British Scientists Make Gasoline From Air

[cerebus23]

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.

this is true for most biofuels as well as battery cars last i read up, though its been a few years.

 

[Strazdas]

cost of liter of oil produced from fosils: around .5 of a dollar. cost of liter produced from air, around 50 dollars. yeah i can so see this working out....

also solar power cant power this, the only alternative we have is atomic power, at least untill we get H3 of the moon.

 

[Strazdas]

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.

this is true for most biofuels as well as battery cars last i read up, though its been a few years.

but thats the fault of an energy grid. we MUST shut down ALL fossil fuel power plants and put atomic plants in their place and we would have a 100% enviromentally friendly energy.

 

[Lancer873]

This is really just another fuel storage idea. It's a nice thought that we'll be able to continue using our current motors later on, but we do of course still need to find a new source, and there really aren't any shortages of energy storage ideas.

Also: to anyone thinking CO2 is a factor here... it isn't really. This is a rather neutral reaction. Once the gasoline is used there will be no more and no less than when it was created (unless the creation process created or used CO2) so the effects of this process will depend on the method with which it's created.

 

[DanDeFool]

Cool proof of concept, but only five liters in two months? Sounds like this process is rather inefficient.

 

[DanDeFool]

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.

Because gasoline (well, liquid fuels in general) have orders of magnitude higher energy density than the other forms of energy storage we've got right now.

Remember, the limiting factor in transportation is high-density energy storage. Cuz, you know, you have to carry it with you. Artificial gasoline would be a panacea if it could be made affordable and carbon neutral, mostly because you don't incur the huge cost of replacing or retrofitting every car ever made with new technology, and you don't have to sacrifice range or power.

 

[Misterian]

This is one of the best products of science since fiber optics.

My message to those who have the chance to buy this fuel, PLEASE DO SO! you'd be saving the world from the horrid greed of oil companies.

It would be one evil gone from this world.

 

[Humanfactor]

Relevant xkcd as per necessary : http://xkcd.com/678/

 

[Playful Pony]

Ignoring the many problems this would encounter in todays climnate (an anti-nuclear atitude, lacking green-power infrastructure, economic powerhouses etc), this is pretty damn awesome! I haven't the faintest idea how anyone could possibly manage to do this, but I consider it to be pretty damn amazing and I really hope this takes off if it's as good as this article make it seem...

I'd love to see a day where we burn large forrested areas on purpose to combat the planet-wide global cooling scandal as a result of a lack of greenhouse gasses. And then we'd have 4,000 meter tall superstructures, small cities in orbit and a megacity on the moon. Me? I'd live a quiet life on a small Marsian farm, somewhere in a mountainous region.

 

[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?

Technically it wouldn't. The product would have less energy per volume than the fossil fuel used to make it due to energy losses in the production process.

However... there is a little loophole in the first law that could be used to power cars (And no, it is not any of that tinfoil pyramid nonsense!); because motors are becoming increasingly efficient in their conversion of electrical energy to mechanical energy and generators are becoming increasingly efficient in the conversion of mechanical energy to electrical energy you could have a motor connected to a generator in a system that generates more energy than then motor uses to spin the generator...

It's a shame that everyone thinks it's just hogwash and claptrap; we could get an electric car with infinite range today (Possibly with off-the-shelf parts!) if we just threw enough money at getting it to work!

No. Just no. There is no way you can hook up a dynamo to a wheel, and then use the dynamo to power a motor that spins the same wheel. That would be a perpetual motion engine, and that is impossible.

Basically, no matter how efficient an electric motor or dynamo gets, they still waste energy in the form of friction, heat and sound. As a motor can only spin as fast as the energy going in, and a dynamo can only produce as much power as the wheels can spin, energy quickly leaks out of the system until both motor and gyro come to a halt.

We have hybrid cars with dynamos and electric engines, but they still also depend on an internal combustion engine. It's sad but true, and it is kind of silly to assume that a company wouldn't capitalize on perpetual motion electric cars, even if they could - that company would become the richest business in the world if it succeeded.

 

[Sprinal]

This is an old idea and I heard of a similar idea of taking carbon from the air and using the power from a nuclear plant to convert it back to gas. It looked promising until Fukashima

Edit:

How annoying in attempting to continue reading the tread for other quotable things I accidentally posted a blank post with only a quote.


Sorry Mods and person who got alerted.

Anyway. What I was going to say about this anyway was that people said the same thing after the Chernobyl Nuclear disaster.

Really there is nothing wrong with Nuclear power as long as you dispose of your waste properly and you also don't decomission half of the reactor and thus leave many faults unchecked.


But anyway. From the OP I say that if they have announced it and the Escapist knows about it then the major companies will be unable to obtain the Patent and the company will hopefully survive. And hey this process might be incredably useful as a last resort to obtain oil in event of a war.

Lets just hope it survives that long.

 

[uzo]

Let's see the reaction to the Carbon Tax when we start getting taxed based on how much air we're breathing.

The simply fact is that if someone can figure this out, there'll be a new form of resource to exploit. C'mon - air, and water? It just happens to be the two things everyone in the world needs to live. Now that's what I call an inelastic demand and supply plot. They can charge whatever the hell they want, regardless of supply.

Oh hang on ... that's what they do already.

 

[GildaTheGriffin]

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...

Did you know we can with today's technology. But we won't because most of the world is greedy for the price of oil. It's about money, not the world.

That's what I believe. Because oil companies make billions of dollars and no government will give it up. But if we can make billion or trillion with this 'air gas' we could change the market.

 

[mooncalf]

food from air, fuel from air, TY science. o.o

 

[Little Duck]

As fantastic as this is, I can see it disappearing into nothing within a few years because it just isn't profitable enough for the people with one too many bags of cash.

How? Instead of using billions of pounds to find some highly taxed oil, they use the pollution they've already thrown in the air and charge it at the same or slightly lower price.

 

[Pinkamena]

I've been reading about this. I do not see how this will be a feasible method of creating petrol. The process seems to require a lot of electrical energy, and that energy gotta come from somewhere.

 

[NezumiiroKitsune]

A short, freely available paper on the process, addressing feasibility: http://ma.ecsdl.org/content/MA2011-02/18/1498.full.pdf+html

 

[mew4ever23]

This is promising, but it doesn't seem too terribly efficient. Unless we can get it running on a renewable source of energy, it might not be viable.