British Scientists Make Gasoline From Air

[SnowBurst]

shame itll never come to anything and just fade into obscurity well not a shame because its a terrible idea... itll ruin the planet even more hydrogen is the way to go this is just a waste of time and just a "oh look what we can do with science" thing

 

[Product Placement]

This is not new news for me. There are guys working on producing fuel from factory exhaust chimneys. Instead of blasting all that CO2 into the air, it would be cheaply converted into fuel.

Still, it's nice to see the technology being developed further.

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.

I know you posted this 5 days ago and it's probably been replied to more than once, but I just felt compelled to point out that the article already addresses this concern:

If the conversion plant were powered by a renewable source of energy, such as wind or solar, then the resulting fuel would be a messiah of green fuels. The clean gasoline would solve the problem of solar and tidal energy rich areas in that it would make that energy easy to transport in a liquid form.

What they're saying is that there are areas where large amount of green energy can be created, for example having solar panels in the middle of a desert, but it isn't economically viable to develop those areas. That is because transporting electricity over very long distances is wasteful. This technology would now make it profitable to develop those areas, since they can now be used to produce fuel instead of electricity. Since the fuel came from a green energy source and the CO2 came from the air, you can consider this type of fuel to be green.

 

[Simskiller]

[tinfoilhat]
I wonder if this is going to be one of those technologies that gets bought out by the energy companies and then vanishes into some sort of technological black hole, never to be seen again. Like so many others. [/tinfoilhat]

CAPTCHA: Pyrrhic Victory
Yes, captcha. It may well have been.

You mean like all those "Grow fuel from plants/bacteria" stories we only hear about ONCE and only ONCE and then never hear about them again?

Seriously new ways to get fuel is old news, the real news would be hearing about it AGAIN as it didn't immeditly disappear.

 

[crimson sickle2]

Finally someone made this possible, now get it to the renewable energy generators for storing excess energy. After that, or during, make the process cheap. After that, time to make a flux capacitor.