Scientists Turn Air Into Petrol 580
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."
Re:Net energy? (Score:5, Informative)
What matters is that they take energy and store it in a convenient, portable form. We have many millions of machines which run on petrol, and replacing all those machines with equivalents which run on batteries would require a huge consumption of energy. So there's merit in keeping them going.
Also, this process can take energy for example in periods of strong wind when there's a surplus of 'green' energy, and store it for periods of calm. My home is entirely wind-powered and consequently I have a huge bank of lead-acid batteries as energy storage for calm weather - they aren't very efficient, but they do what's needed. If this 'air (plus electricity) to fuel' process is at least as efficient as a lead acid battery, it's a win.
Re:Net energy? (Score:3, Informative)
does that really matter if they are going to power it using renewable energy?
Sounds like a great way to make clean energy more dirty! Energy loss does matter.
Re:Net energy? (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, if the average weight of you tank of petrol, as it is used up, is significantly less than your stack of batteries would be (which don't get any lighter as you use them up), then the batteries can be worse. It will take more energy to push your heavy, battery laiden car around than it will to push the petrol powered one. As long as the petrol is coming from a renewable source like airborne CO2 captured with solar or wind generated electricity, then you've eliminated it's biggest drawbacks, making it carbon neutral, and no longer a scarce and depletable resource.
Re:cold fusion fraud again? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Not so fast (Score:5, Informative)
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"."
Re:cold fusion fraud again? (Score:5, Informative)
Sandia National Labs was doing this [sandia.gov], using solar energy to drive the process, five years ago.
Sandia's Sunshine to Petrol project [sandia.gov]
Re:cold fusion fraud again? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Net energy? (Score:3, Informative)
TED: The missing link to renewable energy [ted.com]
Re:cold fusion fraud again? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:cold fusion fraud again? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]). 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 [wikipedia.org]). 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.
Re:cold fusion fraud again? (Score:3, Informative)
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.