This seems almost scam quality – only time will tell if it is just another pipe dream.
From WUWT Tips and Notes by J B Williamson;
A small British company has produced the first “petrol from air” using a revolutionary technology that promises to solve the energy crisis as well as helping to curb global warming by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Air Fuel Synthesis in Stockton-on-Tees has produced five litres of petrol since August when it switched on a small refinery that manufactures gasoline from carbon dioxide and water vapour.
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.
UPDATE: In comments, Ric Werme points out:
Also interesting – http://www.21stcentech.com/military-update-did-a-cancer-researcher-inspire-the-navy-to-turn-seawater-into-jet-fuel/
The Naval Research Laboratory is using an electrochemical acidification cell (see image below) to take seawater through a two-step process to capture carbon dioxide and produce hydrogen gas. Carbon dioxide is concentrated in seawater at levels 140 times greater than in the atmosphere. A portion of it is carbonic acid and carbonate, but most is bicarbonate. Harvesting all that carbon coupled with the hydrogen is what the electrochemical acidification cell does employing a catalyst similar to that used to create synthetic oil from coal but with much greater efficiency.
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Removiing CO2 from the air is a VERY, VERY BAD idea !!!
What happens to trees when you suck all the CO² out of the air? Doesn’t all that green stuff turn grey and die? And we all starve to death. Are Paul Elrich and John Holdren investing in this business by any chance?
ps.. I do , of course mean, in commercially viable fuel quantities.
It would seem to require more energy than it provides, if you ask me.
How much “energy in” does it take to suck a ‘ton a day’ of ‘gasoline’ out of the air?
It is well established you can make methanol from CO2. Maybe that’s what this is about.
http://thinkgeoenergy.com/archives/10711
Applied cold fusion, no doubt.
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?
As a contribution to decarbonization it is of course worthless, even were decarbonization not inane. The oceans will outgas CO2 to restore any trivial reduction such a process achieves.
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?
Yeah, I’m Going To Need To See The Math On That.
Basically they’re turning electricity (coal) and chemicals into other chemicals, from what they say. Probably less efficiently than the alternatives, and with the added benefit of starving poor innocent plants.
I’m also glad I don’t live on the same planet as the commenters there. Serious cortisol poisoning must result and/or cause.
If the climate scientologists are correct, wouldn’t extracting CO2 from the air bring about an ice age and starve all the plants?
I think the “gain” here is taking advantage of green mania and jumping on the green gravy train, to put it bluntly.
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.
Perisamy: Think of it as a “Friday Funny.”
Like the Wind-powered electric car.
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.
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.
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
Let me see if I have this right – they are taking two kinds of ash – CO2 and water, and making fuel from it. Normally in a process breakdown there is a “and a miracle occurs here” claim when you take two unlikely ash piles and combine them to produce yet more energy at no cost. Not buying it. The miracle, that is.
If it seems too good to be true ……… Well, you know the rest.
Making the assumption that this works best as a carbon sequestration system…. one wonders how much energy it would take to get reasonable recovery from a large source. E.g. a coal fired power station… and would the power exceed the amount produced by the plant.
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.
If you mount input of the device at the end of your car’s exhaust pipe and its output is fed into the car’s petrol tank, you get for-ever free motoring.
That is what I call progress, need I say more.
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.
Yep. They are a bit late to the trough if you ask me. They should have started promoting this four years ago when the US was handing out tens of billions of dollars for this sort of nonsense. It would have been pretty simple, really. Just “invest” a few thousand in the right political campaign, set up your business, then wait for the tax dollars to come pouring in. Simple, really.
In 2009, US President Obama took the entire year’s income tax revenue, ALL of it, and dolled it out to political supporters in what was framed as an “economic stimulus” program. I believe that is the largest heist in world history of which we are currently aware.