British Scientists Make Gasoline From 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.

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.

Its going to be a while before we get solar plants to an efficiency where they can outstrip a coal plant in terms of power generation. I was thinking of this as more of a replacement for oil than coal (I mean we don't see coal powered cars on the road) I think that if your goal is to reduce coal plants the fastest way would be nuclear, and yes I am aware that nuclear plants come with their own host of issues, but with our ever expanding population it seems like the only viable technology we have at present.

My goals are irrelevant to the conversation. Coal is far far worse for the atmosphere than gasoline, and the only way that this will ever be ecologically sustainable is when the majority of coal plants have been shut down.

 

[spartan231490]

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.

1) Not sure if you're arguing for/against solar in general, but this point needs to be made because so many people don't know it: photovoltaics as a baseload generation source are incredibly expensive, unreliable, have been that for a long time, and the rate of efficiency increases isn't near fast enough to accommodate the amount of generation that people seem to want.

2) Gen IV nuclear reactors. No emissions (like all nuclear reactions), and very very little waste, as in damn near none.

3) Fusion. The National Ignition Facility is very close to breaking even, and there's also the ITER project under construction. Once fusion is economically viable, we'll have an absolutely unlimited supply of energy to power reactions like the air-to-gas one.


The three most viable clean baseload generation sources are hydro, nuclear, and fusion. By the time the air-to-gas process is economically viable, we'll have the means to support it with completely clean energy without sacrificing power grid generation. Hell, if people weren't so paranoid about nuclear, we'd be able to support it now with Gen IV nuclear reactors. But no, we piss money away at the pipe dreams of having solar and wind and baseload generation. >:|

We've had nuclear reactions for a very very long time, there's a reason coal power still exists. People don't like nuclear, with good reason. I have my own separate issues with nuclear but that's not what this discussion is about and I don't care enough to derail the thread.

Also, you're wrong about solar. Solar isn't unreliable, I know someone who powers their house with it and if you can do it here, you can do it anywhere. I'm not sure what you mean by baseload generation, but I'm assuming you mean for a power grid, and you're correct, solar sucks for power grid generation because it needs a lot of space in order to generate that level of power, but it's nowhere near as inefficient or unreliable as people think, that's just propaganda.

 

[Vuliev]

Quick rundown of terms:

baseload: power that must be supplied to the grid at all times to keep everything running
intermediate: power that meets the day-to-day changes in power consumption (day/night changes, basically)
peak: power that must meet high-demand periods

We've had nuclear reactions for a very very long time, there's a reason coal power still exists. People don't like nuclear, with good reason.

It's "reason" based on two (admittedly very dangerous) accidents, both of which happened with very, very old nuclear technology that is in absolutely no way comparable to the Gen IV technology. The paranoia about implementing new nuclear generation is due mostly to ignorance of the new technology, which in turn causes the ignorant to push for baseload generation sources that are largely unsuited for that task.

Also, you're wrong about solar. Solar isn't unreliable, I know someone who powers their house with it and if you can do it here, you can do it anywhere. I'm not sure what you mean by baseload generation, but I'm assuming you mean for a power grid, and you're correct, solar sucks for power grid generation because it needs a lot of space in order to generate that level of power, but it's nowhere near as inefficient or unreliable as people think, that's just propaganda.

Fine, I'll be more specific: PV solar is incredibly costly and inefficient as baseload generation, but people have this absurd notion that "we can use solar and a little wind to solve all our energy needs!" which is horribly untrue. PVs can help reduce residential and some commercial intermediate needs, but that's still just reduction and not even in the baseload. You need high-energy reactors to have a strong base not only for the periods when solar can't produce power, but also to drive commercial and industrial needs.

There's a very large difference between using a handful of solar panels to reduce one's personal grid consumption, and using solar to power a city, a county, a state, or a country. When we have solar technology that is 60+% efficient, can easily and quickly adapt to meet demand, isn't heavily situational based on geography and long-term weather patterns, can store power effectively without using horrendously toxic materials, and is itself not dependent on horribly toxic materials, then I'll agree that it's a good source to meet much of our energy needs. Of those criteria, only the last is anywhere close to reality, with the recent creation of bio-voltaic solar panels.

So no, solar remains a source best left to small-scale generation, a field to which it's always been particularly suited.

 

[Spartan Altego]

If they can make it efficient enough to be viable long term, I'm all for this. Regardless of the effort put into it, the fact remains they made GAS out of AIR.

 

[Illyasviel]

I can keep driving about in petrol cars then? Awesome.

 

[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.