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.
Simple questions “There are 20 million vehicles in the UK. Assuming maximum efficiency of their engines, how much electrical power would be required to provide a full sustainable supply of this new petrol? How does that compare to the total UK output of electricity currently and by what factor would the number of installed wind turbines have to be increased to meet this additional demand?”
They have a lab bench scale demonstration that can make a gallon of petrol/gasoline in over a month. They hope within 2 years to scale it up 15000x to make a commercial(?) scale plant that can make 360 gallons (8.5 barrels) of petrol/gasoline per day. No mention of costs of the apparatus, level of energy inputs, or energy conversion efficiency.
The major problems I have with this are:
1. You can’t scale up that much in a single step with any reasonable expectation that it will work.
2. Scaling up has always been the failure point for all these ‘green fuel’ ideas. To date few have made it successfully to the pilot plant stage, none have really made it past.
3. 360 gpd is not a commercial scale plant, it barely qualifies as a pilot plant.
4. We need to know the energy input to output conversion ratio. Simple entropy would seem to guarantees that it is going to be abysmal.
5. Cost. Cost. Cost. There has to be a catalyst involved if nothing else. How much is needed? How much can we MAKE? There are limits, for example, on the amount of platinum available.
Only works with significant Govn’t funding.
Alchemy fantacy! Creating “Gold”…
And I apologize to the mods for the changing username but after I post an initial comment, WordPress makes me log in for some reason and subsequent comments are posted under this name unless I remember to click the “Change” button. I’m not intentionally playing multiple sockpuppets here. My previous posting in the thread was as “crosspatch”.
[Reply: Thank you, George. But please use ‘crosspatch’, which is unique, while ‘George’ is not. Your comments are always worth reading. — mod.]
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…
Methanol to be used as a gasoline additive is made by CRI near the geothermal power plant Svartsengi in Iceland. Electric energy is coming from the power plant and CO2 comes from the hot steam wells and has to be removed from the steam before entering the turbines in the plant.
http://www.cri.is/
http://www.cri.is/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3&Itemid=2&lang=en
http://www.hsorka.is/english/HSProduction/HSProductionSvartsengi.aspx
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.
Interesting. If it works, it’s effectively the battery – the energy-storage technology – that has always been the missing link in the wind / solar paradigm.
So unhook all those wind-turbines and solar-panels from the grid, and use them to make gasoline on-site, instead – sort of like having hundreds of small oil-wells. A single unconnected generator powering a chemical process is a lot more easily and efficiently operated than one which has to be hooked up to the supply grid; so that gets rid of all the well-know problems of intermittency and back-up requirements that plague renewable generation. Go back to coal, gas and nuclear for electricity; but now the clean/green effect is switched to getting rid of fossil petroleum for transportation. Two big advantages there: reduction of local pollution – NoX, diesel paticulates and so on – and geopolitical; not having to import oil from Venezuela and Saudi Arabia would be Good News.
Extracting CO2 from the atmosphere (400 ppm, right?) seems dumb, though. Get it from the coal-fired stations at a thousand times the concentration.
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.
Espen:—-could perhaps be an interesting alternative to batteries,
JK:——The problem is that fuel is converted about 30% to mechanical energy, while electricity in a battery is at least double that when considering battery losses + motor losses.
Thanks
JK
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!
As always, it’s a matter of “the ratio of energy in versus energy out”. As soon as I hear them talking about getting that “energy in” from wind and solar I smell a poor ratio to be defended by the argument that it doesn’t matter because wind and solar energy is free…..NOT!
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.
I expect this company is more about trying to suck green grants out of the fatuous British government than sucking CO2 out of the air to make petrol.
It’s almost as if they sat down one day, trying to write the perfect subsidy application, and this is what they came up with; not only does it provide ‘renewable’ petrol, but wait, there’s more! — it reduces CO2 levels too!
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.
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”.
That’s what I expected. Extracting CO2 from air is being done since more than 100 years. I doubt they can beat the industry leader on that:
The start-up of the world’s first air separation plant in 1902 initiated the development of the cryogenic industry. Today, several hundred engineers and specialists work at Linde for the worldwide sale and contract execution of plants recovering the air components oxygen and nitrogen as well as the various rare gases.
Over 2,800 air separation plants in 80 countries bear witness to the outstanding market position of Linde in this field of technology.
http://www.linde-engineering.com/en/process_plants/air_separation_plants/index.html
Maybe they have developed a new process to efficiently turn CO2 into petrol. That alone would be good news.
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.
Well, if they hang their machine at the exhaust pipe of an electricity generator on petrol and feed the generator the produced output of their machine and it keeps on running, then I think they’re up to something (perpetuum mobile, anyone?). Subsequently, they will have to turn to industries that produce CO2 (and there are many of them), so they don’t have to deplete the atmosphere and starve plants and life as we know it..
Otherwise, and that will probably be the case, it will need grants or taxes to make up for the loss of energy. And the energy produced will therefore cost more than tradional sources. In that case I like this idea better than wind or solar, but in the end I don’t like energy that needs grants and taxes at all, so I guess this invention will not be viable enough to outlive the green energy hype/hoax. I think it is just not sustainable, in a normal world.
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
If they are reversing this reaction
C8H18 + 25 O2 → 16 CO2 + 18 H2O
good luck to them! The first thing you need to do is split the water, probably by electrolysis. Then you need to add energy to break more bonds and rearrange things. No wonder they want to hook it up to “free” power sources like wind and solar.
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.
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.
This may work if there is a research grant in it as well as bonus carbon credits.
from what little I remember from organic chemistry they would need a lot of heat and pressure to build a mixture of alkanes, which would mean it would need more energy to make petrol than would be useable when burnt.
“What happens to trees when you suck all the CO² out of the air?”
Oceans outgas CO2 and nothing changes.
Well when you burn petrol you get energy out. To reverse the process you need to put the same amount of energy back in, plus extra to cater for inefficiencies. So where do they get the energy required from?. If its solar/ nuclear fine. If its coal burning you have lost again due to inefficiencies.
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.