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.
Like Ferdinand Englebeen says. Currently, fossil fuel + water + Oxygen = CO2 + water + energyA.
The reverse reaction is CO2 + water + energyB = carbonaceous material + water + CO2.
Unless there is a subtle twist that has eluded brilliant brains for decades, Energy B will need to be larger than Energy A. Any evidence that it is? Are we back to perpetual motion machines again?
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.
If there was a hint of energy balance and viability in this process it would surely be better employed on a CO2-rich exhaust stream from some industrial process. Why take it out of the air when you could get it at vastly higher concentrations before it gets to the atmosphere?
An obvious candidate would be steam reformers used for generating Hydrogen: the exhaust is essentially CO2 and water vapour.
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.
Surely this is the Fischer–Tropsch process, developed in the 1920s?
CO2 is heated until it decomposes, forming carbon monoxide. Carbon monoxide reacts with water to produce hydrogen, and carbon monoxide with hydrogen (helped along with a few catalysts) forms alkanes. The Germans used it to generate fuel in WWII when oil imports were cut off. I think the South Africans had a go, too.
Efficiency is reportedly 25-50%.
If this relied on fossil fuel to power it there is no way that it could be financially viable. The only thing that makes this a possibility is that wind turbines produce most of their electricity when there is no market for it. By using that, otherwise wasted, energy they can make a business case but that would end the moment the wind boondoggle was cut off at the knees.
This is the main front page story
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.
The flexibility of the Carbon element is truly outstanding.
The oil industry have always been able to process long chains C-H-O etc to make amazing products that we rely upon everyday.
They do not perform this particular manipulation because it is too costly in energy input.
I am sure there are some organic chemists reading WUWT who will be able to tell us the energy budget.
I expect it will be horrendously inefficient, I suspect we will need windmills x1000
apparently we now have weather that is ‘weirder’ than before
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19995084
“The company hopes that within two years it will build a larger, commercial-scale plant capable of producing a ton of petrol a day”
I wonder where the money is coming from????
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.
Gasoline manufactured from carbon dioxide and water vapour? Sorry, simply impossible!
As the saying goes, when something looks too good to be true, it’s usually because it is!
Can’t people see this is crap? It sound like something from an April Fools comic book.
http://www.airfuelsynthesis.com/home.html
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.
It could solve lots of problems. Just convert all the wind turbines to gas stations and have a little green light come on half way up the tower when it has made a tank full. No infrastructure required and it could catch rainwater for it’s raw material. No need for electric cars at all.
People can, and have, extracted gold from sea-water. But the cost of doing so makes it uneconomic. Similar principle here. You have to put more energy in than you get out, as required by thermodynamics. What is the energy-efficiency of their process?
They used hydrogen as their energy source, so how is the hydrogen generated? That returns us back to fossil fuels, or electrolysis of water with, for example, energy from nuclear power.
I have on my shelf a book entitled “Nuclear Transmutation of Stable and Radioactive Isotopes in Biological Systems” by Vladimir I. Vysotskii and Alla A. Kornilova. Vysotskii is Professor, Head of Dept of Theoretical Radiophysics in Kiev, and Kornilova is Director of Innovation Centre, Physical Faculty Senior Researcher at Solid State Physics Dept in Moscow State University.
Biological transmutations is alchemy by another name, the supposedly impossible transmutation of one element into another. It evidently happens under our noses all the time, and thankfully the Russians are open to investigating this without prejudice.
With that caveat, I fully endorse the concerns here as to whether this H2O / CO2 process can ever be economically viable, let alone good practice. I’m more interested in magnetism and tracking down the hints coming in from reverse-engineering from Roswell etc. But I’m not going to stray any further into that here. It would be OT.
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.
Thermodynamics dictates that the efficiency of the energy conversion will be less than 100%.
It will take substantially more energy to produce this synthetic fuel that you could obtain from using it.
Where is all that energy going to come from?
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….
steve Richards
I am sure there are some organic chemists reading WUWT who will be able to tell us the energy budget
I just did that above and my degree is not organic chemistry.
It is very easy to establish the lower bound by taking methanol – every chain longer than methanol will just be more difficult and expensive to make so we’ll stay with the simplest to have a lower bound.
CH3OH + O2 -> CO2 + H20 (equation non balanced) is just methanol combustion in air and releases 700 kJ/mole.
So doing the opposite, starting with CO2 and H20 and finishing with methanol will cost you at least 700 kJ/mol.
How far above this lower bound of 700 kJ/mol you will be depends on how inefficient all your other processes are.
Obviously to make happen a reaction in the opposite direction than a combustion will need a great deal of auxiliary processes each with its own inefficiency.
Does this new technology involve a genetically engineered plant called a Triffid?
This just shows that few people understand the second law of thermodynamics, although many commentators can draw the right conclusions without mentoining it. The BBC news item said they would need energy to make it work but it was renewable energy, so that’s all right then…Clever chemical engineering by all means, but don’t imagine it has got anything to do with a new energy source or making it cheaper or any other significant question that we may face in our energy future. Solve the energy crisis? Yes, just like electric cars do…alchemy is the right word!
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.
Isn’t this simply an offshoot of carbon sequestration – catch the exhaust from power stations etc ?
I also saw some scheme Audi had a scheme to sequester exhaust CO2 from factories into a fuel source – has to be better than turning food into biodiesel while millions starve !