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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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
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.
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();
Not having to import oil from middle eastern countries would be a worthy goal.
Agreed. Not starting wars to ensure our premiere access to that oil would be another.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
.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.
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.
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
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.
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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=
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
Until we have mini cold fusion reactors in our homes and cars, there isn't going to be a silver bullet solution to everything. You need to pursue an all of the above strategy. That means using and improving public transportation where it makes sense (Manhattan is a good place for it, Houston is not). Give people the ability to use their bicycles to get around (add bikes lines and green-ways where it makes sense and where it can improve neighborhoods).
This fallacy of "If it doesn't fix the whole, entire problem, for everyone, all at once, for all time, then we won't do it" needs to stop.
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.
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.