[QUOTE]An idea has hit the news on Friday to produce petrol from air and water - removing CO2 from the atmosphere, combining it with hydrogen split from water vapour and turning it into a fuel that can go straight back into the petrol tank.
It's like combustion in reverse, and in essence it is what powers plants: CO2 and water in, energy-rich sugar molecules out.
But in matters of energy, nothing comes for free.
Just as plants need sunlight to pull off the trick, Air Fuel Synthesis, the firm profiled in the UK's Independent newspaper, need to use good old-fashioned electric energy to pull off theirs.
As with any novel fuel production or energy storage method, it is the numbers that matter: efficiency is king.
The degree to which this technique can fulfil its promise to lower CO2 and provide a sustainable fuel source depends crucially on the balance of energy it requires and the energy it stores.
First things first - squashing CO2 back into a molecule packed with energy is not a new idea.
For example, work done at Princeton University in the US and published in 1994 to make the fuel additive methanol from CO2 has more recently been refined and spun into a company called Liquid Light that is aiming to do the same thing.
In Iceland, Carbon Recycling International opened a plant at the end of 2011 drawing waste CO2 from a power station, with capacity to produce five million litres of methanol per year.
Air Fuel Synthesis build on these methods by turning the methanol into something more like petrol, using processes well entrenched already in the petroleum industry.
The firm, so far, has made five litres of their fuel in a two-year demonstration experiment in which they have invested £1m.
Peter Harrison, the firm's chief executive, told BBC News that the demonstration did not focus on efficiency, but rather a proof of principle.
"All we're trying to demonstrate is that here in the UK we can make petrol from air," he said.
"[These processes] are all capable of working at industrial scale, and we've brought it down to container scale. There' a lot of work to do to develop the supply chains and to reduce the costs.
"We've got a design now for a one-tonne-a-day unit, and we expect to be in production by 2015."
'Minority player'
Their first market is "greening the motorsport industry" by offering their pure fuels to racing teams.
But in the bigger picture, the petrol-from-air idea joins a legion of others that are trying to crack the far bigger problem of storing energy produced by renewable sources.
Like the recently reported "liquid air" approach, Air Fuel Synthesis wants to use renewable energy which may come when there is no consumer demand for it.
Mark Carpenter, research fellow at Cranfield University's Chemical Safety, Fuels and Environment Group, said that hydrocarbon fuels were "a very good way of storing energy" but that linking the process to renewable energy was the only way to make it tenable.
"If they can get enough renewable, low-cost electricity, that's a big determinant," he told BBC News. "It could be a very clean and green way of producing hydrocarbon fuels."
"But it'll be a minority player in terms of trying to meet global fuels demand - very, very small.
"It's certainly interesting that someone's considered this as a method, it's just whether you can make the chemistry work and get a reasonable degree of efficiency."
As with many other energy production and storage methods, only time and market forces will determine how far the petrol-from-air idea can go.[/QUOTE]
[IMG]http://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/article8217319.ece/ALTERNATES/w460/06-petrolfromair.jpg[/IMG]
source: [url]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20003650[/url]
source2: [url]http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/exclusive-pioneering-scientists-turn-fresh-air-into-petrol-in-massive-boost-in-fight-against-energy-crisis-8217382.html[/url]
Heh, we still grabbing at petrol from wherever we can, even from the air. Can't forget that thread where they pulled diesel and fuel and shit for cars from plastic bottles.
Oh no you don't make fucking air a limited resource we're in enough shit already.
there's too much CO2, quick, make even MORE CO2! That'll cause a glitch and the World's stats will be reset.
Alternatively that money used for this research could have been used on something far mroe useful
[QUOTE=Jookia;38107056]Oh no you don't make fucking air a limited resource we're in enough shit already.[/QUOTE]
In the article it speaks about how it uses the carbon from CO[SUB]2[/SUB] and the H from H[SUB]2[/SUB]O, which 3 atoms of Oxygen. Seeing as oxygen is diatomic, it would take 2 reactions to make 3 oxygen molecules. Seeing as you don't need CO[SUB]2[/SUB] to live, yet you need O[SUB]2[/SUB] to, I don't see what the problem is?
[QUOTE=D3TBS;38107095]there's too much CO2, quick, make even MORE CO2! That'll cause a glitch and the World's stats will be reset.
Alternatively that money used for this research could have been used on something far mroe useful[/QUOTE]
Same answer. When you burn trees it's carbon neutral because the CO2 released is the CO2 it had previously absorbed. Same goes for this.
ok fine I admit I didnt read because its 2am and the title made the thing sound pretty stupid. Ill read tomorrow or something. Later
US navy has/is building/planning a ship what can convert water into fuel.
Time to invade the amazon rainforest
Now the thing is to make air to petrol and water to petrol techniques cheaper and more competive.
[editline]20th October 2012[/editline]
I bet that in the future CO2 will become rare and plants are not liking it, and it will be called the biggest thread for the planet :v:
[QUOTE=D3TBS;38107095]there's too much CO2, quick, make even MORE CO2! That'll cause a glitch and the World's stats will be reset.
Alternatively that money used for this research could have been used on something far mroe useful[/QUOTE]
Does conservation of mass mean anything to you?
[QUOTE=oskutin;38107195]US navy has/is building/planning a ship what can convert water into fuel.[/QUOTE]
Source? Sounds like cool stuff.
This is a bad time for me to be doing Petroleum Engineering...
the thing is they don't actually know if the energy gained from the recycled molecules would be greater than the energy spent recycling
[QUOTE=Kalibos;38108691]the thing is they don't actually know if the energy gained from the recycled molecules would be greater than the energy spent recycling[/QUOTE]
They do know. It's less. If they could get more energy out than they have to put in, they wouldn't need an external source for the plant. The whole Second Law of Thermodyamics has a bit to say about that.
[QUOTE=kebab52;38107827]This is a bad time for me to be doing Petroleum Engineering...[/QUOTE]
Honestly, this job field always seemed like the biggest gamble ever.
Oh sure you'll make bank your first few years on the job. But oil's going to run out and become less signifigant very very quickly, making such jobs from being high in demand and high paying to very low in demand.
Saudi Arabia, the worlds largest exporter of oil, has already hit peak oil (the max amount they can produce). They will produce less and less oil per year from here on out. We might get lucky and find more oil spots but lets be honest- this is going to be a scarce resource by 2050 if current demand stays steady.
The good news is theres a lot that can be done between now and then to make this not so bad. If everyone in the US used electric powered engines (ideally charged from carbon-neutral powerplants such as thorium reactors or similar), we would drop 60% of our oil usage right then and there, making it so we don't exactly have to worrry about running out anytime soon - especially if most of the big oil consumer nations did the same thing. Sure we'd still need oil for plastics and many many things, but by far the biggest drain is gas. Cut out the need for gas, then the strain on oil reserves will lessen to a point where it'll double or triple their lifespans. Enough to find oil alternatives, or find more oil somewhere else for the production side of things.
Now that I think about it though, I guess if you don't plan on working for over a 75-100 years you probably won't have too many issues with that kind of career path. Especially if globally we manage to cut our oil usage by about 50-70%, then there's much less risk of a complete collapse happening with oil.
[QUOTE=oskutin;38107214]Now the thing is to make air to petrol and water to petrol techniques cheaper and more competive.
[/QUOTE]
I have never seen an alternative fuel pump. Even for hydrogen fuel cell you pretty much need to have stations everywhere. I think the closest we got to that was Propane and even now a lot of those pumps have been taken out of service.
[QUOTE=D3TBS;38107095]there's too much CO2, quick, make even MORE CO2! That'll cause a glitch and the World's stats will be reset.
Alternatively that money used for this research could have been used on something far mroe useful[/QUOTE]
Except, this extracts the CO2 from the air and fixes it into petrol, so it's carbon neutral at best.
[QUOTE=KorJax;38109416]Honestly, this job field always seemed like the biggest gamble ever.
Oh sure you'll make bank your first few years on the job. But oil's going to run out and become less signifigant very very quickly, making such jobs from being high in demand and high paying to very low in demand.
Saudi Arabia, the worlds largest exporter of oil, has already hit peak oil (the max amount they can produce). They will produce less and less oil per year from here on out. We might get lucky and find more oil spots but lets be honest- this is going to be a scarce resource by 2050 if current demand stays steady.
The good news is theres a lot that can be done between now and then to make this not so bad. If everyone in the US used electric powered engines (ideally charged from carbon-neutral powerplants such as thorium reactors or similar), we would drop 60% of our oil usage right then and there, making it so we don't exactly have to worrry about running out anytime soon - especially if most of the big oil consumer nations did the same thing. Sure we'd still need oil for plastics and many many things, but by far the biggest drain is gas. Cut out the need for gas, then the strain on oil reserves will lessen to a point where it'll double or triple their lifespans. Enough to find oil alternatives, or find more oil somewhere else for the production side of things.
Now that I think about it though, I guess if you don't plan on working for over a 75-100 years you probably won't have too many issues with that kind of career path. Especially if globally we manage to cut our oil usage by about 50-70%, then there's much less risk of a complete collapse happening with oil.[/QUOTE]
canada has an incredible amount of oil but a) it's mostly bitumen which is much more expensive to extract and b) we don't have the necessary capital to extract it atm since there's still crude deposits that are easier and cheaper
[quote=Wiki]Together, these oil sand deposits lie under 141,000 square kilometres (54,000 sq mi) of boreal forest and muskeg (peat bogs) and contain about 1.7 trillion barrels (270×109 m3) of bitumen in-place, comparable in magnitude to the world's total proven reserves of conventional petroleum.[/quote]
[QUOTE=Rocksalt;38109469]Except, this extracts the CO2 from the air and fixes it into petrol, so it's carbon neutral at best.[/QUOTE]
Not really carbon neutral if you consider the amount of energy that goes to waste due to electrolysis of all that shit to turn it into dumb petrol.
It would be much more effective to, at least, just use the hydrogen from water directly.
Or even better, just pour the electricity into a battery instead of electrolysis.
This research is pretty useless, we could "make petrol" out of air decades ago. Problem is you don't produce energy, you just transform one kind of energy into other. That energy has to come from nuclear fission or other large scale source.
[editline]20th October 2012[/editline]
Yes, this would save us from the OH SO HORRIBLE change of infrastructure, but pointlessly waste massive amounts of energy every day just so we wouldn't have to do changes.
Seriously, lets just turn shit and piss into fuel.
Edit: Yay! My 100'th post was about shit and piss!
[QUOTE=Awesomecaek;38110016]Not really carbon neutral if you consider the amount of energy that goes to waste due to electrolysis of all that shit to turn it into dumb petrol.[/QUOTE]
That doesn't make it emit CO2 to generate the fuel.
[QUOTE]Although the process is still in the early developmental stages and needs to take electricity from the national grid to work, the company believes it will eventually be possible to use power from renewable sources such as wind farms or tidal barrages.[/QUOTE]
The process is as clean as its electricity source.
[editline]20th October 2012[/editline]
[QUOTE=raineko;38110079]Seriously, lets just turn shit and piss into fuel.[/QUOTE]
Already been done, actually. You can get methane from sewage, and more specifically there are fuel cells powered by bacteria that eat urea from urine.
They would need loads of govt funding to actually make a difference and sell it at a competitive price in the UK.
Yay, lets pollute further instead of trying to develop more enviromentally friendly means of propulsion, actually we dont need to develop them since they have been around for hundreds of years. We just need the world to stop being so dependent on gas.
[QUOTE=Fatfatfatty;38111338]Yay, lets pollute further instead of trying to develop more enviromentally friendly means of propulsion, actually we dont need to develop them since they have been around for hundreds of years. We just need the world to stop being so dependent on gas.[/QUOTE]
For fuck sake, do people not realise that this is totally carbon neutral?
It doesn't pluck petrol from the aether, it strips CO2 from the air and combines it with water vapour to produce petrol.
[QUOTE=Rocksalt;38111351]For fuck sake, do people not realise that this is totally carbon neutral?
It doesn't pluck petrol from the aether, it strips CO2 from the air and combines it with water vapour to produce petrol.[/QUOTE]
Only if the source of energy is renewable too, like solar or wind or whatever.
What this basically does it saves us from building expensive electronic cars, we can continue using combstions and since this is a really clean fuel, we'll stop having problems with other exhaust gases like sulfuric flouride and that stuff.
[editline]20th October 2012[/editline]
[QUOTE=Fatfatfatty;38111338]Yay, lets pollute further instead of trying to develop more enviromentally friendly means of propulsion, actually we dont need to develop them since they have been around for hundreds of years. We just need the world to stop being so dependent on gas.[/QUOTE]
There is no polution involved in this at all. When it burns, water and CO2 are coming out.
Uhhh, let me explain this properly for people who doesnt get it:
Its turning CO2 from the air and water into hydrocarbons, which should actually release a ton of oxygen that is turned into CO2 again when the petrol is burned, so the net amount of released CO2 is always 0 from doing this
On another note, this stuff would basicaly require the equal energy you get out of the petrol to be put into the plant
To put this into perspective
8.72 million gasoline barrels per day
Energy density of gasoline is 35 MJ/L per liter according to wikipedia
A barrel is around 160L, so thats 5.6 GJ/barrel
86400 seconds in a day
~64.8 kW to produce one barrel over the lapse of a day
Thats around 565 GW to produce all the US gasoline demand
Thats more power than outputted by every nuclear reactor currently in the world
(I hope I got my calculations right)
Basicaly we need to stop using so much fucking petrol, but this is technique is usefull for much more than petrol in any case
[QUOTE=Tobba;38111580]Uhhh, let me explain this properly for people who doesnt get it:
Its turning CO2 from the air and water into hydrocarbons, which should actually release a ton of oxygen that is turned into CO2 again when the petrol is burned, so the net amount of released CO2 is always 0 from doing this
[/QUOTE]
It also takes a huge amount of energy and unless that comes from a green or nuclear source (which as you noted, will be impossible on a large scale) it's just wasting time.
[QUOTE=BorisJ;38111688]It also takes a huge amount of energy and unless that comes from a green source it's just wasting time.[/QUOTE]
Which is kind of what the other half of my post boasted about :v:
[QUOTE=Tobba;38111580]Uhhh, let me explain this properly for people who doesnt get it:
Its turning CO2 from the air and water into hydrocarbons, which should actually release a ton of oxygen that is turned into CO2 again when the petrol is burned, so the net amount of released CO2 is always 0 from doing this
On another note, this stuff would basicaly require the equal energy you get out of the petrol to be put into the plant
To put this into perspective
8.72 million gasoline barrels per day
Energy density of gasoline is 35 MJ/L per liter according to wikipedia
A barrel is around 160L, so thats 5.6 GJ/barrel
86400 seconds in a day
~64.8 kW to produce one barrel over the lapse of a day
Thats around 565 GW to produce all the US gasoline demand
Thats more power than outputted by every nuclear reactor currently in the world
(I hope I got my calculations right)
Basicaly we need to stop using so much fucking petrol, but this is technique is usefull for much more than petrol in any case[/QUOTE]
Thats 353 nuclear reactors :v:
the greatest thing about this is that car enthusiasts wont have to go over to electric vehicles...
nothing like the sound of a mad 6 banger.
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