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.
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.
Nullius in Verba
Surely this is the Fischer–Tropsch process, developed in the 1920s?
Yes I am 99,99% sure that this is an Nth variation on Fischer Tropsch synthesis.
The big difference being that F-T starts with synthesis gaz (CO+H2) which is clearly NOT “air”.
So they have to introduce supplementary 2 stages :
1) CO2 – > CO (this happens in coal furnaces)
2) H2O -> H2 (there are many ways all needing investments and energy).
So this whole “alchemy” which is known for 100 years can be resumed by :
Air (CO2,+ O2,+ H20) -> synthesis gaz (CO2 + CO + H2) -> liquid fuel (Fischer Tropsch)
The simplest case being obtained when the liquid fuel is methanol.
And indeed you are right – the world’s leader for Fischer Tropsch is the South African company Sasol. But they use in the process …. the horrible CO2 emitting coal:)
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”
When you consider the price of petrol in the UK, most of the cost being tax, if this process is not taxed to death then commercial viability is feasible in the future. What we also require is viable renewable energy currently unavailable.
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.
Carbon neutral liquid fuels – an investment pitch by Air Fuel Synthesis
With enough nuclear power plants eve Los Alamos can produce hydrocarbons and do it on a huge scale. But even the NYT has been reporting the “catch”
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/federal-lab-says-it-can-harvest-fuel-from-air/
If they’ve managed to reduce the cost of production, they should get on a green-fueled jet and apply at Los Alamos.
However, one hopes the folks will win the science prize down at the local grade school.
A ton a day from a commercial-scale plant? That’s about 1400 litres a day! Less than £2000 value retail, even today.
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/
I don’t think that “Funding” is a swear word. Isn’t that what venture capitalists do?
The obvious energy inefficiencies of this process are not denied – the price of the energy you put into the process is what you pay for the energy density and convenience of the fuel you get out.
If it works out to be worth while in the end, good luck to them – by all means make petrol from overnight electric power, water and CO2. What’s wrong with that?
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.
The Independent article is written by Steve Connor who believes in everything, including global warming, and so gives a sort of fairy tale account as if any scientific description would be beyond him and his readers. A more detailed description of the process can be found in the Daily Telegraph.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/fuel/9619269/British-engineers-produce-amazing-petrol-from-air-technology.html
The “petrol from air” technology involves taking sodium hydroxide and mixing it with carbon dioxide before “electrolysing” the sodium carbonate that it produces to form pure carbon dioxide. Hydrogen is then produced by electrolysing water vapour captured with a dehumidifier. The carbon dioxide and hydrogen are then combined to produce methanol which in turn is passed through a gasoline fuel reactor, creating petrol.
You could probably get this to work but, as many have pointed out, only by putting more energy in than you are ever going to get out
The only justification for this would be: it is powered by windmills so it’s free and doesn’t produce carbon dioxide ( although Sodium Hydroxide is also a limited and expensive resource compared to oil).
On hearing this m’lady said: “Their air must be very polluted.”
What it looks to me is a process called Sabatier, it has been proposed for the Mars Direct mission where a small plant would make Methane out of CO2, Hydrogen and bucketload of energy.
Now on Mars this would be a great idea, because Mars Direct planned a so called Earth Return Vehicle, it would be send to Mars with a (small) nuclear reactor, 6 tonnes of hydrogen and said Sabatier processor combined electrolysis would produced 112 tonnes of oxygen and methane to fuel the Return vehicle.
But it cost more energy to produce these fuels than they deliver. The only reason to use it is because it saves weight that had to be send to Mars. Back here on Earth its rather pointless to work with this.
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).
Hmmm, water and CO2…. Ah yes, can I get some scotch with that?
And since I hale from America, a few of the Arctic’s newly formed ice cubes?
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.
Burning gasoline creates CO2 and H2O and releases energy. So, to make gasoline from from CO2 and H2O, they must add energy. Don’t see the net gain here.
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
There is, or at least was, an experimental site in the US somewhere using solar to do the same thing – those in the UK may remember a BBC TV programme presented by James May a couple of years ago in which he visited the site. So, as others have mentioned, the concept is hardly new; whether it can ever be practical is another matter. Must be a quiet news day at the Independent.
Hot under the collar:
At October 19, 2012 at 3:11 am you assert
No! it is NOT “viable”. It uses more energy than it produces. You need to look up ‘perpetual motion’ if you don’t understand why this makes it non-viable.
And we have adequate “renewable energy” for centuries to come in the forms of fossil fuels and nuclear energy. These energy sources are as “renewable” as any other because all energy was created at the Big Bang and all energy flows are stages towards the Heat Death of the universe. Anything which utilises those flows increases entropy.
Richard
Sounds like a scam. Unless there is a huge breakthrough in catalyst technology there is no way this could be done with a positive energy result. How do you get CO2 out of the air, AND breakdown the CO2 and H2O, AND rebuild it into a complex molecule like gasoline without amazing catalysts or huge amounts of energy- much larger than the resulting gasoline?
If someone made a game changing development in applied catalyst tech, it would very likely have been noticed somewhere.
This is a scam to take advantage of the CO2 obsessed and the credulity they have regarding anything to do with energy.
I’ll see if I can dig up something I read recently from the US military. They’re looking into producing jet fuel on carriers to provide some buffer from needing to be supplied in dodgy parts of the world. The energy source would be the on board nuke, so no magic needed there, the hydrogen source is all around them, so no magic needed there. Cost, not an issue, but apparently pretty reasonable compared to refueling ships and whatnot.
Most of you seem to be forgetting that plants do water + CO2 + sunlight -> hydrocarbons all the time. OK so they not give a hydrocarbon you can use directly for fuel, and this pilot plant is not solar powered, but the idea is not totally stupid – it is why various biochemists have been tinkering with the mechanism of photosynthesis for decades.
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.