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."
Net energy? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that this consumes far more energy than it "creates".
Re:Net energy? (Score:5, Insightful)
fight against global warming (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Net energy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Net energy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Pointless... (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Net energy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely. But the key point here is not how much energy it takes to create a litre of petrol, or other hydrocarbon. It's that that energy can come from a static source - solar power, wind power, hydro, anything that can generate electricity but which is too difficult to put into a compact form - and turn it into an energy dense substance that we already know how to deal with. It turns hydrocarbons from an energy source into an energy storage mechanism.
So we could, hypothetically speaking, stick some massive solar farms in the middle of the Sahara, Death Valley, the Australian outback, and produce the world's petroleum needs by extracting the carbon and hydrogen from the atmosphere. The petroleum gets burnt; the carbon and hydrogen go back into the atmosphere as water and carbon dioxide, and the process starts again. No net change to the world's atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.
We are a long way from that goal, but this puts us a significant step forward toward that end goal.
Re:Net energy? (Score:5, Insightful)
and batteries cannot store at sane cost significant enough amount of energy. ...
There is a reason why massive battery arrays really don't exist
Re:Running uphill to coast downhill (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:cold fusion fraud again? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Net energy? (Score:4, Insightful)
Batteries are heavy, expensive, and wear out. This would be much better even at less efficiency.
Re:cold fusion fraud again? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Net energy? (Score:4, Insightful)
True, but you can't use batteries for everything. Airliners won't fly on batteries, for example.
Re:cold fusion fraud again? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Net energy? (Score:3, Insightful)
Because there are already millions of cars out there without the capability to run on electricity. Replacing them all would consume such amounts of energy and vast amounts of material resources that it'd probably be more environmentally friendly just to continue operating them on petrol extracted from the earth. However if you can power them somehow on energy not extracted from the earth we 1: reduce the number of oil wells, which damage ecosystems, and 2: produce no net increase in CO2 because any CO2 released originally extracted from the atmosphere.
Re:cold fusion fraud again? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Oil imports (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:cold fusion fraud again? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Net energy? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right. While we're at it, let's set a few more things straight:
- We will *never* power the entire world on hydro. Therefore we should stop building dams, and destroy all existing ones.
- We will *never* be able to power all vehicles on diesel. Therefore we should stop investing in diesel technology.
- We will *never* be able to persuade all hot women in the world to sleep with me. Therefore I should turn gay.
The energy landscape of the future will look a lot like today's: Lots of diverse generation methods, storage methods, transport methods... all mixed up and hotch-potched together. There will be no one-solution-to-rule-them-all, and nobody is expecting one.Just because this air-into-fuel gizmo can't power *all* of the world's cars (although that might be debatable) it doesn't mean it couldn't power some of them. And that would be very useful.
Re:Net energy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Given that nobody (except Iceland) is at 100% renewable energy, yes it does matter. Say you consume 100 TWh a year. Say 25 TWh of that comes from renewables, the rest from fossil fuels (ignore nuclear to keep this simple). Say petrol (gasoline) accounts for 10 TWh of your energy use. And say this process requires 2x as much energy as it creates in petrol.
If you create all your petrol using renewables to power this process, then you're reducing your fossil fuel consumption by 10 TWh, but increasing your renewable consumption by 20 TWh. However, you only have 25 TWh of installed renewables capacity. So the 20 TWh of renewables this process consumes displaces 20 TWh of other consumption which used to come from renewables. To make up for that shortfall, you have to burn 20 TWh more fossil fuels.
You might have a point, but it's entirely impossible to tell because the numbers are pulled directly from your ass. (No offense.)
You cannot pick and choose where your power comes from. If your renewables production is static and less than 100%, then nothing you do on the consumption side matters. Once you exceed that static amount of renewables production capacity, every new power drain you add comes entirely from fossil fuels.
I believe you are incorrect. Ask anybody who has successfully moved their house off the grid if they can pick and choose where their power comes from. Yes, if you have your big Air-to-Petrol plant hooked directly up to the grid, you can't choose. But there are plenty of other viable methods, and when you don't have a constant need for reliable power (like say a factory or even a house does) you can easily get away with a wind/solar farm powering your plant. This is even more true when you're in the business of converting excess energy into something transportable and easily stored.
Re:cold fusion fraud again? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:cold fusion fraud again? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Net energy? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that this consumes far more energy than it "creates".
How is this insightful? This is an energy _storage_ system, not an energy generation system. The point is that it creates fuel that works in all kinds of legacy equipment like gasoline cars. Since all the material it uses can come from the atmosphere, the eventual burning of the fuel it creates is carbon-neutral. Since it can be created in situ anywhere using electricity, the infrastructure that transports petroleum around can go away, reducing the number of spills. Same for drilling accidents and spills. We still have to wait and see how efficient this can be in large scale production, of course, but mis-characterizing what this represents isn't helpful.
Re:cold fusion fraud again? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:cold fusion fraud again? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [atomicinsights.com]
http://2ndgreenrevolution.com/2010/05/29/graphic-worth-a-thousand-words-u-s-energy-breakdown/ [2ndgreenrevolution.com]
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.
There is a real point to this (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:You can use electricity for lights, you know. (Score:4, Insightful)
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=
Re:Net energy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed, amd what's more, it allows automobiles to use renewable energy without a carbon footprint, since the carbon it emits originally came from modern air.
Re:Oil imports (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Net energy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear may well be on the way out, but not because it is inefficient or unworthy of use. We're just afraid of it.
And talking about plant fuel anything makes me start thinking of ethanol. You won't fuel the modern era with something that takes as long to renew as plants do and whose planting competes with arable land for food.