Gasoline alchemy from water vapor and CO2

It would seem to require more energy than it provides, if you ask me.

It is well established you can make methanol from CO2. Maybe that’s what this is about.
http://thinkgeoenergy.com/archives/10711

I do see only one problem: the energy needed to transform CO2 into fuel costs more energy than you can obtain from burning that fuel again. Just a matter of chemical energy balances… So, where is the gain?

Why do you waste others time also by publishing such silly science fantasies ?
REPLY: Why do you waste time reading things with “alchemy” in the title if you know you won’t like it?

If the climate scientologists are correct, wouldn’t extracting CO2 from the air bring about an ice age and starve all the plants?

Pure scam, not enough CO2 in the air for this to work, and they need electricity for the manufacturing. More wind turbines needed apparently, or a sea barrage.
“provided we can get the funding going”
They hope to qualify for millions of pounds of government money, until they go bankrupt, but by then the cash will have vanished.
“We don’t have any of the additives and nasty bits found in conventional petrol, and yet our fuel can be used in existing engines,”
Um, don’t those additives help the fuel to burn smoothly.
Comments are fun, Independent readers seem to be a little bit weird to say the least.

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.
Only a paper so blinded by ideology such as the Independent could print such fairyland nonsense. Unless by “possible to use power from renewable sources” they mean “possible to use power that is 0.01% from renewable sources.” Such idiocy.

Yes. I was going to post this in Tips and Notes but the gentleman beat me to it.
this is not a new technology, it dates back at least 70 years and probably further with various people tinkering with it.
Yes it can produce hydrocarbon fuel, the simplest is methanol but higher order paraffins are perfectly practical.
The problem is that it takes more energy to do this than is got from burning the resulting fuel. The factor is between one and half to two and half times the energy input to that recovered from the synthetic fuel.
Which is fine is you have such a source of abundant energy which cannot be transported and need to turn it into portable fuel. it is also why it attracted a lot of attention in WW2 and later after the 70’s oil crisis.
Otherwise like everything else about alternative energy it is yesterdays news.
What did not work then doesn’t work now. And never will.
Kindest Regards

If it seems too good to be true ……… Well, you know the rest.

Um, I don’t get it. It seem fairly elementary (granted I couldn’t go out and do it right now without research) to reverse the process of burning fuel, recombining it in the presence of large amounts of energy as they seem to be doing. I don’t see any special breakthrough, you’re not going to get any more energy back from burning the fuel than it took to manufacture it. The only use I could see is if the process was made fairly efficient for storing energy… maybe I missed something.

Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
I do see only one problem: the energy needed to transform CO2 into fuel costs more energy than you can obtain from burning that fuel again. Just a matter of chemical energy balances… So, where is the gain?,
The only gain would be in the utility of the fuel vs the primary energy source. Storage and transport benefits. No real gain if using fossil fuels as the primary energy, as those are already excellent energy storage and they can already be made into transport fuels by processes that have less production chain losses than fuel->heat->motion->eletricity->fuel is likely to entail.
If the efficiency of the process is decent, it could be useful for running transport on nucular 😉
If the efficiency is really high, it could cause environmental catastrophy by enabling the exploitation of diffuse, intermittent, low quality energy sources like wind, wave and solar.

Yes it sure is possible to make gasoline from CO2 but that process is bound to be extremely energy inefficient. There’s no way to create gasoline from CO2 without spending way more energy than can be used by burning that gasoline back to CO2. Such gasoline is not going to be cheap. And where exactly are they planning to take that energy from, I wonder…

This is 18th and 19th century chemistry. Probably producing octane, a higher alchohol, or a mixture of various hydrocarbons. Perhaps they’ve developed a new catalyst or something. In any case it requires more energy in to crack water and carbon dioxide.

The energy for this is coming from electricity?
If so then I imagine the aim is to produce fuel for transport and feedstock for chemical processing in a hypothetical nuclear powered future. You probably wouldn’t use this stuff to run your car – batteries for doing that are getting better and that niche is closing fast. But I have yet to see any proposals for a battery powered passenger jet.

Strike.
One- A whole lot of mays and coulds.
Two- A whole lot of lack of numbers in regards to energy input vs. output.
Three- If it’s too good to be true…there’s money in it somewhere.
You’re out!

I suppose that the potential for storage is the issue since it would obviously take more energy to produce the “gasoline” than can be obtained by burning it later.

Joule Unlimited have just commissioned their first industrial sized plant near Hobbs, NM, which is growing Ethanol and/or Diesel in a single step continuous process using bio-engineered enzymes, waste industrial CO2, waste water and sunlight. Land use is non arable (no effect on food production) and the process has delivered 10,000 US Gals per acre annually with eventual productivity to reach 25,000 gals per acre at a production cost as low as $1.28 per gal ($0.30 per litre).
There is already a worldwide infrastructure for distribution, it’s carbon neutral and it’s sustainable which is probably why you can’t invest in the company because the Arabs, Russians and Germans already have.
Joule’s renewable fuel platform will best the scale, productivities and costs of any known alternative to fossil fuel today, with no reliance on biomass feedstocks or precious natural resources. Our inputs are sunlight, waste CO2 and non-potable water. Our output? Millions of gallons of clean, renewable fuel that drops into existing infrastructure.

There’s nothing so improbable, in principle, in extracting water and CO2 from the air and turning it into fuel. Plants do it all the time. What it needs to make it viable is a cost-effective energy source. At present thery’re just using electricity off the grid,
Clearly this is just a proof of concept, and a very long way from a usable technology, but it could make sense in time, especially in relation to unreliable intermittent energy sources like wind and solar. We all know these are inherently lousy ways to make electricity, principally because electricity cannot be stored. It also requires expensive infrastructure to transport it from where the wind and sun are found to where the power is needed. Using them to make fuel, on the other hand, could make sense in some places, if the technology can be developed.

Feasible but wasteful. Making hydrocarbon fuels with CO2 extracted from air is almost economic if you have a large cheap source of high temperature heat like a nuclear power plant (I’ve seen estimates as low as $50 per barrel equivalent), but to do it using electricity is incredibly wasteful as electricity is already a very high quality form of energy – far more so than hydrocarbon fuels. It makes the process several times more expensive.
The best place to do this would be somewhere really really cold, like Svalbard as less energy is required to separate CO2 from air

Without more information about what chemicals are the result of the synthesis, it is hard to make a proper evaluation. But it could be a useful alternative to the hydrogen based fuel cell model that was being pushed once upon a time. Linked to thorium nuclear it may be a useful technology for motor racing fuels in a few hundred years when all fossil fuel carbon is used.

It is interesting because Petrol is very energy dense and we know how to use, store and transport it efficiently. Electricity isn’t so convenient especially for moving vehicles. In an ideal world one could run power stations at full tilt the whole time keeping up their efficiency and use any spare juice to make petrol for instance at night time. You could even build windmills and tidal power stations far out to sea, or far from civilisation, and ship the energy they produce back to us as Premium grade. So even if it takes more electrical energy than it produces fuel energy that isn’t necessarily an end to it.

A ton of fuel a day! About 250 gallons a day then in two years time from the commercial plant they plan to build.
I believe that this was mainly privately funded up till now and I do not expect George Osborne to be assisting with further funds any time soon for the reasons listed below.
They also require a massive increase in wind turbines to make this venture green and that is not going to happen.
The enormous and burgeoning costs of our green energy dash are coming home to roost with energy bills now to the fore as the hottest of political potatoes.
13% of every gas and electric bill sent to consumers goes to cover wind, PV and replacement transmission costs and those costs are escalating rapidly without delivering the much vaunted financial returns promised by their adherents.
The genie is out of the bottle and our politicians can now see the catastrophic results of their naive stupidity looming on the already troubled financial horizon as Germany looks to soak up the French and Dutch spare capacity this winter, thus increasing the price of the 7% of consumption that we already are forced to import due to their past havering and incompetence.
The cold winter presaged by the still borne EL Nino will open many more of the publics’ eyes as heating costs empty their purses.
Some of the old, poor and weak will inevitably miss next spring.

No need for a very complicated chemistry to see that this “idea” doesn’t make much sense.
Just consider : CH3OH+O2 -> CO2 + H2O (I skip balancing the equations).
Yes this is just burning methanol in air and you know that it burns well (700 kJ/mol what is quite big)
So the reverse CO2+H20 -> CH3OH + O2 would need 700 kJ/mol energy investment to make it happen. As this is not easy, one clearly sees that this process consumes more energy than it produces. Eventually much more depending on efficiency.
One could then consider CO2+H2 -> CH3OH + H20 (1) which would already not be “gasoline from air” because one needs hydrogen as intermediary and there is no hydrogen in the air.
I suspect that their “technology” is one form or other of this reaction..
This reaction is lightly exothermic (produces energy at a rate 50kJ/mol) what seems nice.
The reverse (CH3OH + H20 -> CO2 + H2) is the well known and studied methanol steam reforming.
The problem with the reaction (1) is that the methanol production is in competition with the CO2 shift reaction (CO2+H2 -> CO + H2O) which is preferred so that (1) hardly happens.
Of course one could then go one step farther to H20 + CO -> CH3OH which is actually how methanol is produced industrially.So this is nothing new.
In any case what stays is that any artificial fuel production with CO2 as primary ressource needs hydrogen.
As there is no hydrogen in the air, one has to produce it.
So you either electrolyse water what is hugely energy inefficient or you tear off hydrogen from water by carbon. As the latter generally produces CO2, you win nothing, are back to the departure point and spend huge amounts of money doing it.
Now one could construct a wind farm and say that it will be used to electrolyze water when there is too much wind. This would be adding insult to injury. First wind farms are not the best way to produce power – if economy is your target, construct gas turbines or nuclear power plants.
Second and more importantly the problem of wind energy is not that there is too much of it but too little (wind mills work at best at 25% efficiency).
In conclusion : gasoline from air is possible and the technologies exist, Some of them for more than 100 years. But there is a reason why nobody is doing it – this gasoline is so outrageously expensive that nobody would have enough money to buy it to just drive a car.

This sounds very interesting, with a hint of uotopia if I may say, at first glance.
However, as one reads into this text, the word “inefficiency” springs up a lot. If these scientist as yet, have efficiency issues with their production yet set targets as small as two years and 15 years, I sense a capitalist, money-making driven rush job in the pipeline.
So long, it seems like a whole lot of investment will have to go into this venture, a whole lot of energy will also need to be used although the output seems way smaller. in a state where fossil fuel companies have fought tooth and nail to stay afloat (even starting wars and exploiting less protected countries), what are the chances that they will take such competition lightly, considering the word “compete” seems to pop up in the article quite often as well.
I for one, if I were a potential investor would not consider funding this project untill I were convinced this will yield results and every step of the process is well planned and thought through.
Interesting read however… interesting concept as well.

apparently we now have weather that is ‘weirder’ than before
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19995084

Not thermodynamically efficient. Better to start with methane from bio-digesters and work on the methane at least the hardest extraction is done by some bacteria at near zero energy costs.

No word raises my hackles quite like “Funding”. Too often it’s a polite expression used by rent seekers to expropriate hard earned tax. If they want funding, they should sell some of their magic petrol.

Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
I do see only one problem: the energy needed to transform CO2 into fuel costs more energy than you can obtain from burning that fuel again. Just a matter of chemical energy balances… So, where is the gain?
When the words “CO2” and “Sustainable” appear suddenly all cost calculations are useless, which has been proved so many times in the past….

ckb says:
October 19, 2012 at 1:10 am
“Iceland runs on some hydrogen because of all their excess geothermal energy – they put it into electrolysis. But they are smart enough to have hydrogen powered vehicles.
There’s no need to go past the “lets split the water” phase.”
Iceland actually runs a Methane synthesis plant as well. Still experimental, but working.
There is a very good reason to go past the “lets split the water” phase.”
Tanks leak hydrogen; and hydrogren makes steel brittle.

My thousand head of unicorn tended by one hundred pixies can produce one thousand gallons a day of fuel. This fuel will propel the largest SUV one thousand miles per gallon {US gallon} more using the standard English gallon.
The only problem I have is with the Pixies, they are demanding two hundred dollars an hour for their work, the unicorns are happy to do it for free. The pixies are unionized and thus I have a cash flow crisis. Catastrophic global warming would be averted entirely with my fuel and a grant of four billion dollars would see the full commercialization of my product, transforming the transport industry. This very powerful fuel burns without producing any pollutants including zero CO2.
I trust you will receive my application for grant monies with kindness and an open heart.
P.S. The pixies are very difficult to deal with, some help from government negotiators would be appreciated. Faithfully yours.

Any Chymist worth his salt knows that spiritus sylvestre can be made to Texas tea if only the King will part with but a fraction of his treasure. Indeed it is quite simple and within the grasp of any Son of the Art: “Ubi palam locuti fumus, ibi nihil diximus”

Tom Vonk puts it well enough for anyone to understand. The utility is in the form of the finished product. That you need at least as much energy to establish the chemical bond energy in the finished product as what comes back out through combustion is a given in all situations due to conservation of energy. The key to turning this from green folly into a boon to mankind is getting the energy needed to establish the chemical bonds from sunlight. That’s demonstrably possible as every photosynthetic organism turns sunlight into chemical bond energy. What we need to do is step up our game in synthetic biology and create some new organisms that have no purpose in life other than producing paraffins. Natural organisms can’t compete if all they do is produce paraffins so what we must do for our artificial organisms is protect them from competition and in return for that they pay us back with hydrocarbon fuel manufactured from air, water, and sunlight. It’s just a matter of time until this happens. Synthetic biology is a young and incredibly complex science. Even the simplest photosynthetic bacteria have incredibly complex molecular machinery which must be reverse engineered and the task is made more difficult by the machinery being so small as to defy direct observation. But we have the tools now and they are being refined and made cheaper every single day. It’s just a matter of time.

Having bravely produced 5 L of petrol in three months of operation, according to the Telegraph article.
There seems to be another way, operating for years – look for biopetroleum Alicante.
http://www.biopetroleo.com/english/

As ajones and others have said, it is perfectly possible to do this. Whether it is practical on a commercial basis is a whole nuther animule. Looking at the photo, I didn’t see anything that looked like hydrocarbon handling equipment, nor does PVC and polycarbonate look adequate to handle temperatures and pressures I assume would be necessary. Commercial CO2 generators (concentration from air) are available. Why he would use atmospheric water vapor when the liquid is readily available and more controllable is beyond me. It would seem that catalytic reduction would take a great deal of heat and fairly high pressures, much higher than the plastic shown in the picture would take. No description of what hydrocarbon mix he is produce. The real question is not that it can’t be done or that it is alchemy, but how much per gallon does this cost? Nice thing about lab experiments and pharmaceuticals is that you can make extraordinarily expensive chemicals without really worrying about the cost. Gasoline isn’t in that class.

On hearing this m’lady said: “Their air must be very polluted.”

Where are they getting the energy for their scheme, i.e. reversing the chemical reaction of turning hydrocarbons into water and CO2 (amoung other thing).

So far, they”re running about 220,000 pounds per litre (without including the cost of distribution).
Heroine is cheaper. A lot cheaper.
I wont hold my breath.

I see no real point in adding a comment, as others have already correctly pointed out the numerous flaws.
However, no-one has said this yet:
What a load of Tosh!
and really, that is all this topic needs or deserves!
regards to all

The system works if you have spare power from an atomic powered aircraftcarrier and the odd squillion. See following article – otherwise scamarooney.
Fueling the Fleet, Navy Looks to the Seas
Daniel Parry, US Navy News 24/9/2012
Refueling U.S. Navy vessels, at sea and underway, is a costly endeavor in terms of logistics, time, fiscal constraints and threats to national security and sailors at sea.
In Fiscal Year 2011, the U.S. Navy Military Sea Lift Command, the primary supplier of fuel and oil to the U.S. Navy fleet, delivered nearly 600 million gallons of fuel to Navy vessels underway, operating 15 fleet replenishment oilers around the globe.
Scientists at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory are developing a process to extract carbon dioxide (CO2) and produce hydrogen gas (H2) from seawater, subsequently catalytically converting the CO2 and H2 into jet fuel by a gas-to-liquids process.
“The potential payoff is the ability to produce JP-5 fuel stock at sea reducing the logistics tail on fuel delivery with no environmental burden and increasing the Navy’s energy security and independence,” says research chemist, Dr. Heather Willauer.
NRL has successfully developed and demonstrated technologies for the recovery of CO2 and the production of H2 from seawater using an electrochemical acidification cell, and the conversion of CO2 and H2 to hydrocarbons (organic compounds consisting of hydrogen and carbon) that can be used to produce jet fuel.
“The reduction and hydrogenation of CO2 to form hydrocarbons is accomplished using a catalyst that is similar to those used for Fischer-Tropsch reduction and hydrogenation of carbon monoxide,” adds Willauer. “By modifying the surface composition of iron catalysts in fixed-bed reactors, NRL has successfully improved CO2 conversion efficiencies up to 60 percent.”
A Renewable Resource
CO2 is an abundant carbon (C) resource in the air and in seawater, with the concentration in the ocean about 140 times greater than that in air. Two to three percent of the CO2 in seawater is dissolved CO2 gas in the form of carbonic acid, one percent is carbonate, and the remaining 96 to 97 percent is bound in bicarbonate. If processes are developed to take advantage of the higher weight per volume concentration of CO2 in seawater, coupled with more efficient catalysts for the heterogeneous catalysis of CO2 and H2, a viable sea-based synthetic fuel process can be envisioned. “With such a process, the Navy could avoid the uncertainties inherent in procuring fuel from foreign sources and/or maintaining long supply lines,” Willauer said.
NRL has made significant advances developing carbon capture technologies in the laboratory. In the summer of 2009 a standard commercially available chlorine dioxide cell and an electro-deionization cell were modified to function as electrochemical acidification cells. Using the novel cells both dissolved and bound CO2 were recovered from seawater by re-equilibrating carbonate and bicarbonate to CO2 gas at a seawater pH below 6. In addition to CO2, the cells produced H2 at the cathode as a by-product.
These completed studies assessed the effects of the acidification cell configuration, seawater composition, flow rate, and current on seawater pH levels. The data were used to determine the feasibility of this approach for efficiently extracting large quantities of CO2 from seawater. From these feasibility studies NRL successfully scaled-up and integrated the carbon capture technology into an independent skid to process larger volumes of seawater and evaluate the overall system design and efficiencies.
The major component of the carbon capture skid is a three-chambered electrochemical acidification cell. This cell uses small quantities of electricity to exchange hydrogen ions produced at the anode with sodium ions in the seawater stream. As a result, the seawater is acidified. At the cathode, water is reduced to H2 gas and sodium hydroxide (NaOH) is formed. This basic solution may be re-combined with the acidified seawater to return the seawater to its original pH with no additional chemicals. Current and continuing research using this carbon capture skid demonstrates the continuous efficient production of H2 and the recovery of up to 92 percent of CO2 from seawater.
Located at NRL’s Center for Corrosion Science & Engineering facility, Key West, Fla., (NRLKW) the carbon capture skid has been tested using seawater from the Gulf of Mexico to simulate conditions that will be encountered in an actual open ocean process for capturing CO2 from seawater and producing H2 gas. Currently NRL is working on process optimization and scale-up. Once these are completed, initial studies predict that jet fuel from seawater would cost in the range of $3 to $6 per gallon to produce.
How it Works: CO2 + H2 = Jet Fuel
NRL has developed a two-step process in the laboratory to convert the CO2 and H2 gathered from the seawater to liquid hydrocarbons. In the first step, an iron-based catalyst has been developed that can achieve CO2 conversion levels up to 60 percent and decrease unwanted methane production from 97 percent to 25 percent in favor of longer-chain unsaturated hydrocarbons (olefins).
In the second step these olefins can be oligomerized (a chemical process that converts monomers, molecules of low molecular weight, to a compound of higher molecular weight by a finite degree of polymerization) into a liquid containing hydrocarbon molecules in the carbon C9-C16 range, suitable for conversion to jet fuel by a nickel-supported catalyst reaction.

“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
=========
The earth does this every day. Water, limestone and iron are heated under pressure within the earth’s interior to produce hydrocarbons. These float up through the crust where they are either captured by rock formations or boil off into the atmosphere to become part of the carbon cycle.
So called fossil fuels are not made from the fossilized bodies of plants and animals. They are made from fossilized CO2, carried along with water by plate tectonics into the earth’s interior. Iron is extremely abundant in nature, being the stable byproduct of both fission and fusions and forms the core of the earth.

Don’t tell Obama about this. He is desperate and running out of looney tune Eco Greenie companies to give rich rides on the Rent Seeking Express Gravy Train.

Ever notice there’s not a big push on Sterling engines to mitigate all this free, heat energy?
Pfft.
It’s crime.
It was crime before Al Gore went on tour for chicks and checks to recoup his presidential loss,
it was crime when he advertised it as real science the first time,
it’s been crime ever since.
Period.

There’s a lot of carbon in a gallon of gas. There is not a lot of carbon in a cubic meter of air.
You’re going to have to process a lot of air to get enough carbon out of it to make commercial quantities of gas.

Hahahahahaha! GASP hahahahahahah!!! SNORT hhahahahahahahahah! PLEASE hahahahaha! STOP hahahahahah!

Did they get inspiration from Pakistan’s water-fueled car?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agha_Waqar%27s_water-fuelled_car
Dr. AQ Khan, self appointed father and mother of Pakistan’s atom bomb program said that there was “no fraud involved”.http://tribune.com.pk/story/416542/the-water-car-fraud/

Liquid fuels are like a battery in a way: They are already more expensive per unit of energy contained than some other sources of energy. That’s why, for example, there is almost no oil-powered electricity generation in the U.S. (only a few diesel generators when being portable is the priority), as has been uneconomic after the 1970s.
Managing to synthesize gasoline without the result being slightly more expensive than the conventional gasoline competition and thus a losing business proposition by default would be doubtful (unless we had the massive expansion of low cost energy like nuclear power which the environmentalists stopped). But there is nothing magical about synthesizing gasoline. Fundamentally, you need a carbon source, a hydrogen source, and an energy source. Back in WWII, Germany was synthesizing gasoline using coal as the carbon source. Conversion starting from the more oxidized form in CO2 adds to energy requirements but is totally physically possible. The crux of the matter is the economics.
Although using thermal energy as much as possible can be cheaper, to start with an example of electricity:
Electricity costs vary by source of production and country, but let’s say $0.05/kilowatt-hour for example.
Gasoline contains around 130 megajoules/gallon, so roughly around 36 kilowatt-hours of electricity costing around $1.80 would be required to synthesize a gallon of gasoline in that example, except for such being increased up to multiple times by inefficiencies. Accounting for costs other than input energy alone (such as capital costs) would also increase the figure. On the other hand, usage of nuclear thermal power would improve the economics (substantially cheaper than nuclear electric power or electricity in general currently).
A more sophisticated look at synthesizing fuel:
The analysis “estimated a capital cost of $5.0 billion for an 18,400-bbl/day synthetic-gasoline plant and $4.6 billion for a 5,000 tonne/day methanol plant. Nuclear power accounts for more than 50% of the total plant capital investment. The estimated operating cost is $1.40/gal for synthetic gasoline and $0.65 for methanol. Because the capital investment is high, a profit margin of $0.50 per $1.00 of sales or more is needed to yield an acceptable return on investment. Therefore, the price of gasoline at the pump must be about $4.60/gal, and price of methanol at the plant gate must be $1.65/gal for these base cases.”
A number of new technologies of varying technical risks (not considered in our economic analyses) offer promising opportunities for lowering these prices in the future. These include innovations in material science, reactor technology, and compressor technology. Electrolytic cells account for ~20% of the total capital investment required for a synthetic gasoline plant. General Electric can fabricate alkaline electrolyzers from Noryl plastic for a significant cost savings. Use of this material for both the hydrogen electrolyzers and electrolytic stripping cells could result in substantial savings. Advances in material science that make steam electrolysis commercially feasible could reduce both capital costs and energy consumption as well. If just these improvements are realized, the price of gasoline at the pump would be reduced to $3.40/gal and the price of methanol at the plant gate would be reduced to $1.14/gal.
http://www.lanl.gov/news/newsbulletin/pdf/Green_Freedom_Overview.pdf
Actually where making inroads against the competition could be easier than in the general market would be to synthesize fuel for deployed military units to reduce the logistics train. While gasoline may cost $4/gallon retail at the pump today and be worth less for the price manufacturers could sell it for before taxes, getting fuel to some places costs significantly more. The U.S. Navy has looked into synthesizing jet fuel with nuclear power using CO2 from seawater (a little different from getting the CO2 from air but the basic idea being related) and hydrogen from water.
Incidentally, contrary to a lot of environmentalist BS, we will never run out of plastics either: They can be synthesized just as much so, even starting from air and water if needed.

My previous comment was not one of my finer ones but this post reminds me of the odd patents file folder. This clearly needs promoting next to the patent for the contraption affectionately known as the pants puller upper. Yes, it can be done, but the punch line is why?

The Germans used this process in WW2 to make synthetic fuel from browncoal. They used the flue gas from the powerstation that generated the energy to run the conversion from CO2 and hydrogen to methanol. The only thing “new” is using atmospheric CO2. They require an atomic plant to generate the electricity needed for any industrial scale production.
In green technology as in anything else: you gain some, you lose some.

So maybe they will be powered by a solar plant or a windmill. Even with more energy used, the carbon GHG intensity of fuel is reduced.

K.I.S.S. principle. Keep it simple, stupid.
Hydrolyze H2O into H2 + O2 and either combust it or invent an efficient fuel cell to capture the energy.
At best, the proposal in the article is too highly energy intensive with multiple costly steps. More likely it is fraud looking for a grant, with the promise of cold fusion and perpetual motion.

Plants already combine CO2 and water. The next step is geological, but in the end, that’s what all our fossil fuels come from.
I don’t see how this will scale up into anything economical (I’m skeptical, after all) but I’ll wait and see before passing judgement.

@ Robert of Ottawa
The gain isn’t in absolute energy, the gain is supposed to be in efficiency of transportation and storage.
Electricity can not be used as a vehicle fule with any efficience because you have loses in both transportation to the vehicle and storage in the vehicle. There is no know way to store electricity without loses over time even with no load.
This is essentially a scheme for powering vehicles with electricity by converting electricity into a liquid fule.
One of the entrants into the Progressive automotive X-prize was pushing a similar scheme using an amonia based fule. Their plan was not to use ambient C02, but to co locat production plants with fossil power plants using the C02 rich exhaust as well as electricity from the plant as inputs.
I don’t know all the math involved so I don’t know if the supposed gains in transportation and storage using electricity -> liquid fule -> vehicle over electricity -> vehicle are real or not.

An aside: I was involved in some modeling for a methanol-from-atmosphere plant a long time ago at NASA. The goal was to get pure CO2 out of the Martian atmosphere and turn it into rocket fuel — CO+O2 or CH4+O2 — for a return trip. The amount of energy involved was gigantic, and only made sense because it is cheaper to produce electricity on Mars than to send up all the fuel from Earth. But rockets can’t burn electricity, you need chemical fuel (one reason to be excited about water on mars is that then you don’t need to bring hydrogen for your methane production).
There were two issues: purifying the nearly-pure CO2 atmosphere, and then converting pure CO2 to bipropellant. Well, and doing this flawlessly, since you couldn’t count on Bruce Willis smacking the plant with a sledgehammer whenever it broke.
On Earth, this invention is basically equivalent to the biofuels stuff. Biofuels use solar power to convert atmospheric CO2 to liquid fuel; the work this group is doing can use geothermal or fusion power instead (or coal, but that would be stupid), and probably uses a lot less land than jatropha or sugar.

See http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4087

match this up with fusion power plants that “are just round the corner” and you convert electricity that is “too cheep to meeter” into a useful fuel. 🙂

The passage graph that accompanied the release appears to be absolute nonsense, geared to extract taxpayers money via grants.
Safety Tip: DO NOT LET THE DOE SEE THIS GRAPH.

In effect hydrocarbon production from renewable energy sources can be considered a high density liquid battery – storing that energy for later or for distant use. Batteries are never 100% efficient round-trip, incidentally, and if the energy source is renewable, fuel cost isn’t the issue (sunlight and wind are free), just the one-time cost of the collection/production infrastructure. The gain is in a carbon-neutral transportation fuel – and transportation represents a significant chunk of CO2 emissions.
A distributed wind system can provide baseline power at about 1/3 to 1/2 it’s average power level (shown in Archer & Jacobson 2007, http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/winds/winds_distributed_jamc.pdf) – if the other 1/2 to 2/3 average power were devoted to producing methanol or petrol that would be a good use of the baseline excess. Or it could be even be run in gas turbines for load balancing.

Espen says:
If the process uses the input energy efficiently (something I really, really doubt) this could perhaps be an interesting alternative to batteries, a way to store energy from solar and wind power on the days they actually deliver.
I suspect a more important factor would be how well the process handles an energy supply which can vary on a second by second basis.

Yes Dennis Kazura (11:06), most commenters missed the point. There was a long feature on this on the BBC World Service overnight including interviews with the company concerned.”
I think the concept is best viewed as a method of energy storage. Probably better and more convenient than running your car off a battery of limited capacity. And a better use of wind farm production than feeding an intermittent supply to the electricity grid. That said the question still remains “Is it necessary?”

Scute says:
October 19, 2012 at 8:18 am
This is inserted cleverly between one of Mr. Harrison’s, admittedly, more breathless assertions and a reported summary of Mr Harrison talking about “using the extracted carbon dioxide”. I was caught out reading that first time round. I thought Mr Harrison was acknowledging that he was gallantly embarking on scrubbing all the man-made CO2 out of the atmosphere for us. Of course, he’s not- he knows the CO2 gets spewed straight back out as exhaust. He knows it’s CO2 neutral, which is good but isn’t the same as “Remov[ing] the principle greenhouse gas from tbe burning of fossil fuels…”. Only the Independent asserts that and should be ashamed of themselves for trying to put it into the heads of their readers.
Scute
****************************************************************************************************
You beat me to it on the CO2 scrubbing front
Many others on this thread have not realised that this process is not removing CO2 from the air permanently – the fuel produced will be burnt and the CO2 returned almost immediately.
Similarly, others have worked out the cost of fuel produced in this manner (including the extra energy costs). All these calculations have omitted the fuel taxes imposed by most western governments which rely on huge taxes on motor fuel to run ” their” finances. This could add significant costs.
In most cases it will be cheaper to go on collecting the petroleum products being produced deep down in the earth, but I agree with the military uses of this process.
Steve T

zbcustom: That said the question still remains “Is it necessary?”
I disagree. The question is “Can it be made to work cheaply enough?”
Cheaply enough for what? you may ask:
a. to drive industrial/economic development in places of the world where fossil fuel is now relatively expensive (relative to the EU) and deliveries are unreliable.
b. to replace gasoline/diesel fuel from petroleum and natural gas.
as to a, I think the answer is probably yes, now, in a few places in the world.
as to b, I think we’ll have a better handle on the answer 10-20 years from now. What economies of scale and improvements in the production process will be invented I have no clue.

Thanks, Anthony! I wish them well, but I have doubts their process will work.
The good news is, carbon dioxide is finally being recognized as a valuable substance. As a former consultant to the gas industry (BOC, Linde etc.) we would harvest CO2 from ethanol fermenters for use in beverage carbonation, substitute for acids in wastewater treatment and solvents for degreasing etc. It’s really a nice substance with many uses, and extremely non-toxic and biocompatible.
US govt is spending beaucoup of our bucks on trying to directly convert CO2 into fuel. Direct routes are expensive, but routes via bacterial fermentation or photosynthesis (mostly microalgae) are showing promise. I can produce diesel oil equivalent for about $1/gallon.
Don’t worry about using up the damn “plant food,” there is no shortage of CO2 in the atmosphere & not likely to be. Better worry about “peak phosphorus,” my friends…..this is going to cause a shooting war and catch everyone off guard.

Nearly 90 percent of the world’s estimated phosphorus reserves are found in five countries: Morocco, China, South Africa, Jordan, and the United States. In comparison, the 12 countries that make up the OPEC cartel control only 75 percent of the world’s oil reserves.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/20/peak_phosphorus

@rgbatduke
The average electric car uses ~300WH/mile.
The full processing (well to wheel) cost in electrical energy per US gallon of fuel is ~6.5KWH.
The scam to process C02 back into fuel means building up to 3x more wind turbines to overcome the inefficiencies of the process. They will gain extra carbon credits for this plus further carbon credits for the fuel plant.
ITS A SCAM!!!

Why extract CO2 from air when I am sure that any coal, oil, or gas fired power generator would be delighted for anyone to remove the CO2 from their exhaust? Wouldn’t it be cheaper to extract CO2 from an exhaust which might approach 20% CO2 as opposed to from air at 0.00038% CO2? There is also a ready source of water in either the exhaust from an oil or gas fired plant as well as from the cooling towers.

This is supposed to be a future power storage under the assumption that renewable energy cost, particularly solar energy production goes more or less to zero.
Then efficiency considerations are not of interest.
Energy storage as fluid or gas is best compatible with todays demand.
What matters is, if solar energy will get that cheap (what I think will) and if such devices can be built at low cost in the future, currently not.

Just testing….my first time access in the comment box for days.
This alchemy is going on in my part of the world; I hope they leave some CO2 for the plants! The cold wet weather this ‘summer’ has played havoc in this neck of the woods.

Chairman Al says: The only reason we are not running around in fuel cell powered cars is because there is no cheap source of hydrogen.
The problem with hydrogen is the same as the problem with natural gas: there is no way to store the gas without a large expenditure of energy to compress it (and waste heat) and the extremely heavy containers to hold it (unless you go cryogenic which requires even more energy and has its own problems with storage. To make matters worse there is a loss of available energy (cooling) as the gas is released from pressure.
In San Diego they had (maybe they still do) natural gas powered transit buses that had two roof mounted high pressure tanks that ran the length of the bus which replaced the much smaller diesel tank.
If one could figure out the storage issue, hydrogen would be viable.

Ric Werme says:
October 19, 2012 at 10:41 am
Have you priced the cost of delivering jet fuel to an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Pacific? I think it makes all sorts of sense to use excess energy to make jet fuel while an aircraft carrier is traveling to a destination, and using the fuel once it gets there.
————————————
Presumably you would want to size the system to produce enough fuel to handle daily flight operations or perhaps just a little under that. It seems like you could reduce the fuel storage and handling needs on the carrier that way which would free up space and make the ship more survivable.. One other thing I’m wondering about is life impact on the carrier’s reactors. I haven’t done the calculations but I would expect that this would result in a noticeable shortening of the time between refuelings which would have to be factored in. Still seems like a good idea to me…

Donald Mitchell says:
October 19, 2012 at 1:44 pm
Why extract CO2 from air when I am sure that any coal, oil, or gas fired power generator would be delighted for anyone to remove the CO2 from their exhaust? Wouldn’t it be cheaper to extract CO2 from an exhaust which might approach 20% CO2 as opposed to from air at 0.00038% CO2? There is also a ready source of water in either the exhaust from an oil or gas fired plant as well as from the cooling towers.

Exactly, Don! Technologies are being developed to capture this fossil fuel carbon dioxide very efficiently & cost-effectively. It is an under-utilized byproduct (as are most pollutants) that will eventually be the basis for its own branch of the chemical process industries. Once an economic value is given to it, it will become a commodity & the utilities will charge for it. Watch and see.
The same thing happened with SO2 scrubber gypsum (used to make wallboard), coal ash (used to make cinderblock) etc. Industry is very creative in re-packing its waste & re-selling it to consumers!!

CO2 is presently a byproduct of the Great Plains Synfuels Plant boondoggle near Beulah, North Dakota, that produces methane from coal. They pipe the CO2 to Canada to sequester it by pumping it underground into oil wells.
Using hydrogen as a fuel is not viable even if storage problems are solved. The cheapest way to produce hydrogen is from methane and it would be cheaper and more energy efficient to use methane directly as the fuel rather than to produce hydrogen from it.

Ken Pollock is right: don’t ignore the second law of thermodynamics.
There is no free energy, there is no easy way out.

I’d like all of you solar and wind energy proponents to start a city powered only by wind and solar. No fossil fuels, no nuclear, no internal combustion engines. Electric cars and buses only.
Try that out and get back to us in a few years and let us know how it’s working out.

I can make gas from CO2 and water vapor too. It is a highly proprietary process that I have in my “plant(s)”. Even better it uses solar energy too and it is organic. Never mind that I use as much energy to produce it as it will provide, it is GREEN!!! I will do an IPO of this later this year after I suitably flog and carpet post like a Harrop (as in Barrie).
In other news, it appears that the cabbage heads are returning with new schemes of wonderment.

richardscourtney: If wind power were really useful then oil tankers would be sailing ships.
Don’t be absurd.
If batteries were really useful, then oil tankers would be running on batteries.
If gasoline were really useful, then oil tankers would be running on gasoline.
If hydropower were really useful, then oil tankers would be running on gasoline.
We will never have an economy where all of the energy is of a single source and kind.

ferd berple: Exactly, this is what most folks aware not aware of. How little energy a solar panel puts out as compared to fuel. Residential electricity rates are about $0.1/kwh, so a gallon of gasoline is about the same as $3.30 worth of electricity.
That depends on where you live, and those are current costs. In 2032 we’ll want to redo the calculations for Arizona, central India, and Namibia.

richardscourtney: imagining perpetual motion machines
That will matter when someone proposes a perpetual motion machine. This thread is about fuel from H2O, CO2 and electricity, where the source of electricity might be cheap, like wind, solar or (as suggested in a comment), nuclear power. What made your comments “stupid” was your blanket dismissal of possibilities that are obviously possible.
If [insert power source here] were useful, it would be used in oil tankers. Billions of people find pedal power useful, and it does not power a single oil tanker. Billions also have plenty of sun and wind but no cheap or reliable fuel. If the technologies that already exist can be mass-produced at low enough cost, someone will sell those people fuel made from solar, CO2 and H2O. Perpetual motion machines are not in the mix.

@richardscourtney
I presume you eat food to live. Unless you live on bread alone (102% efficient) you are alive and commenting thanks to the biggest perpetual motion machine scam in history, still going strong with 7 billion grateful adherents:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6252
I was happy enough to skim past your comments after the first few but then I realised there might be some people who are here, eagerly trying to get up to scratch on the science and fall into the same trap as you have if they read “perpetual motion” enough times. That’s the only reason I’m slipping this comment in. Well, that and the fact that these other guys seem to be having some difficulty convincing you despite their cogent arguments.

Catcracking: High costs ALWAYS fall dramatically regardless of how bad the technology actually performs? Certainly there are lots of ideas that are in the dustbin because the economics never make sense.
With knowledge that we have now, would you bet that this technology costs more or less than 10% of what it costs now, 20 years from now? At that time will liquid fuels from carbonaceous deposits cost more or less than what they cost now?
Functioning gas turbine engines were first operated in about 1939. Their development was entirely government funded. Do you think it will take longer to make this technology commercially feasible than it took the governments of the world to make turbine engines commercially feasible? For solar, we know the answer is “Yes”; given that solar is where it is today, it seems to me that catalyzed manufacture of liquid fuel from PV panels has a good chance to be commercially feasible in less than 20 years, especially for the populations of humans who have sun, water, but no reliable supplies of gasoline or diesel fuel.
Taking a hard line on what costs can’t possibly be reduced sufficiently to make a technology commercially feasible strikes me as being foolish.

richardscourtney: (except hydro-power)
Why did you except hydro-power? The “energy density” of wind and solar compare favorably with the energy density of hydro-power. Besides that, solar and wind can be harvested in flat locations and places that don’t have water, like Iowa and West Texas. Hydropower in San Diego County is kind of a joke: what comes from the Colorado River goes elsewhere, but we have a lot of wind and sun.
I don’t deny that nuclear power is great; what I deny is that we know for sure that it will always be cheaper than wind and solar in all places for all time. The costs of the wind and solar technology have been reduced much more than the costs of nuclear in the last 20 years.

@richardscourtney (October 27 4:27pm)
Richard,
My reference to “the biggest perpetual motion scam in history” was an ironic reference to your constant erroneous assertions about perpetual motion i.e. showing that if you think the air to fuel process is perpetual motion then so should modern agriculture (when it clearly isn’t).  I’m sure you know I wasn’t advocating “a return to horses, oxen and slaves” or any kind of retrograde step. I’m wary of your tactics now, all the more so since reading your astonishingly brazen and wilful misrepresentation of Matthew R Marler’s pedal power comment. You try to make intelligent people look like dunces by taking their sensible argument and pretending they meant the opposite by turning around 180 degrees. That’s what you have done with both of us in succession. I’d better put your comment in full before I carry on with my reply.
Richard said in reply to my comment of October 20th 1.32pm:
“There have been NO “cogent arguments” for ‘renewables’ in this thread. Lots of ‘green’ wet dreams but nothing that approaches a viable and economic reality.
“The “7 billion adherents” mostly exist because renewables were abandoned in favour of the greater energy intensity available from fossil fuels. People need energy to survive and the human population took off when the energy of fossil fuels became available initially by use of the steam engine.
“Indeed, your link goes to a site that lists the energy requirements of food production. You are deluded if you really think a return to biomass and a return to horses, oxen and slaves could replace the agricultural production enabled by fossil fueled tractors.
“At present the world population is conservatively estimated at 6.6 billion and it is expected to peak at conservatively 8 billion around the middle of this century. Those additional billions need energy to survive. Burning wood and dung will not provide anywhere near enough of it. The only sources of sufficient additional energy are fossil fuels and nuclear power. Most of the needed increased energy supply has to be from fossil fuels because there are limits to the uses of energy from the end of a wire.
“The idea that the increase in needed energy could come from renewables is not merely daft: it is evil. It condemns billions of people – mostly children – to death. The existing population was achieved by abandoning such low energy density sources and adopting fossil fuels instead.
“Whether you like it or not, a device for producing energy which consumes more energy than it provides IS a perpetual motion machine. Don’t try the idiotic assertion that you could use a ‘renewable’ to provide the excess energy. If that energy were useful then it would be foolish to throw some of it away by using it as an input to the device.
“Read the post from Catcracking at October 20, 2012 at 2:02 pm and try to learn something before again putting both feet in your mouth when making a post.
Richard”
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxEND OF RICHARD’S COMMENT
Wow! What a pointless rant. I didn’t think you would think I was advocating a return to the stone age. Anyone who had read your assertions regarding perpetual motion and then saw my link would get what I meant. But it seems I need to spell out the simple message therein that negates your argument:
A process (agriculture) produces a fuel (food) which feeds a machine (your body) at vastly greater input (energy needed for food production) than output (you typing, walking, running).
Yet producing food and eating it to stay alive is clearly a viable energy input/output equation despite being way less than 100% efficient (as has been the case since the most basic forms of auxiliary energy replaced muscle power). You are not a perpetual motion machine and neither is the process used to make your fuel. You must agree with that if you are alive and well and buy your food from the shops. Indeed, your robust support of modern agriculture (which I would heartily second) proves that you do agree, quote:
“You are deluded if you really think a return to biomass and a return to horses, oxen and slaves could replace the agricultural production enabled by fossil fueled tractors.”
That observation proves my point admirably: fossil fueled tractors (and other energy inputs) consume more energy than the food energy they produce. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. Yet you call the process of fuel from air a perpetual motion machine (despite its being a process and not a machine). So, by the same token, we have to conclude that you would call modern agriculture a perpetual motion machine. It is clearly not and neither is fuel from air, for the same reason. That reason is that you gain added value, or utility, from the conversion and the cost of the excess energy over and above 100% is the price that is paid- willingly so in the case of food, the value added being life; and yet to be ascertained in the case of air to fuel, the value added being ease of transportation and energy density.
If you really believed your energy input can’t exceed energy output argument it would be you, not I, who would be advocating a return to the stone age- using muscle power to produce your food. Hunter gathering or bashing clods in a field with a hoe are the only way to feed the human machine with fuel that contains more energy than that used to produce it.
If you continue to believe that perpetual motion is being touted here, please just go and look it up somewhere. You’ll find that such systems are described as closed systems, independent of outside energy input and impossible for that reason. If you present an argument against air to fuel while invoking energy input, as you have, then you have strayed from perpetual motion territory right there at the outset.
I think, on reflection, you probably did understand the simple food energy analogy I was making. It certainly does seem surreal having to explain such a simple concept for you while other readers look on with what must be bemused astonishment.  So please don’t wilfully misrepresent my comments in future and in such an insulting manner. I don’t do so with your comments nor with anyone else’s.
Scute

Chairman Al says:
The only reason we are not running around in fuel cell powered cars is because there is no cheap source of hydrogen.
Nothing to do with a liquid being rather easier to transport and store than a compressed gas?

@ richardscourtney October 21st at 6:16am
There you go again. Turning our arguments round 180 degrees. You’re digging a hole and don’t know when to stop.
Scute

We will never run out of fossil fuels – as its scarcity increases, so will its cost, and at some point its cost will exceed the cost of alternatives. At that point, alternatives will replace fossil fuels without any government initiatives or taxpayer subsidies. Until that point in time arrives, the construction of full scale plants as anything other than an experiment intended to uncover any unforeseen problems with a new technology is a waste of resources.
The Great Plains Synfuel Plant may have been justified as such an experiment (even though that wasn’t its stated purpose) but we are not dumb enough to invest in more of them in an attempt to solve any energy problems. A few large wind turbines, for example, would be sufficient for experimental demonstration purposes. Huge arrays of wind turbines requiring taxpayer subsidies are a monumental waste of tax dollars. Money that would be better spent looking into new ideas for alternatives – even investigating seemingly harebrained schemes to turn water and CO2 into gasoline is better than just letting the wind blow it away.

richardscourtney: Any energy source can have a niche use.
Would be good to end on that note of agreement. That is the claim I have been making about non-fossil and non-nuclear power.
But I shall add: if the cost of the energy source can be made to decline, then it can expand into other niches. As the costs of wind and nuclear continue to decline, they will continue to expand, as did the “niche” turbine engines before them.

Catcracking: “Lets stop this nonsense before we are bankrup and get some qualified engineers screening these investmentst”
You omitted Worldcom, Enron, GM, DEC, American Motors Corporation, TWA, Kodak and Consolidated Aircraft.
Let’s stipulate that in most places in the US and EU and most developed nations wind and solar are not cost-competitive against gas and coal, for most purposes (maybe solar is good for irrigation in the Imperial Valley and lighting schools and businesses in Southern Arizona.) However, the prices have been driven up because demand has increased much faster than output ( favor increased American output of petroleum and natural gas, but I would be surprised if prices fall 25%.) As America’s exports of natural gas increase, the domestic prices of natural gas will probably continue their recent increase. Over the past 2 decades, the costs of electricity from wind and solar have decreased. With the usual caveat that the future can not be predicted accurately, and for sure not 2 decades in advance, there is every reason for optimism that continued R&D will continue to drop their prices. Starting small, the aircraft and airline industries grew because they received great sums of government support, more than the alternative energy industries have received — that includes my favorite example of turbine engines. One of the basic justifications for the federal subsidy is to develop the technology to where is is commercially viable, and solar and wind look set to achieve that goal, despite the disasters that you listed.
Outside the US and EU, there are billions of people who have no electricity, no reliable deliveries of gasoline, gas, or natural gas, but who have plenty of wind and sunshine. If the rest of the world economy grows, those people will never have electricity from fossil fuels because they can’t outbid the rest of the world, but they might soon be able to afford electricity from solar and wind power.
I am not saying you don’t have a case, I just don’t think it is decisively against further R&D of these alternatives.