British Scientists Make Gasoline From Air

[Rellik San]

This is it, the people in charge of funding will look at it and go:
"Ok so with our funding you may have this financially viable in 10 years of development, but then we won't see a profit from this for a further 15, I think we'll pass."

Instead of thinking;
"We get in on this now, monopolise it and we basically get 10 years of free good PR and remove our reliance on foreign powers."
Y'know, like a smart company would.

 

[SteewpidZombie]

Think of it this way: If you can burn 1 Litre of Fossil fuels to power a machine that produces 2 Litres of Synthetic Fuel (or even 1.2Litres), you now have a machine that can power itself with it's own product. So if they can refine the process to make more fuel then they expend, they'll have created a literal self-powering machine that can produce a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels.

 

[mrdude2010]

It's a shame the oil companies will do their best to suppress this.

 

[RA92]

This won't happen. It'll work with renewable energy to fuel the process of... creating fuel, but why not just increase the amount of renewable energy that gets produced and use that? Oil will always be needed but gasoline won't if engines just run off of other power sources.

Chemical batteries and hydrogen still come nowhere close to hydrocarbons in terms of storing energy per volume.

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

Holy shit! This is really awesome. Hooray for science!

 

[Aaron Foltz]

They can now charge us for the air we breathe. No matter how dirty.

 

[dyre]

This won't happen. It'll work with renewable energy to fuel the process of... creating fuel, but why not just increase the amount of renewable energy that gets produced and use that? Oil will always be needed but gasoline won't if engines just run off of other power sources.

But converting the entire population to using alternate fuel sources for their cars isn't feasible.

It's not as simple as designing a bitching car that runs off of happy thoughts. You have to consider the titanic infrastructure changes you'd need to undergo. First and foremost is making it efficient, Honda have been trying for years to find alternate, efficient energy sources for cars. And then when they find it, they've got to find a way to conveniently allow people to refuel. It's not like back in the 30's when you could slowly introduce the concept of petrol stations. Adding 1 or 2 to every town over the course of a few years won't cut it. People expect to be able to refuel round the corner. And we're not at a point where we can make a mobile fuel source that can last seemingly indefinitely.

Like it or not, the best option is to find more efficient ways to get large quantities of fuel that's already in use.

About the refueling thing, I interned at an energy forecasting firm over the summer, and from the research I did there it looks like in the next few decades we might see enough fueling stations created/converted for it to be economically viable to switch trucks, buses, etc from diesel to natural gas (trucks obviously don't need as many fueling stations as cars).

It's not as plentiful as air, but we do have a lot of it.

 

[Aaron Foltz]

We get fuel out of the god damned air, how can we NOT be living in the future now?

I say we work on setting up a decent warp drive now...

Yesterday, this was the future.... You are here now...... Welcome.

But yeah, this is friggin' sweet, especially the fact that it removes carbon from the atmosphere instead of creates it.

There is no future. Only this very moment. O____o


...

...

Still waiting for my hover-board...

 

[Syzygy23]

Ugh, just what we need. If we keep this up, we'll NEVER make cool, sleek, advanced reactionless engines.

 

[Harker067]

Think of it this way: If you can burn 1 Litre of Fossil fuels to power a machine that produces 2 Litres of Synthetic Fuel (or even 1.2Litres), you now have a machine that can power itself with it's own product. So if they can refine the process to make more fuel then they expend, they'll have created a literal self-powering machine that can produce a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels.

This will NEVER happen. Conservation of energy states that you can't burn 1L of fuel to make 1 L of fuel. Not to mention trying to burn 1L of fuel to make more then that on the way out (unless you were making a worse fuel you could maybe turn 1L of octane into 1.5L ethane but that's again worthless). Never ever ever ever ever ever ever happen cause our universe is a harsh mistress.

Actual interesting uses for this is as others have mentioned storing a renewable energy source like
solar, hydro, nuclear etc in a more usable form. You can't really put nuclear reactors into car's like in fallout. You could for example put a solar farm in the sahara then hook that up to the plant and produce fuel which you could then use to run cars or power things in the night etc.

People somewhat conspiratorial ideals about the oil companies aside they probably aren't the biggest threat to this. Conventional battery technology is a bigger threat. If we can make more better batteries for car's then why bother turning it into fuel when you could just recharge a battery for your car. If that technology has some good advances it'll kill this off cause it just won't be all efficient and you won't make money off it.

The other big hurdle that comes to mind is how efficient they can make it. If you've taken some university chemistry you might know that there is a difference between the chemistry you do in a flask in your lab and what goes on in a chemical plant. Because of the huge scale up you need a completely different set of reactions to make it all move in bulk. If they can't find a way to scale this up and make it more efficient then batteries, bio fuels, solar paneled cars etc then this won't really go anywhere.

The thrid problem is they're completely dependent on advances in other renewable technologies. Right now they're turning (probably) coal into gas and its probably pretty inefficient. They're going to need a big solar farm, wind farm, fusion plant something a it might even have to be a dedicated plant just for their needs depending on your efficient things are.

While this is certainly nice and I'm all for them continuing this isn't much of a story. In gaming terms they've spent a few month's and put out a very short tech demo with a some interesting effects. How well it translates to a game in the future is really up in the air.

 

[spartan231490]

Yeah, these guys are idiots. It takes more energy to make the gas than you get out of it. Also, since this energy comes from coal, you end up getting a lot more pollution from making the gas than you take out of the air by making it. It's stupid.

 

[maninahat]

Think of it this way: If you can burn 1 Litre of Fossil fuels to power a machine that produces 2 Litres of Synthetic Fuel (or even 1.2Litres), you now have a machine that can power itself with it's own product. So if they can refine the process to make more fuel then they expend, they'll have created a literal self-powering machine that can produce a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels.

Wouldn't that be a violation of the first law of thermodynamics?

 

[MorphingDragon]

This won't happen. It'll work with renewable energy to fuel the process of... creating fuel, but why not just increase the amount of renewable energy that gets produced and use that? Oil will always be needed but gasoline won't if engines just run off of other power sources.

Chemical batteries and hydrogen still come nowhere close to hydrocarbons in terms of holding energy per volume.

What we really need is a new generation of batteries, made from an incredibly small molecule. Some scientists think that NanoTechnology capable of producing very thin plates (atoms thick) made of graphene will give us super batteries. We can place graphene plates in the same way we make capacitors today, just at the atomic level and get (in theory) energy storage close to petrol.

However NanoTechnology is still very young, but its uses in computing should help speed along its development.

Think of it this way: If you can burn 1 Litre of Fossil fuels to power a machine that produces 2 Litres of Synthetic Fuel (or even 1.2Litres), you now have a machine that can power itself with it's own product. So if they can refine the process to make more fuel then they expend, they'll have created a literal self-powering machine that can produce a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels.

Wouldn't that be a violation of the first law of thermodynamics?

Yes, but you're taking atoms from the air that already existed, not just from the fuel burnt to make it (So his math is wrong). However this is unlikely, it's more likely that these factories get their own dams, reactors or power farms for power.

 

[iniudan]

This won't happen. It'll work with renewable energy to fuel the process of... creating fuel, but why not just increase the amount of renewable energy that gets produced and use that? Oil will always be needed but gasoline won't if engines just run off of other power sources.

Actually it still a useful innovation, for a liquid is much easier to conserve then pure energy like electricity. Also go ahead and try to do a quick refill of an electric vehicle, that just impossible in any kind of efficient manner, outside of going the Fallout universe road and having civilian vehicle work on nuclear fuel cell. =p

Electric vehicle need to be locked to a power grid, have a vehicle fleet rotation available or regular return and wait period at a recharge station, to be used on long term period, in any foreseeable future. (One restaurant chain around here indeed replaced all their delivery vehicle into a purely electrical fleet, since restaurant delivery can fit the last two pattern)

But most people don't use their vehicle enough each day for it to be a an actual issue in most case, I will admit, but for most professional drivers it is still quite major.

 

[Sonic Doctor]

How are world economies not throwing large sums of cash at this to speed up the process? oh right we're all held by the balls by big oil companies.

Actually if we truly found a way to make unlimited gasoline, or cheaper gasoline, the oil companies wouldn't be able to do jack now.

The US gas prices would be at least half as much as they are now if US companies had been given the proper go ahead about four years ago to make coal into synthetic oil, and then into gas. The problem was that government officials that get their backing form environmentalists, got rules and regulations passed so that now it wouldn't be profitable to do such thing to make cheaper gasoline so that it could be sold less then what it is now. The last I heard, companies have stopped work on such facilities.

The US government back in the 70's, had actually planned on doing the coal to gas thing, but OPEC then had the ability the lower oil/gas prices so low that it wasn't a viable option anymore. I remember that they brought oil down quite drastically, close to 18 dollars a barrel.

If the facilities were up and running today, we could be making synthetic oil at around 55 dollars a barrel. These days, the oil companies don't have the ability to lower the prices as much as they could back in the day. If they did like they did before, they would have to lower it so low that it would crash the market.

But no, we don't get to do something that makes perfect sense, because: "Oh no! Think of the environment!" Most politicians won't back such a thing now because it could cost them their re-elections, because of the crazy environmentalist fringe that would make them lose for backing such a plan.

 

[MorganL4]

Yeah, these guys are idiots. It takes more energy to make the gas than you get out of it. Also, since this energy comes from coal, you end up getting a lot more pollution from making the gas than you take out of the air by making it. It's stupid.

Yeah, well the first message shot across the internet was a grand total of two letters. They didn't just say, "Meh it wasn't a full word, let alone a full sentence, let's give up." They worked to improve the system and today I can type this entire paragraph, and not bat an eyelid.

You don't give up on new technology just because it didn't provide results in huge quantities, you work to improve it so that in the future you have greater utility.

 

[m72_ar]

Believe it or not big oil cannot be a "big oil" unless they have a couple of smart cookie at the top.

It's all economics for them. IF the process can be somehow cheaper than the current crude oil extraction you can bet your ass they will jump on the game If not someone else will.

Why would they even attempt to bury it, those company currently can't make gas cheaper than the big oil therefore not a threat to them. They don't need to bury them, the market will do it for them

And when they do manage to create gasoline even cheaper using air, the Big Energy just gonna buy the company and use that process in their plants