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)
Re:Net energy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Net energy? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Everyone seems to have forgotten about the other pollution that comes from burning petrol. I live next to a main road and the soot/dust is horrendous.
That's brake dust & diesel particulate, mostly (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [phys.org]. 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.
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
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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TED: The missing link to renewable energy [ted.com]
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There is a reason why massive battery arrays really don't exist ...
Don't tell BOB that...
http://inhabitat.com/bob-americas-biggest-sodium-sulfur-battery-powers-a-texas-town/ [inhabitat.com]
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and batteries cannot store at sane cost significant enough amount of energy. ...
There is a reason why massive battery arrays really don't exist
I guess it depends on your definition of "massive", but 36 Mega-watt hours is pretty big:
http://cleantechnica.com/2012/01/03/china-byd-launch-largest-battery-energy-storage-station/ [cleantechnica.com]
Re: (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
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Actually, batteries do get lighter when you use them.
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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.
Since you can recover much of the energy spent in accelerating that mass of batteries when you decelerate, as well as capture much of the energy spent getting it up the hill when you go downhill, most of the cost of carrying around the extra weight is rolling resistance, which is a small fraction of the extra weight. So carrying extra battery weight isn't as detrimental as it might seem.
A conventional car can't recapture this energy - but a hybrid can, which is why hybrids tend to get better mileage in th
Re:Net energy? (Score:4, Interesting)
A conventional car can't recapture this energy - but a hybrid can
Actually, petrol-powered Formula 1 racers have recently been made legal with regenerative braking. It was illegal before. And no, they don't have hub motors that turn into generators, nor big-ass batteries to charge up.
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They're not mutually exclusive.
Re:Net energy? (Score:4, Insightful)
Batteries are heavy, expensive, and wear out. This would be much better even at less efficiency.
Re:Net energy? (Score:4, Insightful)
True, but you can't use batteries for everything. Airliners won't fly on batteries, for example.
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.
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.
I would be impressed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I would be impressed (Score:5, Funny)
I would be more impressed if they made something useful like gasoline, instead of this petrol stuff!
Indeed, I can barely afford gasoline, let alone that expensive petrol they have in Britain.
Synthetic Fossil Fuels (E4) (Score:3)
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
Re: (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 rel
Re:Net energy? (Score:4, Interesting)
Batteries don't grow on trees- they cost energy (and some fairly scarce and/or toxic materials) to make.
You've got to compare the overall cost of building a car with a petrol-based engine and powering it with synthetic fuel, with building a car with great big battery cells and then transporting energy to it by wire.
I bet the batteries still win, but then this is a brand new technology. It'll be interesting to see if they can fulfil their promised efficiency improvements as the technology progresses.
The other obvious use is aviation fuel. I'm not aware of any sensible design for a practical aeroplane powered by batteries. Bio-fuel is the main competitor in that space, so the same logic applies.
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.
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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.
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Yes, because if you have a source of renewable electricity, it is better to use it as electricity to cut down the amount of fossil generated electricity.
Re:Net energy? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
That is, your renewables consumption remained at 25 TWh. Your fossil fuel first went down by 10 TWh, but then increased by 20 TWh. So powering this process with renewables resulted in a net 10 TWh increase in the consumption of fossil fuels.
Don't make the mistake of mixing up consumption with production. 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.
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: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.
NIMOY (Score:4, Funny)
Crocodile Dundee called. He said, "Not in my Outback yard!"
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Doesn't matter really, because for wind farms, solar etc. this is way better store of energy than batteries.
1) Build a huge ass solar plant in desert
2) Have these turn it all into gasoline
3) Haul the gasoline on cheapest energy consumption method to everywhere in the world
4) PROFIT
OR
Have an existing wind farm/solar plant but it produces more at times than can be consumed nearby. Use these to turn the excess into gasoline. When there is no wind or sun shine burn the gasoline to supply the baseline, all exces
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Build a huge-assed jojoba farm in the desert. It produces hydrocarbon oils from solar power and the best part is the equipment is self-assembling and self-replicating.
The one thing we're going to need in any of these endeavours is scale, and nothing does scale like biology. We just need to devote our attention to giving it enough help.
The problem being that gardening isn't sexy new technology that you can print headlines about and make profits from patenting.
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By and large, the only skill the alchemists of Ankh-Morpork had discovered so far was the ability to turn gold into less gold.
-- Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures
However with Wind Farms (Score:3)
However the technology could draw it's energy from Offshore Wind Farms [greenporthull.co.uk], which often stand idle because wind doesn't coincide with peak demand; this is potentially real winner.
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.
Running uphill to coast downhill (Score:2)
...net energy gain -200%
Re:Running uphill to coast downhill (Score:5, Interesting)
might there not be something of value 20-30 years down the road?
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: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=
Oil imports (Score:2, Interesting)
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: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.
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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:fight against global warming (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, imagine a world where we have so much energy being created through hydro, wind, solar, nuclear (fission and fusion) that we have a true net surplus. We could make oil with this then pump that oil back into the wells we originally got oil from. True sequestration.
The problem we have today is, fundamentally, that we are outrunning nature's ability to handle our activity. The true, long-term value of this then is that we can speed up nature's process to meet our desires.
Re:fight against global warming (Score:5, Interesting)
Even if burning it releases 100% of the CO2 it took to make it, you're still carbon neutral. Current sources are a long, long way from carbon neutral as they take non-atmospheric carbon and turn it into atmospheric carbon.
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
Hydrogen is a terrible fuel for a vehicle. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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From an energetic point of view, this is utterly pointless.
Yes, but it would be nice to be able to make plastics and lubricants without oil.
Even though it is surely a net energy loss... (Score:3)
...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.
"Its not like gas comes from thin air" (Score:5, Funny)
Is it just me? (Score:2)
Renewable turtles all the way down (Score:3)
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.
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Of course this isn't the answer to the energy crisis but it does help with one aspect - oil being finite.
Thin air into petrol (Score:5, Funny)
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
How to spot crappy science journalism (Score:3)
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.
Unlikely... (Score:3)
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.
Sabatier reaction? (Score:3)
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.
Call DARPA (Score:3)
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.
US Navy Research (Score:3)
Oblig CSI Reference (Score:3, Funny)
*puts glasses on*
vaporware.
YEEEAAAAAAAHH!
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"."
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: (Score:2)
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cause that having too much CO2 thing was bothering me...
FTFY.
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:cold fusion fraud again? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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:cold fusion fraud again? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:cold fusion fraud again? (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org], that a fuel cell is generally between 40-60% [wikipedia.org] 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.
Re:cold fusion fraud again? (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:3)
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 dow
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: (Score:3)
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.
Re:cold fusion fraud again? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re: (Score:3)
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 woul
Re:cold fusion fraud again? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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: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: (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
Re:cold fusion fraud again? (Score:4, Interesting)
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=
Re: (Score:3)
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.
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: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:4, Interesting)
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.
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: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: (Score:3)
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.
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Or attach units to pollution points (smoke stacks) and run from excess industrial heat+solar. Better deal than carbon bitcoins or whatever.
Re:cold fusion fraud again? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
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 th
Re:cold fusion fraud again? (Score:5, Funny)
.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!
Re:cold fusion fraud again? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
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.