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.
Well, that was easy. Googling |military carrier jet fuel seawater| yields many links.
I forgot – carbon source would be CO2 from seawater, not air.
http://www.navytimes.com/news/2012/10/navy-turn-sea-water-into-jet-fuel-101312w says in part:
“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
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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.
Oops, left a step out there – plants naturally produce carbohydrates not hydrocarbons, but getting from carbohydrates to hydrocarbons biologically is a lot easier than H2O+CO2 directly to hydrocarbons.
It is less costly to convert animal (human?) tissue to fuel than it is to make it from air.
There is absolutely no way that this can come out with an energy gain as ALL processes must have energy losses, regardless of which way it is going, burning the fuel or making the fuel. That is why biofuels are not a gain, as the processing from planting seed to fueling a car ALL have to have losses.
Sure, if we had NO fuel from the ground, we would find the expenses of biofuels palatable. As that is not the case, then biofuels are a patent waste of everything involved, except, of course, the people receiving huge government subsidies to make something that would not be marketable on the open market.
This has nothing to do with saving money or being cost efficient. It is all about a maniacal need to use any means, no matter how stupid or expensive, to make save the planet from a delusional threat. It’s an excuse to pursue stupid things.
This is also another cry for “Funding, please.”
This story reminds me of electric cars that use fossil fuel generated electricity to charge up their batteries. A bit like solar and wind requiring (always on) fossil fuel generated power for when the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine. I smell another scam in the works.
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.
We can now expect a constitutional amendment requiring 10 percent of all liquid fuel to be made out of thin air.
Hot under the collar says:
October 19, 2012 at 3:11 am
“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. ”
Commercial viability? What’s that?
I seem to remember that there is an awful lot of empty space in the huge towers of the wind turbines . Why not put a petrol producing plant inside it , the power is ‘on tap’ so can be switched to producing fuel when it isnt wanted for producing electricity . Lots of room for storage below and the fuel can be tapped off into petrol tankers when needed.
Imagine tens of thousands of giant petrol pumps filling themselves automatically for next to no cost – wouldnt that upset the price of oil!! .
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.
Also interesting – http://www.21stcentech.com/military-update-did-a-cancer-researcher-inspire-the-navy-to-turn-seawater-into-jet-fuel/
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.
How to make octane from CO2 and H2O? Simple. You get a plant, water it, give it CO2, wait for it to grow, then bury it in the ground for a few million years under heat and pressure, then you suck up the juice, dstil it, and you have octane!
Hahahahahaha! GASP hahahahahahah!!! SNORT hhahahahahahahahah! PLEASE hahahahaha! STOP hahahahahah!
The only way this will pay is to produce from free electricity. Why not simply sell the free electricity? A higher profit is guaranteed.
After all, Britain’s electric prices are at this minute going through the roof!
So, the fact of the matter is they intend to sequester carbon tax monies to pay its hidden cost of liquid fuel production.
No matter how you look at it. It’s a scam.
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/
Technology like this was used by the Germans in WWII (synthetic oil plants), how is this new? How soon we forget.
It can work IF we have enough cheap power, due to “green” power, we do not. We can have enough power if we use two technologies, nuclear and solar power satellites. The greens have managed to stop both, the first due to the “nuclear disaster” in Japan that has, to date, killed or injured absolutely no one (horrors!), and the second they shut down even a small scale test of beaming power to earth with microwaves by inventing imaginary fears and getting the courts to believe them (typical).
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.
They do not say anything about the thermo-chemical processes. Can it be the Cerium-reactor? (10.1126/science.1197834). Without even basic information on the process and the input-output energy-relationship it is not worth reading.
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 point (to the extent that there is one) is that gasoline, octane in particular, is a near-perfect way of storing a huge amount of energy in a very small volume and mass. Gasoline has an extraordinarily high recoverable energy density — much higher than batteries, for example — and can yield that energy back “explosively” rapidly. Hydrogen, methane, propane, butane, all have to be compressed or liquified under pressure and are hence much more difficult to handle or store or distribute compared to gasoline. So let’s concede that gasoline is a “desirable” fuel for cars in particular, at least until such a time as some sort of storage battery is invented that has a comparable energy density and that can be recharged as fast as a gas tank can and that doesn’t have a “memory effect” or explosive/toxic properties even worse than the explosive/toxic properties of gasoline (which are considerable).
to the rooftop during optimal times of day. We average it out, count the number of square meters, work out efficiencies, and perhaps I can get (being generous) 5 kW from my rooftop for 8 hours a day — call it 40 kWh (although it is more likely going to be more like 20). That’s just over one gallon of gasoline assuming perfect conversion efficiency. Gasoline has a whoppping 33 kWh per gallon! No way I’ll get perfect conversion efficiency, so in the real world it would take days to make a gallon and even using the energy to charge up a chevy volt would be far, far more efficient in terms of transportation, and that would still suck because yeah, dumping all 40 kWh straight into the battery of a volt without loss (ideal fantasy world) still only moves the volt about as far as the gallon of gasoline would have, 30 or 40 miles.
So sure, I’ve fantasized about putting a collector on my roof and using it to run my car. Here’s how the numbers work out. Sunlight delivers perhaps 700
That’s enough to make it feasible for me to run an electric vehicle off of my own rooftop’s energy supply at zero MARGINAL cost once I invest in rooftop solar collector and the vehicle itself for the amount of driving I typically do when NOT on the road for a trip with energy to spare for the household (where it would of course be of far more use, far more efficiently) but economically it is a disaster — rooftop collector breaks even on recovered energy costs only with a 13-20 year amortization as it is, the chevy volt is enormously expensive and I NEVER recover its amortized marginal cost compared to buying a cheaper car and paying for a lot more gasoline.
Then there is diesel. Diesel has an even higher energy density than gasoline — the highest of the commercially available liquid fuels except for kerosene (jet fuel) at 37 kWh. And the lovely thing about diesel is that it is basically just oil, and many, many plants make oil out of sunlight, air, and water already. Some of this is straightforward — growing peanuts, rapeseed, hemp, corn, olives, oil coconuts — and extracting the oil. So far, biodiesel grown this way doesn’t break even compared to regular diesel, except when it is recycled cooking oil already used for its primary (more expensive) purpose where this use is quite profitable. However, if it becomes part of a comprehensive plan to use e.g. hemp — oil from the seeds, paper, rope and clothing from the fiber, alcohol or methanol from the sugars/starches, (hell, mental entertainment from the leftovers:-) it might well become profitable (even very much so).
But the more interesting possibility is the development of commercial scale production of biodiesel from e.g. algae. So far, this hasn’t reached break even, although it has come reasonably close. There are a bunch of technical problems to overcome, although there are a lot of very competent people working on those technical problems and a lot of them probably CAN be overcome — they are a matter of clever engineering or plausible advances in the science. There is at least one large scale plant under very serious construction by people who expect to make money from it, and at the same time use it as a real-time engineering platform to solve those problems and gradually refine the process beyond the break-even point to the very profitable point. They have deep pockets and I wish them well (and think it reasonably likely that they will succeed).
This is almost certainly going to be far more efficient in every way than the process described in the top article. The actual energy conversion of sunlight and deconstruction of water and CO_2 is done by chlorophyll, which is remarkably efficient. There is every chance that by a combination of genetic engineering and forced evolution they can increase the fraction of energy that goes into high-grade oils by as much as an order of magnitude compared to levels in naturally occurring alga. There are again auxiliary products one can make for additional profit out of the harvested material once the oil is extracted.
It still won’t work as a rooftop collection process, though, I don’t think. My rooftop would have to produce a gallon of refined biofuel a day, and I just don’t see that happening. If it did, that would represent (say) $4/day in recovered investment, call it $1200/year, which means that in a decade it would STILL only break even on a financed original installation cost of $8000 with zero annual maintenance costs. Not a winner, again, compared to straight up PV solar even now, but something that potentially could be a big winner at turning useless desert with accessible water into a steady flow of fuel.
None of these so far compete with converting coal into gasoline, and all of them risk the development of a really efficient storage battery that permits electricity to actually compete with gasoline as a primary fuel for cars, where now it does so only on a toy basis, enormously expensive and hence only for the rich seeking to be “cool” instead of smart.
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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.
Urgh….
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.
We also know how to transform elements via neutron bombardment. I think thorium transformation to U233 may be somewhat more scalable and efficient. We are presently extracting energy from transformed elements (plutonium) in our current reactor designs.
Alchemy has limited practical use, but I daresay, we are already exploiting the magic, in our present day power reactors. GK