself.
Given the relatively short lifespan of cars and the relatively long adoption period of new fuels we would probably just see a a trend over a decade or two where petrol cars are produced in decreasing numbers and alternate energy cars produced in greater numbers. While there is some carbon cost of converting the factories, they have to be upgraded sooner or later even if we stick with petrol. It's unlikely that current cars will be converted in any significant amount.
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();
Probably the waste product of putting all that CO2 back into the air when we burn it. Unless you thought we were just going to build massive warehouses of petrol and never use it?
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
How do you propose to use wind farms to directly power my 2004 corolla?
It seems extremely unlikely that petrol is the most efficient way to move energy around, however, it is a way we have plenty of experience with and we have existing infrastructure that supports it. So that seems a reasonable method.
Sure you could plug your electric car into the a socket and chlarge the batteries from the grid and then use those batteries to power the car (note you are already indirect), but batteries take longer to charge than filling a gas tank.
Why would having gas stations equipied with such a plant and generating gas on site be any worse than having charging stations that they charge electric cars at? Sure if you generate elsewhere and ship you now have transport costs, then again it costs to transmit power as well (and the process might have other features that make it undesirable in some locations).
....what are they going to do with all the free oxygen radicals?
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
.or we can cut out the inefficient middle man and use that power directly instead of converting it into hydrocarbons.
Yeah! Electric cars with windmills on top! A brilliant solution, Sir!
Will
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?
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).
"Wind is already beating most other generation methods except for coal on cost. "
not by any practical measure.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
You think we are going to make a bunch of gasoline and then store it forever? Rather than say burning it in an engine?
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.
It would solve plenty of problems...
It creates a loop whereby the co2 emitted by burning the fuel is then turned back into fuel, much faster than (although obviously similar to) the natural processes by which such fuels were traditionally formed.
It makes other cleaner forms of energy production far more practical, for instance solar, wind and geothermal since the fuel makes for a very convenient energy storage mechanism.
The storage and transportation is even more convenient because there is already infrastructure in place for storing and transporting large quantities of petrol.
Similarly it promises to be compatible with existing technology that makes use of such fuels (eg cars).
Since the infrastructure is already in place, technology like this can be introduced gradually and scale up, you don't have the catch 22 situation that exists with say hydrogen - where there is no distribution network and no incentive to build one because there are no users.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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
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.
This is what I thought people were talking about when I first started hearing the term "smart grid". When I discovered they really meant I was disappointed.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
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"
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.
As someone else pointed out, it's not just a case of energy.
My car carries 60kg (or thereabouts) of petrol (gasoline to the Americans) around with it. But it only does that when the tank is full. On average, it's actually only carrying 30kg of petrol. That makes a huge difference to just how far it can drive itself.
And then, a battery in an electric car, say the Honda EV+, weighs 374 Kg - ten times as much on average - no matter what you do with it or how charged it is. That's not counting the fact that the engine itself might weigh more, etc. That battery alone weighs more than the entire engine in my car, for example.
And weight is one of the huge contributors to not only poor efficiency on the road but efficiency of construction too - from getting the parts made, to shipping them, to assembling them, to repairing them, even to just how much metal you need in the bodywork to hold them safely. And that all adds up, especially when you're carrying lots of that around all day as you drive.
And the other problem is, that amount of weight has to be changed occasionally - so it's not static compared to my "constantly burnt off" petrol, it actually has to be completely replaced (by more infrastructure), recycled, recharged etc. by something else. That's a lot of energy NOT counted in a simple comparison of mpg for two cars, for instance. How do is even out? Nobody's really sure at the moment.
This is also one of the reasons, for instance, that American cars are seen as "gas guzzlers" while European cars (despite being able to tow trailers, load goods, etc. just the same) are more efficient. We just don't carry the same amount of weight around unnecessarily. Some of the Fiat's weigh only slightly more than that battery!
The carbon cost of something is inherently meaningless unless you add up EVERYTHING and often that up is almost impossible. Converting every car in the world to run on batteries would have MASSIVE economic and envrionmental effects, if we even HAD that much lithium around. Just shipping that amount of solid lithium around the world would actually cancel out quite a lot of the savings that you'd expect to see over the lifetime of a converted car, for instance.
Not to mention, we'd have to dispose of everything we were scrapping, and that's not a zero-cost exercise environmentally or economically either, extract huge amounts of lithium, pay companies to do it within the timeframe specified, refine it, convert it, pack it into batteries, test it, provide recycling facilities for it, ship it, and deal with it at end-of-life. And the knock-on effects on every component in the car would also have enormous amounts of sub-projects that would also cost environmentally too.
Yeah, petrol is going to go away, and no extracting it from the air isn't efficient enough to bother with it (even if it's the only way to get petrol any more, it would still cost more than just converting to whatever everyone else is using by then).
New batteries = new engines = new designs = new structures = new supports = new tests = a lot of money and effort to make all our cars twice as heavy and still need (indirectly) to power themselves (at much less efficiency, and much higher reliance on global extraction of metals from copper to gold to lithium) from "dino-juice" because our politicians are too scared to put a nuclear plant down near a voter.
Electric cars are not, and never have been, the answer. We've had them in toys for DECADES, forklifts run off them, and even my milkman has driven around in a milk-float that is entirely reliant on electrical energy since I was a child (1970's, but they were all over Britain in the 60's too). The originals used lead-acid, the new ones use lithium, but they are only efficient for very specific loads and journeys (e.g. once a day, in the morning, after a whole day of charging, etc.)
The problem is the ultimate source of energy. That's oil. That's the problem, not what fancy methods you use to convert it to run your c
Of course it can be done, the issue is just how much energy do you want to hemorrhage while doing it. You can't gain energy going both ways with gasoline.
In any case, I predct more scares down the road if this becomes industrialized -- we're toying with inducing an ice age due to too much CO2 removal.
Oh, and we're making it harder for plants to grow.
Oh, and shorelines are receding, drying up fishing stocks in shallows.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
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".
They need the windmills to cool down the solar cells, which get hot in the sun.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
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!
To the idiot who labelled this a troll, you're the troll.
Cold fusion is exactly the correct response. I've lived long enough to see many.many attempts to make fuel from unconventional sources and all of them fail because of economic and practical arguments that don't go away just because it's claimed to be "carbon-neutral" (it hides the carbon generation further up the supply chain), "provides energy independence" (it never does), "saves the planet"(from what?) and will be fitted into your neighborhood "pretty soon" for cents on the dollar (never happens).
And its not a conspiracy of oil companies. It is a matter of what Bill Clinton memorably phrased as "Arithmetic", better known as Economics Theory 101
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
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();
It sounds like we've got a case of
*puts glasses on*
vaporware.
YEEEAAAAAAAHH!
Using that power directly may well be efficient, but storing it is not and transporting it generally requires static infrastructure (cables) to be built, making it impractical for short term use in remote areas.
Electric cars have large heavy batteries which require a lot of energy and toxic chemicals to make, quickly wear out and need replacing, and take a long time to charge... Also the storage process is in itself lossy.
Being able to pour a liquid fuel into a tank is extremely convenient, and while this process is likely to be less efficient than other energy storage techniques this lesser efficiency could easily be outeighed by the other advantages it offers.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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"
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.
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!
Sandia National Labs was doing this, using solar energy to drive the process, five years ago.
Sandia's Sunshine to Petrol project
I drank what? -- Socrates
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.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
...air..
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.
Developing this means of fuel production (even using coal, which the US has a lot of btw...) could have strategic importance for the US or any other net importer of oil. Since pretty much all military vehicles use petrochemical fuel, an embargo of the US by the oil-rich nations could cripple the US military forces. (Nuke subs probably being the exception) A ready infrastructure able to synthesize hydro-carbon fuel rather than refinement from crude oil provides a means of escape from dependence on oil imports. In the least, it augments fuel producing capability in case of shortage.
If I went around claiming I was an emperor...they'd put me away!
Or attach units to pollution points (smoke stacks) and run from excess industrial heat+solar. Better deal than carbon bitcoins or whatever.
I drank what? -- Socrates
"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
Solar does have storage and 24/7 supply if you use solar thermal with a heat reservoir.
What this does is provide something useful for large scale wind plants to do without having to load balance their inherent instability on a distribution grid.
This gasoline is going to be returned to the vapors rather rapidly via internal combustion engine. Its like the circle of life, but without the singing warthog.
Combustion engines will emerge 50 - 100 years from now as one of the stupidest human inventions of all time.
For the past 100 years combustion engines have wasted 90% or more of the energy offered by gasoline. That means 90% of the gas produced over the last 100 years was vaporized and did nothing more then produce heat, noise and vibrations instead of moving cars forward.
Combustion engines are like incandescent light bulbs, they are both better heaters then they are for the purpose they were intended for. Both are 100+ year old technology that just became so cheap and easy to use that people just gave up trying to make them more efficient.
Even "modern" combustion engines are not much better than the ones create 100 years ago. The only reason why fuel efficiency has improved over 100 years is because we are building are cars with lighter materials with "marginal" improvements in the way combustion engines actually work. 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. Hybrids are nothing more than putting bandaids on a gaping wound.
History lessons in the 22nd century will look back and laugh at the follies of the 20th century for having done nothing to innovate and move past the combustion engine. The fact that after 100 years we have nearly depleted our fossil fuel reserves on something as wasteful as the combustion engine will be the biggest most retarded invention in human history.
So while I agree that hydrocarbons are a great store for energy, humans have wasted that store in epic proportions!
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I would be more impressed if they made something useful like gasoline, instead of this petrol stuff!
love is just extroverted narcissism
Maybe you should build a grid in the USA. Your current grid looks like one from a third world country.
I love comments like yours that trivialize problems of scale.
The U.S. has issues of scale that only a few other countries share when it comes to delivering utilities and other forms of infrastructure to its citizens. It's easy to sit in a country the size of a single U.S. state and talk about how things would be better if the U.S. just did this or that differently, but the fact of the matter is that because of where the population centers are in the U.S. and just how much land they have that's sparsely populated, many of the models that work for densely-populated, smaller countries simply do not apply very well when applied to the entirety of the U.S.. Some of them work just fine when applied on a smaller scale, such as in urban centers, but there are enough tracts of sparsely populated land over rough terrain in the U.S. that you simply cannot feasibly and economically deploy some infrastructure in certain areas, and those areas can be very large.
Now, none of that is to say that the grid system in the U.S. couldn't use some improvement. It, as with several other utilities, could use some serious upgrades. And the suggestions you have are things that the U.S. could definitely use. But when you frame your thinking by looking at it as a single country that has nearly the same land area as Europe yet with only 40% of the population, you start to realize just why it takes awhile to deploy some of these things.
I believe you are correct. Here are some references to facts to help this discussion a little:
http://atomicinsights.com/2009/10/quick-graph-of-us-electricity-generation-showing-the-breakdown-of-the-wind-solar-biomass-geothermal-portion.html
http://2ndgreenrevolution.com/2010/05/29/graphic-worth-a-thousand-words-u-s-energy-breakdown/
I'm no expert in this field, but I have a buddy that buys energy at PG&E that tell me that we care most about cost and reliability (coal) and less about sources that introduce inpredictability and power fluctuation into a grid that needs to maintain a very stable flow of electrons. Buffers, such as batteries and diesel, exist to help stabilize the infrastructure. These companies employ heartless economists that are trying to get the most-per-dollar they can get, which factors in quite a few substantial government subsidies for renewable energy (federal and state).
In the US, our grid is set up such that anybody is free to push electrons into the grid and roll the meter that tracks his/her usage in the opposite direction. Lots of people do this with solar power - feeding it into the grid to reduce coal usage a little and then pulling from the grid at night when there is no sunlight. The technology we use to manage our grid is very flexible and can be as diverse as economics and politics allow it to be.
Do you accept bitcoin?
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
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.
Unlike the current grid, fed by dammed hydro, coal, gas, nuclear, and infinitesimal amounts of wind, solar, and gasification.
huh?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Just like the Internet pipes.
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.
Brazil (a third world country BTW, with slightly lower population density as the US) is basically as big as the USA. We have a national power grid that covers every part of the country that's physically possible (i.e, it doesn't cross the freakin' Amazon river, but come on...). Some power plant goes down in Natal (extreme northeast)? No problem, the Itaipú dam (near extreme South) turns on another reactor. As a citizen of a third world country, I must say I'm offended by the GP's comparison. The US grid is much, much worse than ours.
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.
Once the CO2 returns to normal levels, yes, obviously we would keep it in the air fro food to grow. D.uh.
The problem is we put more CO2 into the air then what can be readily returned. 40% of the CO2 we put into the air is more then what can be absorbed by the carbon cycle.
Yes, this doesn't end the need for cleaner fuels, but it helps scrub the air. Assuming it really works. Power these with a wind turbine or a solar plant.
Or power a large area of them with a nuclear plant. The advantage of that is you can build it in the middle of nowhere since you aren't running lines anywhere. You could, literally, put it on an island.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Have you ever been to a third world country? Or just hyperboling out of your ass? All parts of the incredibly large contry have power 24 -7, even the crazy in the middle of nowhere rural parts. The infrastructure is aging, but is repaired as it breaks.
The best decisions are always the most pragmatic. All of the sources you listed (except compressed air) are actively being developed in the most economically sensible way.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
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.
If they are efficient or could become efficient, then go for it. However, as many other pointed out here, the synthesis of oil from CO2 and water is quite ineffective. To produce H2 or methane is also inefficient, but more efficient than the oil thing from the article.
IMHO it is not helpful to search for methods, which falsely imply that we can go on like we did in the past. We have to reduce our energy consumption by 80% to get rid of the fossil oil problem. And we need to distribute energy, but we have more efficient ways to do it than use artificial generated oil. For example, we could use DC lines for long distance electricity transportation.
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't put sunshine, blowing wind or flowing water in your gas tank. Internal combustion engines are only capable of converting molecules with high energy atomic bonds to molecules of lower energy bonds, and extracting work from the resulting high kinetic energy of the resulting molecules.
In order to use sunlight in your internal combustion engine, you must first convert the electromagnetic energy of the photons into the bonding energy in a molecule. If you use fossil fuels, that conversion happened through photosynthesis tens-of-thousands to millions of years ago.
Again, I'm a strong advocate of electrification but we will never NOT need liquid hydrocarbons. It's too useful a substance. Having multiple sources for this substance is protection against any one of those sources failing, and sources that are renewable are preferable over sources that are not for a whole host of reasons.
=Smidge=
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.
It doesn't matter. If all forms of energy were equivalent, nobody would spend billions digging oil out of the ground in politically unstable regions of the world. We'd just build 20% more power plants and use that energy to power all our cars, airplanes and container vessels. But we can't, and that's the point. All those things run on oil, and nobody has figured out how to run them on generic electricity.
""saves the planet"(from what?)"
from an extreme over abundance of CO2.
Since this technology was done by Sandia and works, it isn't Cold Fusion; which has never worked. Now, this specific company might be committing fraud, sure.
https://share.sandia.gov/news/resources/releases/2007/sunshine.html
" just because it's claimed to be "carbon-neutral" (it hides the carbon generation further up the supply chain)"
care to explain?
With this technology, you would use Wind, Solar or Nuclear to power it. Hopefully we could use it it 'scrub' the CO2 down to preindustrialized levels.
No we should all go singing praises and assume the problem is solved; but that doesn't mean we should ignore possible solution. It only means we should use science and critical thinking to find out if it works, the cost, and scalability.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
There's also the obvious benefit that if you can make petrol, then you can make pretty much any other type of hydrocarbon. Being able to do that with processivity is a huge breakthrough in and of itself.
This. The next news article will be, 'Scientists Turn Air Into Plastic', and it should get a lot more attention.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
we still don't have any cars running on ethanol
...in North America, S America, in particular Brazil have cars that can run on anything from 0-100% ethanol and it's been that way since the 1970's oil crisis. N. America will move toward hydrogen fuel cells to power cars like the volt, the captains of industry want it that way and have planned for it to be that way since the mid 1990. Few people want planet wide ethanol because of the land use problems it would create, even now there are big problems in Indonesia because palm oil plantations are mowing down the rain forest at an alarming rate.
Oddly enough the push for Indonesia to be the "palm oil capital of the world" was triggered a few years back when the US and EU in what I think was a genuine attempt to be "green" offered subsides for ethanol producers. In the US it was basically pork for corn farmers, the EU were happy to import it from the Indonesians and others.
What humanity needs, is a serious fact based investigation into energy production in the same way it did in recent history with both the LHC and IPCC. It's really is hard to think of another industry with more economic and political clout than the Fossil Fuel industry. Our lives literally depend on it, and yet like smoking it will clearly kill us in the long run. Being a bit of a geek it took me quite some time to figure it out, but I have now come to the conclusion that pollution is a human problem, not a technical one. I know how a hydrogen fuel cell works, but humans?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
There are known chemical processes for converting coal to gasoline and diesel. If your aim is to convert coal the more direct chemical process is probably more efficient.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_fuel
Looking at the Wikipedia article, I'm guessing that they are using a similar process, except that they use electricity to make Syngas, and then the established processes to produce fuel. Sysgas is just Hydrogen and Corbon Monoxide. You can use water electrolysis to get the Hydrogen. There are catalysts that can break down Carbon Dioxide when heated, so you can generate Carbon Monoxide that way. (I'm having a hard time finding a reference, but I remember reading about it a few years ago).
I think another point in its favor is we have so much infrastructure built around the internal combustion engine that is nice that we can create fuel for these things with energy and air - no doubt such fuel will be expensive but at least it is another source
I don't think the Institute is meant to teach Tim Fox anything
Apprehension of basic science can yet still be a source of bewonderment (to a journalist)
The foremost argument against current renewable energy sources is that the electricity cannot be easily stored and transported for storage
Avoid your fears , or wonder at the past
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
This process will only transfer energy from one location to a gas tank, at a net loss of energy.
Which is exactly the same thing that happens with oil drilling, isn't it?
Ezekiel 23:20
Even theoretically it won't take the same energy. Second law of thermodynamics ftw!
Oil.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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
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.
I have an even better way to clean CO2 from the air. The equipment incorporates a solar collector and storage cells and can be maintained by relatively low-skilled labour.
The carbon gathering process is facilitated by some incredibly sophisticated enzymatic chemistry and electronic nanotechnology, and can be made to produce a variety of storage substrates of different densities and molecular chain weights and structures.
The best bit is that this equipment is self-replicating, provides food for the workers maintaining it, and even comes in a variety of colours and flavours.
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
I sure hope you are right because in my area there is a huge pumped-storage plant and 56 wind turbines. To top it off we have a large amount of salt(Morton Salt) so there should be enough places for air reservoir plants. It would be nice if they could produce our gasoline needs here too.
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........
Better question: Assuming this device is compact enough to fit in the footprint of the average gas station, why wouldn't we each have one of our own, and thus eliminate the dependence on oil cartels?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Much lighter than current batteries... but is it more efficient?
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
They need the windmills to cool down the solar cells, which get hot in the sun.
Wouldn't Sterling engines and Peltier coolers be more efficient?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Shut up with your sciencey talk.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Do you think it will always be cheaper to manufacture batteries to store renewable electricity than to store renewable electricity in hydrocarbons?
Actually, it's slightly better than carbon neutral (assuming green energy inputs) because every gallon of gas you're burning that's created through this process is offsetting a gallon of gas that would otherwise be contributing additional CO2 to the atmosphere.
The Nazis thought so, and no I'm not going Godwin on you, it just the good'ol synfuel being revisited on you. Honestly they would be better off hooking this thingy up to a cement kiln or a coal fired power plant and getting some concentrated CO2 to extract rather than trying to get parts per million out of the atmosphere but that way it's hard to get the grants and subsidies to get this money-pit rolling.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
TFA only lightly touches on the economics but recognizes that it must scale to be cost competitive with producing a gallon of gas from stuff you pull from the ground. That it provides a potential way to time-shift (admittedly in-efficiently) energy delivery from intermittent green energy sources (solar, wind) is another benefit figuring into the TCO.
It may, in fact, turn into a pig-in-a-poke but there's reason to believe that if it can scale and efficiency can be improved there's a business case.
Running your petrol engine at optimal RPMs and power output can greatly improve this. The problem is that in a car the engine can not run at a constant speed, and that causes losses. It's one of the reasons those hybrids are so fuel efficient.
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
Shut up with your sciencey talk.
Sorry.
Shoulda just stuck to the Blackjack and hookers...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
For stuff like wind and solar there's another thing: reliability. Wind can come and go in minutes or even seconds, so one moment you have full output from your wind farm, the next you have nothing. That can upset the grid badly and there are no good solutions for that, yet.
Using wind energy to make petrol this way could help a lot, assuming the process can start up and shut down easily. When the wind blows, you produce petrol, when the wind stops, you sit and wait. Production should average out over time, and the petrol becomes an energy store. You subsequently run a generator on that petrol, and have reliable power supply to the net.
The cocaine must have gotten to your head.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
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...
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
...or we can cut out the inefficient middle man and use that power directly instead of converting it into hydrocarbons.
I presume you have designs for solar powered or battery powered aeroplanes then?
Aviation fuel is a big problem for renewables- that's one of the main drivers for bio-fuel research. It's also one of the main areas they've name dropped in TFA. If you think of this as a battery/energy storage component to renewable power (wind/solar/tidal/etc.) as opposed to a source of energy in its own right then the concept makes more sense.
Not necessarily as much sense as the alternatives (batteries, hydrogen, bio-fuel), but still worth researching.
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.
Nope...I'd rather fill my car up with good old gasoline....and hot rod around town in it!!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Pay no attention to the delicious but highly radioactive fig pudding byproduct.
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.
"For example, we could use DC lines for long distance electricity transportation."
Last I looked, Tesla won out over Edison on the A/C vs D/C thing specifically because A/C is more efficient at long distance transmission. Like, a lot more...
Look, I'm not the kind of guy who is interested in overrunning the planet with "progress", but your vision of a future where we cut energy requirements by 80% will never... ever... happen. We have to deal with reality. Reality has it that the masses are not going to cooperatively move toward some idealistic utopia. Beyond the sterile facts, figures, and efficiencies, are people, politics, and chaos in the world that real solutions have to navigate through. That invariably means stepping stones. If technology such as that in the article represents a stepping stone towards a viable solution, I'm all for it. If it means globally reducing dependence upon foreign energy sources, it could be a "win" all around.
If you think you have a better idea, then you should go out and raise a billion dollars and do something about it. The world is waiting. In the meantime, the naysayer thing is a bit tiresome.
Also you can use it to load balance excess power on the grid.
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.
Not only are the issues of scale a problem, but even if there were a plan for revitalization to rework the entire grid, there are only a couple entities with the resources to pull it off. The costs are enormous, the ROI a VERY long term proposition, and the federal/state/local legal resistance to making changes to infrastructure are endless.
For example, I would be all for having underground power and utilities, everywhere. No more unsightly telephone telephone/utility poles that require a continual source of replenishment, and no more risk of something hot falling down and zapping people, objects or landscape which is a common cause of fire. But the costs are enormous. Where would you trench the lines? Who would do all that work? Where would the revenue come from to pay for all that work. It's not as simple as burying an extension cord in your back yard. All totaled, this problem alone is so big that it just doesn't get touched.
And that's just door-to-door delivery. Managing changes to the greater grid infrastructure would be far worse. This is not federally regulated, so it's not like the government can just sweep in, throw a mandate and a bunch of money at it, and make it happen. That would take an act of Congress...
I never suggested there wasn't a European grid. What I suggested was that America faces an entirely different problem than Europe thanks to its significantly lower population density while taking up nearly the same land area. Less people means both less money and less reasons to expand infrastructure to hard-to-reach places.
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.
The problem with D/C is not the efficienty (I assumed that too), it is hard to transform from one voltage to another. The thing with the 80% comes from the following scenario. Our present energy mix is primarily based on fossil fuels. They will run out and the burn products modify our climate. Therefore, we have to replace them. Electricity is around 1/3 of our energy usage, the rest is directly linked to fossil fuels. We will not be able to built enough nuclear plants to produce all our energy. As, we would run in a resource shortage on Uranium and other reactor types are not necessarily feasible. To replace all fossil fuel with renewable energy is not possible over night.
The above mentioned scenario implies that we stop use fossil fuel and as a replacement we use renewable energy. However, at a mid range time horizon that can only cover about 20% of our energy usage of today.
So it is more a "What are the alternatives?"-question. In Germany, they insulated approx. 20% of their homes, driven by rising oil and gas prices, as well as laws on emissions and efficiency of heating systems. They assume that they can half the energy consumption of houses in the next 10 years.
In the long run, we have to come to a more energy efficient way of live (in Western countries). And from my point of view it is either an utopia or dystopia, which awaits the next generation. Depends on what we do.
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. ---
How many cars do you see that we're built in the 80s? Not too many right.
Cars may not be disposable put they do have an operational lifetime of decades not centuries.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
How do you propose to use wind farms to directly power my 2004 corolla?
Well first step is to build this huge metal grid over the tops of all roads and highways and juice it up...
:P
then we put a rod on your car that reaches up and brushes against the grid...
what..works for bumper cars
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.
The cocaine must have gotten to your head.
It is a hell of a drug.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
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.
Just picking up oil that already exists in the ground is quite cheap, but that's using up existing portable containers of energy, not storing energy in a portable energy container. Think of it as using up already-existing buckets of paint, as opposed to producing new paint and putting it in a bucket.
Actually producing oil from energy plus other basic components is actually quite energy-expensive.
Ok, now you are just being a goddamn moron.
What the matter, your portugese rejects all butt-hurt over the nerds explaining how brazilan papers are going to get fucked in the ass for picking a fight with Google news in the other thread? You gotta come pollute other threads too?
Take a look at this map: http://www.geonames.org/img/800px-GeonamesDensity.png
Population density of brazil is all packed up against the coast. Of course you have a good grid, in your geography it's easy.
Your assertion of "covering the population" is just stupid. If even half the US has electricity, the grid in the US is both bigger, and better than the grid in brazil. And, you fucking morons are spending a lot of money lighting up what is essentially jungle-wasteland in the central Amazon basin for four or five guys living in a hut somewhere? LOL. That's absolutely ridiculous. In the US, people who are off the grid are often surrounded by neighbors who are on the grid. It's a choice, and not influenced by some third-world shithole idiot's idea of a good penis measuring contest.
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"
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
First, let me say that I've lived in both the US and Brazil, and I'm an Electrical Engineer.
Second, Brazil is on the verge of being considered "developed," if I understand rightly, so I object to calling it third world in the first place. It's actually a great place to live.
Third, from personal experience, Brazil's grid simply isn't better than the US's. For example, the power quality in Brazil is very sketchy. Pay attention to how the lights dim and brighten, for example. That will happen in a US home when the air conditioning compressor turns on, but that's about it. In Brazil, it's the fault of the power grid itself. (But having a large favela nearby didn't help much, either.) I've seen many computers with fried power supplies due brownouts in Brazil's grid; always use a UPS!
Fourth, distance matters when it comes to power generation. Turning on an extra station in the South can help with load problems, but that also introduces other issues due to geography. Much better is to start up another station nearer to where the failed plant is.
Fifth, while the US doesn't have a national grid, the individual grids are very interconnected, with power being transferred between them constantly. If one grid has a shortage, a neighboring grid will sell its extra capacity to them. These interconnections are constantly increasing, to the point that the US effectively does have a national grid.
The fact of the matter is that the US consumes an insane amount of electricity: over 3x that of China and 5x that of Brazil, per capita. More than the entire EU combined. Only Canada and Australia have to deal with such a large per capita consumption and a large, geographically dispersed population. The US grid system works very well, and out of necessity. If it worked as poorly as people think, there's no way the grid would ever keep up with that kind of demand.
I know, right! I was so suprised when I found out that our grid in the United States was powered by one big plant in the middle of the country. And even more suprising is that it is fueld by the bodies of all the uninsured people we heartlessly let die on the front steps of our hospitals. But then again I guess that explains the constant black outs we experience here. Dumbass!
The nice thing about PV is that it pushes electrons into the grid at peak usage times. That lowers the peak demand build needs of the grid.
Learn to love Alaska
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.
Because if the electrical energy companies found a way to create large amounts of petrol at, say, 10$ per barrel, they could easily start using 100$ stacks as bricks to build the company headquarters.
Most energy companies are not exactly posting huge profits by the way. Oil companies excepted, but they've got nothing to do with the energy grid.
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.
That is one of the big myths surrounding DC vs. AC.
These days (with solid state components etc.) it's really easy to transfer HVDC over long distances and step-down that voltage to usable power either on AC or DC without needing to synchronize grids, worrying about the skin effect or capacitance losses. HVDC is actually more efficient and cost-effective and used for practically all new high voltage designs these days.
Back in the day (before the early 1960's) AC was indeed more 'easy' to deploy as transformers (spools of wire) are freaking cheap although the losses are significant. But HVAC also introduces the skin effect for high voltage and has the problem that transformers (an RC network) introduces phase shifts while requiring multiple HVAC networks to be synchronized before additional capacity can be generated or require really, really expensive and lossy synchronizers (basically AC->DC->AC converters)
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
and that is why we have the, seemingly ignored, 10th amendment. get back to the constitution and things would be better for all
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
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?
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
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.
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).
Biomass and Fischer-Tropsch is more efficient, both in energy, and in land use.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
It MIGHT be more efficient in terms of net energy - which I don't necessarily accept since biomass tops out at ~6% efficiency under the best of conditions, but let's say that it is just for the sake of discussion. (I'm not sure how you can even make that assertion unless you know more about the process than the article gives.)
Biomass needs water. The easiest place to get bountiful, reliable sunlight is also the hardest place to get water: the desert. Plop an air-to-hydrocarbon machine in the middle of the Sahara with a bunch of solar PV and the whole thing will operate completely unmanned for months at a time. And unless you can get away with seawater, you are now using up fresh water resources that are more important that the oil you're trying to displace... you can't have a modern economy or industry without fuel, but you can't have life without water!
=Smidge=
Sugar cane makes 14% photochemical efficiency, Fisher-Tropsch 50%. PV is 15% tops, realistically, electrolysis 25% unless you get expensive, CO2 extraction and hydrocarbon fixation don't even enter the equation. Also, the method I described is easily scalable, and lower on capital costs. GMOs resistant to salinity exist, reverse osmosis is cheap enough anyway, I don't see how someone could complain about fresh water. Energy, yes, water, no. And screw food prices - there is plenty of profit margin and inefficiencies to be removed before anything is close to being a problem. Not to forget canned goods - extremely efficient in a market economy.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
Sugar cane makes 14% photochemical efficiency
Bullshit. We're not going any farther until you demonstrate that.
"One of the most efficient crop plants is sugar cane, which has been shown to store up to 1% of the incident visible radiation over a period of one year."
I support biofuels as well but don't confuse theoretical limits or lab experiments with practical reality. Give your source.
=Smidge=
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency Oops. Sorry about that. My point is weakened, but stands - crop fields are cheaper per acre (hence per watt) that PV.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
My point is weakened, but stands
Really? I thought your point was it's more efficient, not cheaper. I'm basing this on the time you said:
Biomass and Fischer-Tropsch is more efficient, both in energy, and in land use.
Now it's money. Huh. Except PV is essentially a one-time cost whereas farming is a continuous expense, so it's not at all clear how tilling the soil (or skimming te oceans) is a less expensive option. Now you have a whole new assertion you need to provide support for - and you haven't even supported your last assertion!
=Smidge=
PV panels need to be cleaned. Some biomass cultures grow like weeds - they need no farming, worst case, some water. All you need to scoop up all that energy is tractor/combine which can have a monstrous average power collection capacity (proportional to the size of the field). That machine costs multiple orders of magnitude less than PV, same goes for maintenance. syngas to petrol process starting from biomass is quite more efficient than electrolysis and CO2 scavenging from air. Plants can run on diffuse sunlight, unlike PV. They don't need special pointing or cooling arrangements, and don't need extra power storage facilities to integrate with the grid, the energy conversion equipment is cheaper and more scalable per unit (steel and cheap catalysts vs transistors in an inverter). The PV grid needs to be close to civilization due to powerlines, taking up logistically valuable land, biomass crops can be treated like distant oil fields. Cheaper in my mind equates to (financially) efficient - does it not?
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
Concede or defend your comment about efficiency before moving on. I'm not chasing after your goalposts.
=Smidge=
I retain my viewpoint on capital efficiency - lets agree to disagree, I guess I wasn't to clear in my expression of opinion initially, leading to a moving goalpost effect - I hate it myself - again, sorry.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.