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.
richardscourtney: If wind power were really useful then oil tankers would be sailing ships.
and what I did write is self-evidently true.
Let me try again more directly: an energy source can be really useful and yet not be used to power oil tankers — pedal power for example. That wind power is not used to power oil tankers is irrelevant to the discussion of whether wind power is useful.
richardscourtney: (except hydro-power)
Why did you except hydro-power? The “energy density” of wind and solar compare favorably with the energy density of hydro-power. Besides that, solar and wind can be harvested in flat locations and places that don’t have water, like Iowa and West Texas. Hydropower in San Diego County is kind of a joke: what comes from the Colorado River goes elsewhere, but we have a lot of wind and sun.
I don’t deny that nuclear power is great; what I deny is that we know for sure that it will always be cheaper than wind and solar in all places for all time. The costs of the wind and solar technology have been reduced much more than the costs of nuclear in the last 20 years.
I didn’t see the programme but No.1 son, said, they have produced petrol from air. One problem it took months to produce 5 litres and well – maybe in the future they can do a lot better?
Matthew R Marler:
I copy all your post at October 20, 2012 at 5:17 pm because – like all your posts – it is so mind-blowingly stupid that anybody only reading a rebuttal could think the rebuttal is an exxageration of it. You write to me saying
Twaddle!
Any energy source can have a niche use. Your example of “pedal power” is an example of this. Pedal power is useful for some personal transport over short distances. But it is ridiculous to claim “pedal power” is useful for bulk transportation.
In other words, pedal power is not really useful so it only has a niche uses.
You imply that if “pedal power” were connected to drive shafts then it could be really useful for transportation; i.e. it could usefully power ships, trains, trucks and mass transport systems. Indeed, in the example of ships, oars were used for thousands of years and are still used for small boats, but galleys are not used now. Since you advocate this by using it as an example, then I suggest you volunteer to be a galley slave.
Are you really trying to say that because pedal power has a small niche use then that indicates pedal power can provide a useful contribution to the electricity supply of a grid!?
And you suggest that windpower is useful because pedal power has some small, niche uses!
Windpower also still has some small niche uses. For example, windpower is still used to pump irrigation water in places distant from a power source, but is not now used to power ships or mills although it did for centuries.
As I pointed out in an earlier post, windpower relies on the wind and is extremely expensive. The unreliability of wind or its cost would each alone rule it out as a viable source of bulk power, for example, to supply to an electricity a grid supply. If it were really useful then owners of present-day mills and factories would still use it as a power source: but they don’t.
Windpower as a supply to electricity grids is a rip-off of the public: it is politically mandated as a method to ‘farm’ subsidies. I strongly suspect you are employed by Big Wind as a propagandist because, otherwise, I fail to understand how anybody could want to post the kinds of outrageous nonsense with which you have snowed this thread.
Richard
Matthew R Marler:
I am bothering to reply to your daft post at October 20, 2012 at 5:24 pm because it demonstrates the type of (deliberate?) falsehood with which you have been trolling this thread as a method to preovide your pro-wind propoganda. It begins saying to me
I chose hydro-power because it has much higher energy density than normal winds (windfarms only operate when the wind is strong enough but not too strong).
Indeed, as I said, that is why hydro-power continued to be used when windpower was discontinued because the greater energy intensity of fossil fuels became available by use of the steam engine.
I will explain the difference between the energy intensities of windpower and hydro-power in a manner that any reader can understand. But before that I briefly mention it is because water is denser than air, and the energy in air increases with the cube of the wind speed.
Most people saw the news videos of the Boxing Day tsunami that struck Japan. They saw the water moving in at a speed which would not have been a problem if it were air. At that wind speed people could have walked down a street. But at that water speed the streets were demolished by the immense power of the moving water.
Richard
@richardscourtney (October 27 4:27pm)
Richard,
My reference to “the biggest perpetual motion scam in history” was an ironic reference to your constant erroneous assertions about perpetual motion i.e. showing that if you think the air to fuel process is perpetual motion then so should modern agriculture (when it clearly isn’t). I’m sure you know I wasn’t advocating “a return to horses, oxen and slaves” or any kind of retrograde step. I’m wary of your tactics now, all the more so since reading your astonishingly brazen and wilful misrepresentation of Matthew R Marler’s pedal power comment. You try to make intelligent people look like dunces by taking their sensible argument and pretending they meant the opposite by turning around 180 degrees. That’s what you have done with both of us in succession. I’d better put your comment in full before I carry on with my reply.
Richard said in reply to my comment of October 20th 1.32pm:
“There have been NO “cogent arguments” for ‘renewables’ in this thread. Lots of ‘green’ wet dreams but nothing that approaches a viable and economic reality.
“The “7 billion adherents” mostly exist because renewables were abandoned in favour of the greater energy intensity available from fossil fuels. People need energy to survive and the human population took off when the energy of fossil fuels became available initially by use of the steam engine.
“Indeed, your link goes to a site that lists the energy requirements of food production. You are deluded if you really think a return to biomass and a return to horses, oxen and slaves could replace the agricultural production enabled by fossil fueled tractors.
“At present the world population is conservatively estimated at 6.6 billion and it is expected to peak at conservatively 8 billion around the middle of this century. Those additional billions need energy to survive. Burning wood and dung will not provide anywhere near enough of it. The only sources of sufficient additional energy are fossil fuels and nuclear power. Most of the needed increased energy supply has to be from fossil fuels because there are limits to the uses of energy from the end of a wire.
“The idea that the increase in needed energy could come from renewables is not merely daft: it is evil. It condemns billions of people – mostly children – to death. The existing population was achieved by abandoning such low energy density sources and adopting fossil fuels instead.
“Whether you like it or not, a device for producing energy which consumes more energy than it provides IS a perpetual motion machine. Don’t try the idiotic assertion that you could use a ‘renewable’ to provide the excess energy. If that energy were useful then it would be foolish to throw some of it away by using it as an input to the device.
“Read the post from Catcracking at October 20, 2012 at 2:02 pm and try to learn something before again putting both feet in your mouth when making a post.
Richard”
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxEND OF RICHARD’S COMMENT
Wow! What a pointless rant. I didn’t think you would think I was advocating a return to the stone age. Anyone who had read your assertions regarding perpetual motion and then saw my link would get what I meant. But it seems I need to spell out the simple message therein that negates your argument:
A process (agriculture) produces a fuel (food) which feeds a machine (your body) at vastly greater input (energy needed for food production) than output (you typing, walking, running).
Yet producing food and eating it to stay alive is clearly a viable energy input/output equation despite being way less than 100% efficient (as has been the case since the most basic forms of auxiliary energy replaced muscle power). You are not a perpetual motion machine and neither is the process used to make your fuel. You must agree with that if you are alive and well and buy your food from the shops. Indeed, your robust support of modern agriculture (which I would heartily second) proves that you do agree, quote:
“You are deluded if you really think a return to biomass and a return to horses, oxen and slaves could replace the agricultural production enabled by fossil fueled tractors.”
That observation proves my point admirably: fossil fueled tractors (and other energy inputs) consume more energy than the food energy they produce. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. Yet you call the process of fuel from air a perpetual motion machine (despite its being a process and not a machine). So, by the same token, we have to conclude that you would call modern agriculture a perpetual motion machine. It is clearly not and neither is fuel from air, for the same reason. That reason is that you gain added value, or utility, from the conversion and the cost of the excess energy over and above 100% is the price that is paid- willingly so in the case of food, the value added being life; and yet to be ascertained in the case of air to fuel, the value added being ease of transportation and energy density.
If you really believed your energy input can’t exceed energy output argument it would be you, not I, who would be advocating a return to the stone age- using muscle power to produce your food. Hunter gathering or bashing clods in a field with a hoe are the only way to feed the human machine with fuel that contains more energy than that used to produce it.
If you continue to believe that perpetual motion is being touted here, please just go and look it up somewhere. You’ll find that such systems are described as closed systems, independent of outside energy input and impossible for that reason. If you present an argument against air to fuel while invoking energy input, as you have, then you have strayed from perpetual motion territory right there at the outset.
I think, on reflection, you probably did understand the simple food energy analogy I was making. It certainly does seem surreal having to explain such a simple concept for you while other readers look on with what must be bemused astonishment. So please don’t wilfully misrepresent my comments in future and in such an insulting manner. I don’t do so with your comments nor with anyone else’s.
Scute
Scute:
I read the first paragraph of your post at October 21, 2012 at 4:41 but no more because it is offensive and untrue nonsense. If that is what you want to write then I can get similar and better in a book of childrens’ jokes.
The paragraph I read says
You clearly fail to understand irony. Only idiots promote perpetual motion. I explained why much of what was being promoted by ‘green’ idiots posting to this thread is perpetual motion.
Agriculture is a different activity from making energy by using more energy. It is about growing crops. And you certainly WERE advocating a return to so-called renewables which IS “a retrograde step”.
I did NOT misrepresent the astonishingly stupid post that provided “Matthew R Marler’s pedal power comment”. It is so outrageously ridiculous that it is not possible to ridicule it. I remind that it said
People can ride bicycles so windpower is useful?
Do you really want to defend that idiocy?
Windfarms farm ‘subsidies’: they are a rip-off of the public: nothing more and nothing less.
And it is silly to claim – on the basis of that – I “try to make intelligent people look like dunces by taking their sensible argument and pretending they meant the opposite by turning around 180 degrees.”
I do not try to do any such thing because there is no need. I explain the stupidity of the comments from people such as Marler and you. Why would I want to misrepresent those comments when those comments shout about the idiocy of their providers?
I did not bother to read more of your post because I cannot be bothered with more of such nonsense.
Richard
Chairman Al says:
The only reason we are not running around in fuel cell powered cars is because there is no cheap source of hydrogen.
Nothing to do with a liquid being rather easier to transport and store than a compressed gas?
“renewable” energy already costs three times as much as conventional and not all of that is transmission costs. So let’s say they really get this efficient, I’m betting it still costs twice as much as conventional delivered at the user. I guess I’m kind of underwhelmed.
@ur momisugly richardscourtney October 21st at 6:16am
There you go again. Turning our arguments round 180 degrees. You’re digging a hole and don’t know when to stop.
Scute
Because of their extremely high energy densities, hydrocarbons make excellent fuels for dynamic vehicles. Energy density doesn’t matter so much in stationary applications, but when you have to move your potential energy around with you, it is of paramount importance. Whether or not a scheme like this will ever be viable will depend on the cost of synthesizing hydrocabon fuels vs. the cost of drawing them up out of the ground. If we were to get to a state where it is cheaper to synthesize the fuel (say we develop an infrastructure of thorium-based nukes, producing really cheap electricity) than to draw it from the ground (having to go to increasingly exotic methods to extract oil from increasingly remote reservoirs), then it may happen. But not likely until then.
We will never run out of fossil fuels – as its scarcity increases, so will its cost, and at some point its cost will exceed the cost of alternatives. At that point, alternatives will replace fossil fuels without any government initiatives or taxpayer subsidies. Until that point in time arrives, the construction of full scale plants as anything other than an experiment intended to uncover any unforeseen problems with a new technology is a waste of resources.
The Great Plains Synfuel Plant may have been justified as such an experiment (even though that wasn’t its stated purpose) but we are not dumb enough to invest in more of them in an attempt to solve any energy problems. A few large wind turbines, for example, would be sufficient for experimental demonstration purposes. Huge arrays of wind turbines requiring taxpayer subsidies are a monumental waste of tax dollars. Money that would be better spent looking into new ideas for alternatives – even investigating seemingly harebrained schemes to turn water and CO2 into gasoline is better than just letting the wind blow it away.
Scute:
I have saved our entire exchange and bolded your final post at October 21, 2012 at 8:32 am.
And I intend to use the resulting presentation – with that final post as the demonstration – whenever I am asked to explain ‘psychological projection’.
Thankyou. The result has made the unpleasant business of interacting with you worthwhile.
Richard
Lester Via:
Thankyou for your excellent post at October 21, 2012 at 10:35 am.
Since 1994 it has been possible to produce synfuel from coal at competitive cost with natural crude by use of the Liquid Solvent Extraction (LSE) process. We operated a demonstration plant in North Wales and it proved both the technical and the economic viabilities of the process. The process was invented and developed by the UK’s Coal Research Establishment (CRE) on behalf of UK government which owned CRE. The IPR of LSE is now owned by UK government.
The existence of the process sets a limit to true cost of crude for the reasons Big Don outlines at
October 21, 2012 at 9:28 am. Bulk crude producers are constrained from lowering production to a degree that would enable economic viability of constructing the infrastructure to produce LSE product. And ensuring that constraint was the purpose of developing the process.
Richard
richardscourtney: People can ride bicycles so windpower is useful?
Do you really want to defend that idiocy?
You made that up. I agree it’s comical.
Luckily, all these power sources are under continual development, so we’ll be able to discuss relative costs for the rest of our lives. If the costs of the proposed technology (“artificial photosynthesis”) are brought below the costs of the alternatives, then the technologies will thrive without subsidies. Meanwhile, be thankful that you enjoy reliable delivery of cheap fuel.
Matthew R Marler says:
October 20, 2012 at 5:10 pm
“Taking a hard line on what costs can’t possibly be reduced sufficiently to make a technology commercially feasible strikes me as being foolish.”
I agree that it would be foolish, however, that is not what I said.
Why would you set up a phoney strawman?
What I was relating to was the “always” claim by the professor:
“However, Professor Klaus Lackner of Columbia University in New York said that the high costs of any new technology always fall dramatically”
Only a gullible person would believe this claim or deceptive person would make or support this claim.
As I said “Certainly there are lots of ideas that are in the dustbin because the economics never make sense.”
What I find interesting is that you would so strongly defend what is obviously nothing more than a press release with very little technical detail as to how they can make gasoline from CO2 but backed up by a Professor’s claim that costs ALWAYS dramatically fall. Unfortunately I have seen so many failures in the past 12 years.
Go to the following website for a partial list of failures supported by our tax dollars:
http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/maritanoon/2012/10/07/romney_to_obama_you_pick_the_losers/page/full/
Why would anyone trust brief press reports with this track record for exaggerated claims?
richardscourtney: But before that I briefly mention it is because water is denser than air, and the energy in air increases with the cube of the wind speed.
that only matters in places that have lots of water falling or flowing downhill. Where the Niger River flows through the Sahel, you can get more power from the wind than from hydropower. Closer to home, the California Electricity crisis began when a multiyear drought failed to refill all the source reservoirs and the hydroelectricity supply fell (that wasn’t the only thing, but it was the closest thing to a “proximate cause” — absent the droughts, or if they had occurred 3 years later, there would have been no electricity crisis.) In San Diego County, one wind farm will outproduce the hydropower of the entire rest of the county because there is so much reliable wind and so little water.
The density of water is irrelevant where the water doesn’t flow in sufficient quantities.
For a smart fellow, you ignore an awful lot of possibilities in an awful lot of places. I would never recommend wind power to a gas-rich and coal-rich place like Pennsylvania. But I think it may eventually prove commercially viable in other places.
richardscourtney: Any energy source can have a niche use.
Would be good to end on that note of agreement. That is the claim I have been making about non-fossil and non-nuclear power.
But I shall add: if the cost of the energy source can be made to decline, then it can expand into other niches. As the costs of wind and nuclear continue to decline, they will continue to expand, as did the “niche” turbine engines before them.
Matthew, here is a better list of failures and the cost that would make any reasonable person say:
“Lets stop this nonsense before we are bankrup and get some qualified engineers screening these investmentst”
As a matter of full disclosure, I did some consulting on Range fuels. No 23.
The complete list of faltering or bankrupt green-energy companies:
1.Evergreen Solar ($25 million)*
2.SpectraWatt ($500,000)*
3.Solyndra ($535 million)*
4.Beacon Power ($43 million)*
5.Nevada Geothermal ($98.5 million)
6.SunPower ($1.2 billion)
7.First Solar ($1.46 billion)
8.Babcock and Brown ($178 million)
9.EnerDel’s subsidiary Ener1 ($118.5 million)*
10.Amonix ($5.9 million)
11.Fisker Automotive ($529 million)
12.Abound Solar ($400 million)*
13.A123 Systems ($279 million)*
14.Willard and Kelsey Solar Group ($700,981)*
15.Johnson Controls ($299 million)
16.Schneider Electric ($86 million)
17.Brightsource ($1.6 billion)
18.ECOtality ($126.2 million)
19.Raser Technologies ($33 million)*
20.Energy Conversion Devices ($13.3 million)*
21.Mountain Plaza, Inc. ($2 million)*
22.Olsen’s Crop Service and Olsen’s Mills Acquisition Company ($10 million)*
23.Range Fuels ($80 million)*
24.Thompson River Power ($6.5 million)*
25.Stirling Energy Systems ($7 million)*
26.Azure Dynamics ($5.4 million)*
27.GreenVolts ($500,000)
28.Vestas ($50 million)
29.LG Chem’s subsidiary Compact Power ($151 million)
30.Nordic Windpower ($16 million)*
31.Navistar ($39 million)
32.Satcon ($3 million)*
33.Konarka Technologies Inc. ($20 million)*
34.Mascoma Corp. ($100 million)
*Denotes companies that have filed for bankruptcy.
Catcracking: “Lets stop this nonsense before we are bankrup and get some qualified engineers screening these investmentst”
You omitted Worldcom, Enron, GM, DEC, American Motors Corporation, TWA, Kodak and Consolidated Aircraft.
Let’s stipulate that in most places in the US and EU and most developed nations wind and solar are not cost-competitive against gas and coal, for most purposes (maybe solar is good for irrigation in the Imperial Valley and lighting schools and businesses in Southern Arizona.) However, the prices have been driven up because demand has increased much faster than output ( favor increased American output of petroleum and natural gas, but I would be surprised if prices fall 25%.) As America’s exports of natural gas increase, the domestic prices of natural gas will probably continue their recent increase. Over the past 2 decades, the costs of electricity from wind and solar have decreased. With the usual caveat that the future can not be predicted accurately, and for sure not 2 decades in advance, there is every reason for optimism that continued R&D will continue to drop their prices. Starting small, the aircraft and airline industries grew because they received great sums of government support, more than the alternative energy industries have received — that includes my favorite example of turbine engines. One of the basic justifications for the federal subsidy is to develop the technology to where is is commercially viable, and solar and wind look set to achieve that goal, despite the disasters that you listed.
Outside the US and EU, there are billions of people who have no electricity, no reliable deliveries of gasoline, gas, or natural gas, but who have plenty of wind and sunshine. If the rest of the world economy grows, those people will never have electricity from fossil fuels because they can’t outbid the rest of the world, but they might soon be able to afford electricity from solar and wind power.
I am not saying you don’t have a case, I just don’t think it is decisively against further R&D of these alternatives.
Matthew,
I am not against properly vetted R&D, in fact a good potion of my career has been engineering support of new energy technology development even to this day. I once worked for one of the largest energy companies with one of the largest R&D development programs (not government funded), and still do/did a lot of consulting on developing new technologies, including failed number 23 on the list. The Company I retired from had a vetting process (gates) to prevent throwing millions of dollars at commercialization of a development that did not show a chance of achieving economical success, This is lacking in the US government because they do not employ the best talent and fall prey to political decisions and funding campaign contributors.
I am too experienced to buy into the mantra that” high costs of any new technology will always fall dramatically” with time. That is a lame excuse for all the failures listed above. Let’s be honest, the administration is blinded into believing that throwing $$$ at something like a car battery will overcome the laws of thermodynamics, physics, and chemistry. Private companies have been searching for a better battery in Labs for decades and know better not to build a multi million dollar production plant for a battery and a car when the batteryt does not even store sufficient energy in the LAB. The public are smarter than the DOE as evidenced by the sales of electric cars that run on “dirty” coal!!
The reference I gaveabove is looking for funding to convert CO2 to ethanol, and you can invest based on your beliefs. Before investing however I think you should know that while feasible, it is not cheap to capture CO2 from air since it is only 0.04 %. That is one of the many reasons why I am a skeptic which has served me well over a long career.
Matthew R Marler:
You began our interaction when at October 20, 2012 at 11:14 am you called “absurd” a clear, sensible and realistic illustration I had provided. And you tried to ridicule my illustration.
Now, after I have shown it is your silly assertions that are absurd and ridiculous, you wave an olive branch. I will notice that after you wave a white flag by admitting windpower is a rip-off of the public.
Richard
In the eventual post-carbon era, when the Earth’s remaining petrochemical energy is so difficult to recover that its continued use as a common fuel is impractical, I believe that only some form of nuclear power would support our current population levels. People of the future are going to face a planet largely denuded of the easily obtainable resources that support our current technical civilization. I suspect that many of the high-tech green (natural) energy solutions proposed today would not be practical once the resources required become too expensive for personal use.
With natural power, I believe some minimal area, perhaps on the order of one acre per person or per family will be required to collect the energy for the population of the planet. Those promoting an economy driven by green energy alone should realize that they are also promoting a probable return to pre-industrial population levels.
There have been two books with the title “The End of Growth” which say we may have reached a limit because we can no longer exponentially increase the production of resources required to support an exponentially increasing population. These also deal with the fact that our current economy is structured on the presumption of continual exponential growth and government policies based on trying to renew growth by increasing government debt may be likened to the case of a pilot, who, flying a plane at maximum flight altitude, tries to get more lift by increasing his angle of climb and stalls backward out of the sky.
Someday, California residents may not appreciate the fact that their high taxes may have to be paid to some other country so that the price of gasoline will be cheaper over there.
Catcracking,
I think we have gone over the relevant issues enough for this thread. I review local prices each summer, and I’ll do the same next summer.
richardscourtney: you wave an olive branch
That was not an olive branch, it was a notice that you agreed with me on my main point.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow there will be new developments and new prices.