Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Turn Air Into Petrol
rippeltippel writes "The Independent reports on a scientific breakthrough which would allow us to synthesize petrol from thin air. Quoting from the article: 'Air Fuel Synthesis in Stockton-on-Tees has produced five liters of petrol since August when it switched on a small refinery that manufactures gasoline from carbon dioxide and water vapor. The company hopes that within two years it will build a larger, commercial-scale plant capable of producing a ton of petrol a day. It also plans to produce green aviation fuel to make airline travel more carbon-neutral. ... Tim Fox, head of energy and the environment at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in London, said: "It sounds too good to be true, but it is true. They are doing it and I've been up there myself and seen it. The innovation is that they have made it happen as a process. It's a small pilot plant capturing air and extracting CO2 from it based on well known principles. It uses well-known and well-established components but what is exciting is that they have put the whole thing together and shown that it can work." Although the process is still in the early developmental stages and needs to take electricity from the national grid to work, the company believes it will eventually be possible to use power from renewable sources such as wind farms or tidal barrages. "We've taken carbon dioxide from air and hydrogen from water and turned these elements into petrol," said Peter Harrison, the company's chief executive, who revealed the breakthrough at a conference at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in London."
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.
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.
might there not be something of value 20-30 years down the road?
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
From an energetic point of view, this is utterly pointless. They use electricity which was produced at 40% efficiency from fossil sources, to turn the same CO2 which came from those fossil fuels back into a fuel at much lower than 100% efficiency.
To go from coal to a fuel, there are processes such a the Fischer tropsch process, as used in South Africa on industrial scale, which are far more efficient.
If you want to use sustainable electricity to produce a fuel, for heaven's sake, just make hydrogen, and be done. Or better still, use the electricity directly - by the time we have excess sustainable electricity, electric cars will be a reality too.
...imagine using energy that cannot be used for internal combustion being used to produce petrol?
This could be a great help during civilization's crossover from hydrocarbon energy to wind/solar/fusion.
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You were wrong dad, you were wrong.
For a fledging technology, it's a good start. Seeing as portable energy will always be less efficient than the grid powered by huge power plants, it's a fair trade. You expend energy in order to turn it into a portable state. Sort of like how rechargeable batteries take more energy to charge than they provide to the device that uses them.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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();
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).
.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?
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.
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!
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"
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
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".
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!
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.