British Scientists Make Gasoline From Air

[direkiller]

Sure so again this technology may well be interesting for aviation as oil supplies continue to dwindle.

I never said it was a bad idea(in-fact it's a good idea to save billions in infrastructure cost of switching to a pure electric car system based on renewable energy)

I said it was a bad idea to put this on a car your planning to drive or a jet your planning to move due to very basic physics.

Do you mean using this system so that the car powers the reaction to make more fuel while it drives? Cause that's absurd and I never suggested nor meant to suggest that.

as you said to do that on a airplane I thought you had the idea to do it on a car as well. In the same sorta battry>to gas>to drive fasion

I kinda expected you were not thinking of a perpetual motion machine

In any case it's a bad idea for both

 

[Harker067]

Sure so again this technology may well be interesting for aviation as oil supplies continue to dwindle.

I never said it was a bad idea(in-fact it's a good idea to save billions in infrastructure cost of switching to a pure electric car system based on renewable energy)

I said it was a bad idea to put this on a car your planning to drive or a jet your planning to move due to very basic physics.

Do you mean using this system so that the car powers the reaction to make more fuel while it drives? Cause that's absurd and I never suggested nor meant to suggest that.

as you said to do that on a airplane I thought you had the idea to do it on a car as well. In the same sorta battry>to gas>to drive fasion

I kinda expected you were not thinking of a perpetual motion machine

In any case it's a bad idea for both

No you misunderstood me from the start.

I was saying that this technology (making fuel from atmospheric CO2) is probably of interest to aviation. Since electronic cars may well replace fuel driven cars but fuel will probably remain important to aviation it will need a source of that fuel. Batteries are heavy for planes etc. That was my the point I was trying to make from the start.

I was at no time saying we should try to couple to 2 processes together the fuel would of course need access to the grid if not a dedicated power plant ( as I mentioned in posts before the one you commented on).

 

[DarklordKyo]

Oh no we're going to run out of air!

Nah, we'd run out of Carbon Dioxide... Which might actually be a good thing for a while, what with Global Warming and all...

OT: Huh, neat. Maybe Gasoline isn't Archaic after all. Still, I don't want the first car I ever buy to run on it; 4+ Dollars is crazy!

they suck all of the CO2 out of the air, plants no longer have anything to nom, plants die, oxygen is doomed!


ITS THE END OF DAYS! REPENT, REPENT!

I know this is probably a joke, but we exhale CO2, the world's probably fine.

 

[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.

well minus the nuclear waste that is, though i agree we should make more use of nuclear power, but the old stigma of the 70s puts a damper on that lest over here, NIMBY and 3 mile island go hand in hand anytime someone suggests we should build more nuclear plants.

IMO we need to do all the drilling, nuclear etc a combination of all resources available while putting research into biofuels, a one way or the highway approach that politicians put us on is unworkable and just plain backwards, when it takes far more energy to make hydrogen and biofuels than you get out of them.

and do not even get me started on the asshat move of mandating corn for biofuel while we cannot even use the plant part of the plants to make it. and skyrocketing global corn prices as a result. ethanol should have been a 10 or 20 year down the road thing and not today, simply because it is not ready, and the world cannot afford to pay more for corn.

meanwhile we cut off drilling.

why i say politicians are either completely ignorant or criminally motivated.

As i stated previuosly nuclear waste is not a big problem. Yeep the stigma of fear surrounding technology average citizen cannot understand and we got russians to thank for the worst and pretty much only disaster it ever had that fuels the fear. (yes there was also fukoshima, but its level of diaster was MUCH lower. enough to make germans revolt though apperently)
I agre that a comtination of energy sourcers is the best, but we should get rid of fossil fuel ones, because if we dont our enviroment is f**ked.Corn biofuel is expensive, why cany you do like europeans and make diesel from raps(spelling?)?. it is much more cheaper, easier to grow and its prices didnt skyrocket even with 10% raps diesel laws because there were many palces it could be grown easily that used to be abandoned.

I don't particularly disagree on the main points. There's always the possibility that battery technology will stall of course but that's probably unlikely. I just didn't want to see the environmental impact quite so white washed (I am in fact a proponent of more nuclear power). Nothing we do is environmentally friendly. We mine the earth for rare metals used in solar cells, for fissionable materials none of that is really environmentally friendly.

Solar is generally considered environmentally friendly. But current plans for a solar plant in the Mojave have run into problems with endangered tortoises in that same desert. We shouldn't be thinking of things as environmentally friendly vs destructive. Instead we should be realistically considering and discussing the pros and cons of these technologies.

Nothing in this world is black and white, but with the amount of contrast we have, whne you put nuclear power and mazut factories clsoe by the nuclear power look pretty damn white.

 

[DarklordKyo]

Oh no we're going to run out of air!

Nah, we'd run out of Carbon Dioxide... Which might actually be a good thing for a while, what with Global Warming and all...

OT: Huh, neat. Maybe Gasoline isn't Archaic after all. Still, I don't want the first car I ever buy to run on it; 4+ Dollars is crazy!

they suck all of the CO2 out of the air, plants no longer have anything to nom, plants die, oxygen is doomed!


ITS THE END OF DAYS! REPENT, REPENT!

I know this is probably a joke, but we exhale CO2, the world's probably fine.

I am aware we exhale CO2 and it was indeed a joke, but I have no idea what the volume of CO2 we exhale is, and if this technology takes off it would be interesting to see how it is balanced.

I guess it's sort of self-preserving. CO2 becomes gasoline, gasoline gets used, used gasoline excretes CO2, rinse and repeat.

 

[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.

Do you not understand physics? Every single energy conversion, such as combining chemicals into gasoline to store energy in chemical form, is less than 100% efficient. This isn't due to unfinished technology, this is just the way it is. Which means that there is no possible way for this to not take more energy than you gain from it. Which means as long as it works off a fossil fuel power grid, it will always cause more pollution than it saves. Also, they use coal to generate the power, and coal is remarkably bad for the environment, far more so than gasoline. Even "clean coal" is bad for the environment, in fact the only power source it pollutes less than is regular coal. This isn't due to limited technology, it's due to massively high levels of impurities inherent in the coal.

No matter how much they refine this technology, it will always cause more pollution for the environment, which considering the current state of the world, is not a good thing.

If you re-read the article, the idea was to get the technology to a point where it COULD produce gasoline in viable quanitties, and then set up a factory to do that run by a solar power plant........ A lot of work yes.... but you would be using THE SUN as a power source, as such you wouldn't have to worry about the fact that you are expending more power to make the fuel... I mean you can't hog the sun, and we won't use the thing up for a few billion years yet so......

Kinda makes your point null and void.

 

[ReinWeisserRitter]

Can't wait to see how some group of rich dickheads is going to find a way to shove it offscreen before it goes into widespread use because it'll cut into their precious big oil profits.

People who ask why we're not living in the "future" can just ask those guys.

 

[SirDeadly]

I am so glad I read this. I have to do a future scenario for one of my uni courses and I will definitely be using this in it. Thank you!

 

[Matt King]

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.

but.. it's from air? how much will it really cost if they perfect it?



also isn't this kinda win-win, won't this help with the whole global warming thing

The thing is, if they perfect it then fuel prices are going to have to go down aren't they? That means less money for them (In theory, one could argue that this would discourage people from using public transport and use their cars instead because fuel is dirt cheap). So they'll either have to limit production or this is something that just wont happen, because they're not making enough money. I'm not talking about the people that are actually a part of this but fuel companies etc.

As for helping the whole global warming thing, you don't see bags of cash being poured into renewable sources of energy, do you?

fuel prices go down anyway, but they still raise the price?

 

[Ashadow700]

Hold on - sorry to be the buzzkill, but what about the law of conservation of energy?

You would have to invest a ton of energy into producing this synthetic fuel and, at best, you should only be able to get the same amount of energy back when combust it (which in is impossible in practicality, as there are always energy losses along the process).

How is this going to be useful for anything - other then maybe as a way to story energy in the form of synthetic fuel?

 

[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.

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.

Do you not understand physics? Every single energy conversion, such as combining chemicals into gasoline to store energy in chemical form, is less than 100% efficient. This isn't due to unfinished technology, this is just the way it is. Which means that there is no possible way for this to not take more energy than you gain from it. Which means as long as it works off a fossil fuel power grid, it will always cause more pollution than it saves. Also, they use coal to generate the power, and coal is remarkably bad for the environment, far more so than gasoline. Even "clean coal" is bad for the environment, in fact the only power source it pollutes less than is regular coal. This isn't due to limited technology, it's due to massively high levels of impurities inherent in the coal.

No matter how much they refine this technology, it will always cause more pollution for the environment, which considering the current state of the world, is not a good thing.

If you re-read the article, the idea was to get the technology to a point where it COULD produce gasoline in viable quanitties, and then set up a factory to do that run by a solar power plant........ A lot of work yes.... but you would be using THE SUN as a power source, as such you wouldn't have to worry about the fact that you are expending more power to make the fuel... I mean you can't hog the sun, and we won't use the thing up for a few billion years yet so......

Kinda makes your point null and void.

Yes you'd be using the sun as a power source, but even then it's still not as green as it sounds. You still need more energy from the solar then you get out of the gas, and that solar energy could instead be used to power parts of the existing infrastructure and remove them from the coal system so it will still result in coal being burned to power it, one way or another.

 

[spartan231490]

Hold on - sorry to be the buzzkill, but what about the law of conservation of energy?

You would have to invest a ton of energy into producing this synthetic fuel and, at best, you should only be able to get the same amount of energy back when combust it (which in is impossible in practicality, as there are always energy losses along the process).

How is this going to be useful for anything - other then maybe as a way to story energy in the form of synthetic fuel?

It's economically useful because all that energy is still cheaper than drilling and refining. It's also somewhat useful because this gasoline doesn't release fossil carbon, which is a good thing. However, all in all, it's only marginally useful at present, especially with the current global power infrastructure having so much coal power.

 

[dvd_72]

As others have said, I can't see how this would be anything more than an amusing piece of news since they have to use energy, more enrgy than they get from the gasoline, to make it out of air.

So they can transform energy made with, for ecample, solar panels into gasoline? Whoopty doo.
If you'd find a way to make solard energy or other renewable energy sources more efficient, now that'd be a news piece.

Do you have any idea how difficult it is to store and transport energy from renewable sources? Gasoline is a hell of a lot cheaper than batteries after all. Even if they DID make solar or wind power as efficient as is physically possable, the problem posed by the need to transport the energy around is still going to be there. This just solved that problem!

Christ man, it's not all about getting the energy. Get your head out of your little bubble and see this for the news worthy piece it is. Get a little exited for progress!

 

[roushutsu]

This sounds like a neat idea. I just hope that we'll be able to see this continue to advance in some way (as long as it doesn't lead us to living like the people in the shitty Lorax movie).

 

[aegix drakan_v1legacy]

Aaaaand big oil companies will shut this down, and it will all be forgotten about in 3...2...1...

 

[ResonanceSD]

is relevant.

Given that you need an insane amount of clean energy to even dent the efficiency of fossil fuels, and you lose energy with every transition, I don't see how this is a good solution for anything.

It's a good solution for "how do we keep people from developing better technology and moving forward as a species while saving money and resources?"

BUT WHAT IF WE'RE ALL WRONG AND WE CREATE A BETTER WORLD FOR NOTHING? WHAT THEN?

 

[TheOrb]

Oh no we're going to run out of air!

Oh God,no! I can see it now!

WE ARE GOING TO BE CHARGED FOR THE AIR WE BREATH!

 

[Jamous]

Interesting. Hopefully they'll get this sorted, efficient and cost-effective. Because that would be excellent.