Pioneering Scientists Turn Fresh Air into Gasoline

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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Now this may be a lot of hot air, but you never know. A British company claims to have been able to produce gasoline from carbon dioxide and water vapor, taken straight from the air. Through revolutionary technology, the gasoline production process also removes CO2 from the environment, scoring a hit on two fronts.

"We've taken carbon dioxide from air and hydrogen from water and turned these elements into petrol," said Peter Harrison, the company's chief executive, who revealed the breakthrough at a conference at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in London.
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Well I'm only in first year chemistry, but using the formula for octane I come up with: 16CO2 + 18H2O = 2C8H18 + 25O2. Although the octane rating depends on which isomers of C8H18 are produced, and could range anywhere from a rating of 0-100. I'm guessing that plays a role in why this hasn't been done before.
 
Wikipedia shows the combustion of gasoline (combustion is always a form of CO2+H2O btw) as the exact opposite of the formula I came up with, so I guess my math is right :)
 
Scientists can make gold out of other elements too by whacking the shit out of it to knock neutrons free... but it's hardly energy efficient to do so.
 
Well, clearly this is an energy negative process. They are using electricity to add the energy necessary to change the CO2 and H2O into long chain carbohydrates similar to those found in gasoline.

The amount of energy that goes into the process is greater than the energy you will get from burning the product. Since electricity is a higher quality energy (meaning it is more useful and efficient than gasoline), this process is pointless, which is why you have never seen it done.
 
But there is a convenience cost associated with continuing to use liquid fuels that work with existing infrastructure. However, I can be pretty confident in saying that it is currently no where near close enough to matter.
 
Until they have a genetically engineering plant/bacteria that does this reaction produces it as it's waste product (or excess stored "food"), then I'll just assume it's a massively energy negative reaction.
 
DaWolf said:
Well, clearly this is an energy negative process. They are using electricity to add the energy necessary to change the CO2 and H2O into long chain carbohydrates similar to those found in gasoline.

The amount of energy that goes into the process is greater than the energy you will get from burning the product. Since electricity is a higher quality energy (meaning it is more useful and efficient than gasoline), this process is pointless, which is why you have never seen it done.
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They hope to start powering this process with renewable sources like wind power.....which you would have seen if you read the article.
 
DaWolf said:
Well, clearly this is an energy negative process. They are using electricity to add the energy necessary to change the CO2 and H2O into long chain carbohydrates similar to those found in gasoline.

The amount of energy that goes into the process is greater than the energy you will get from burning the product. Since electricity is a higher quality energy (meaning it is more useful and efficient than gasoline), this process is pointless, which is why you have never seen it done.
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1) as tubular pointed out, renewable energy sources
2) even if it won't be used for powering cars, you will need a backup option for petroleum derived materials, for example pretty much all plastic materials. Or we will drop use of all petroleum derived materials, and go back to stone age ?
 
sfsuphysics said:
Scientists can make gold out of other elements too by whacking the shit out of it to knock neutrons free... but it's hardly energy efficient to do so.
Click to expand...

As you said, this won't be energy efficient, especially to begin with, but that is now what this is about. The point is we can produce our primary mobile energy source from any electric energy source. We can liquify, distribute, and burn the energy from nuclear power plants, wind farms, tidal farms, solar farms, hydroelectric dams and geothermal power using our existing gasoline transportation infrastructure. And after we burn the fuel, we can recapture the CO2 again as the building blocks for new fuel. This will allow us to slowly move from fossil hydrocarbon dependence to the use of more renewable energy sources, without the expense of creating a new infrastructure based on heavy, expensive to produce batteries, or low density, hard to store hydrogen.
 
it can theorically be done but will likely never, EVER be energy practical. When we combust gas it just becomes co2 and h20, and releases energy in the processes. In order to recombine the products to make the reactant they need to provide AT MINIMUM the same amount of energy realease (through heat and entropy), but in reality sake would need a fair bit more due to energy loss and such. Simple laws of thermodynamics guarantee that. Exeriments like this are neat, but I find they tend to be given significanly more hype than deserved; it's a high school science project on steroids, not a legitimate solution for anything.
 
faugusztin said:
1) as tubular pointed out, renewable energy sources
2) even if it won't be used for powering cars, you will need a backup option for petroleum derived materials, for example pretty much all plastic materials. Or we will drop use of all petroleum derived materials, and go back to stone age ?
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Some disposable plastics are now being made from plant cellulose, with the additional benefits of being biodegradable. As for the rest, I'm from the province of Alberta in Canada. Or oil sands rival the reserves of Saudi Arabia, if it doesn't have to all be burned in cars the reserves remaining should last for centuries to come :)
 
DaWolf said:
The amount of energy that goes into the process is greater than the energy you will get from burning the product. Since electricity is a higher quality energy (meaning it is more useful and efficient than gasoline), this process is pointless, which is why you have never seen it done.
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One big problem with electricity: Storing it.

The energy density of gasoline is many times higher than that of any battery technology known to man. What this allows us to do is store a vast quantity of energy in a very small space (losing some energy in the process). That's a very worthwhile endeavor, as it enables very long vehicle runtimes with relatively little additional weight or volume taken up by the fuel source.

If you wanted to power a vehicle with electricity, you're looking at batteries and their much lower energy density. To get the same runtime, you'll need a fairly large battery... but then the weight of that battery drags down the runtime and saps the efficiency of the power usage, so you need a larger battery still...

You're either wasting power converting it into chemical fuel, and wasting power hauling around a battery. At what point is the difference in waste so small that it just makes more sense to convert to chemical fuel?
 
DaWolf said:
Well, clearly this is an energy negative process. They are using electricity to add the energy necessary to change the CO2 and H2O into long chain carbohydrates similar to those found in gasoline.

The amount of energy that goes into the process is greater than the energy you will get from burning the product. Since electricity is a higher quality energy (meaning it is more useful and efficient than gasoline), this process is pointless, which is why you have never seen it done.
Click to expand...

they are claiming that they will be able to use renewable energy to do this with

Although the process is still in the early developmental stages and needs to take electricity from the national grid to work, the company believes it will eventually be possible to use power from renewable sources such as wind farms or tidal barrages.
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I still don't see how feasible this is. if they could use solar power in the south to manufacture it that would be worthwhile (it would at least solve the storage issue). but pulling power off the grid is as you say stupid.
 
tubular said:
They hope to start powering this process with renewable sources like wind power.....which you would have seen if you read the article.
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And had you read my response, you would have seen that my point was that electricity is a higher quality energy than gasoline. It is stupid to convert electricity to gasoline regardless of the source of the electricity.
 
Unknown-One said:
One big problem with electricity: Storing it.

The energy density of gasoline is many times higher than that of any battery technology known to man. What this allows us to do is store a vast quantity of energy in a very small space (losing some energy in the process). That's a very worthwhile endeavor, as it enables very long vehicle runtimes with relatively little additional weight or volume taken up by the fuel source.

If you wanted to power a vehicle with electricity, you're looking at batteries and their much lower energy density. To get the same runtime, you'll need a fairly large battery... but then the weight of that battery drags down the runtime and saps the efficiency of the power usage, so you need a larger battery still...

You're either wasting power converting it into chemical fuel, and wasting power hauling around a battery. At what point is the difference in waste so small that it just makes more sense to convert to chemical fuel?
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Unfortunately, your analysis fails to take into account efficiency of the energy conversions from the storage medium to motion. A typical gasoline engine is about 30% efficient (the wasted energy being heat) while the efficiency of a typical electric motor is 98%. I won't do the math for you, but you could haul around a very large battery with the energy saved in just the efficiency difference.
 
DaWolf said:
Well, clearly this is an energy negative process. They are using electricity to add the energy necessary to change the CO2 and H2O into long chain carbohydrates similar to those found in gasoline.

The amount of energy that goes into the process is greater than the energy you will get from burning the product. Since electricity is a higher quality energy (meaning it is more useful and efficient than gasoline), this process is pointless, which is why you have never seen it done.
Click to expand...

^^^ This. Unless someone figures out a way to make very very cheap electricity, less than a penny a watt, this is completely non-viable. Even then, the pace of improvements in batteries would make this completely irrelevant in 10-20 years time.
 
stiltner said:
Hey look, some asshole got grant money.
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People have been given grants for a hell of a lot less.

DaWolf said:
And had you read my response, you would have seen that my point was that electricity is a higher quality energy than gasoline. It is stupid to convert electricity to gasoline regardless of the source of the electricity.
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Except electricity has more storage problems than gasoline and if you want to power cars with it, you have to buy a whole new car. With this, someone in the middle of outback Australia could gather the electricity to convert to petrol, then ship it to me in the suburbs and I can continue to drive my 1979 Holden, which will run cleaner since it doesn't have a lot of the crap in it that conventional petrol has.

I think it's an interesting idea. I'd like to know just how efficient and practical it is to produce gasoline in this way.
 
Why does this have to be a replacement? Just as ethanol isn't superior to gasoline, it does add depth, helps stabilize gas prices, and increases self-reliance.

Let's say your car has solar body panels. As it sits in the sun at work, it's creating gasoline.
 
Ustauk said:
As you said, this won't be energy efficient, especially to begin with, but that is now what this is about. The point is we can produce our primary mobile energy source from any electric energy source. We can liquify, distribute, and burn the energy from nuclear power plants, wind farms, tidal farms, solar farms, hydroelectric dams and geothermal power using our existing gasoline transportation infrastructure. And after we burn the fuel, we can recapture the CO2 again as the building blocks for new fuel. This will allow us to slowly move from fossil hydrocarbon dependence to the use of more renewable energy sources, without the expense of creating a new infrastructure based on heavy, expensive to produce batteries, or low density, hard to store hydrogen.
Click to expand...

There are not enough renewable sources of electricity to have any impact on fossil fuel use as you describe. Especially not when you are wasting most of it in the conversion process.
 
Unknown-One said:
One big problem with electricity: Storing it.

The energy density of gasoline is many times higher than that of any battery technology known to man. What this allows us to do is store a vast quantity of energy in a very small space (losing some energy in the process). That's a very worthwhile endeavor, as it enables very long vehicle runtimes with relatively little additional weight or volume taken up by the fuel source.

If you wanted to power a vehicle with electricity, you're looking at batteries and their much lower energy density. To get the same runtime, you'll need a fairly large battery... but then the weight of that battery drags down the runtime and saps the efficiency of the power usage, so you need a larger battery still...

You're either wasting power converting it into chemical fuel, and wasting power hauling around a battery. At what point is the difference in waste so small that it just makes more sense to convert to chemical fuel?
Click to expand...

The outlet to the wheels efficiency is in the neighborhood of 60-80% efficient after inverter, mechanical losses and such. The efficiency of gasoline is at best 30% and more like 20%; because you're running outside the optimum RPM range most of the time. On a cost for cost basis not including modern batteries an electric car costs about 10x less to operate over 10 years, not including the maintenance costs of the ICE and transmission. With the batteries it's about even at this point and only moving steadily in the batteries favor. Range won't be an issue much longer; because of fast charging. The batteries available can already be charged to 80-90% within 15-20 minutes. A DC fast charge standard was just approved and will start rolling out in some areas shortly. Not that it's that important to most of us less; because unless you're traveling long distances you only really need a 110v plug in your garage to charge overnight.
 
-PK- said:
Well I'm only in first year chemistry, but using the formula for octane I come up with: 16CO2 + 18H2O = 2C8H18 + 25O2. Although the octane rating depends on which isomers of C8H18 are produced, and could range anywhere from a rating of 0-100. I'm guessing that plays a role in why this hasn't been done before.
Click to expand...

So all we need to do is put 16 mol of CO2 and 18 mol of H2O in a jar, shake well and we end up with 2 mol of C8H18 and 25 mol of H2O? ;)

Former chem student. Those carbon-carbon bonds are a motherfucker when it comes to energy though.

Now, let's look at the molecular arrangement and VSEPR theory then follow that with molecular bonding and VB theory... :D
 
DaWolf said:
I won't do the math for you, but you could haul around a very large battery with the energy saved in just the efficiency difference.
Click to expand...
Obviously not a viable solution, since we're still getting much longer runtimes with much smaller physical volume out of petrol-powered cars compared to full-electric cars.
 
DaWolf said:
And had you read my response, you would have seen that my point was that electricity is a higher quality energy than gasoline. It is stupid to convert electricity to gasoline regardless of the source of the electricity.
Click to expand...

Stupid? It depends.

Remote Africa could use solar panels to create gasoline to transport to other areas. You could do the same with power lines, but high capacity grid infrastructure requires much more capital compared to buying some trucks and renting tankers. I don't pretend to know the efficiency differences, but there is at least a possibility that the outlay required for raw electricity transport (coupled with smaller transport efficiency losses) offsets any disadvantage of lower efficiency derived from the electrical to chemical energy conversion.
 
metalsmart said:
Just as ethanol isn't superior to gasoline
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Umm, ethanol is superior to gasoline, thermal efficiency of 87 octane pump unleaded is god awful compared to high octane ethanol.

If we had purpose built ethanol vehicles, I have very little doubt they'd be as fuel efficient as current 87 octane gasoline engines but producing less carbon due to the higher thermal efficiency. The issue with ethanol is flex vehicles. Flex vehicles waste all the advantage of ethanol, and ethanol gets compared to gasoline based on these vehicles that waste ~20% of the potential of ethanol.

We just have to figure out how to make those algae poop ethanol so we don't have to have the inefficient step of mashing / grinding up food to ferment into ethanol.

IMO, it's the most promising of all the renewable vehicle options. I have little doubt that we will eventually bio-engineer algae that can produce ethanol and desalinate water at the same time with only solar energy input. Of course, the iron If this breakthrough happens is that the best location for production would be the Middle East.
 
Ustauk said:
As you said, this won't be energy efficient, especially to begin with, but that is now what this is about. The point is we can produce our primary mobile energy source from any electric energy source. We can liquify, distribute, and burn the energy from nuclear power plants, wind farms, tidal farms, solar farms, hydroelectric dams and geothermal power using our existing gasoline transportation infrastructure. And after we burn the fuel, we can recapture the CO2 again as the building blocks for new fuel. This will allow us to slowly move from fossil hydrocarbon dependence to the use of more renewable energy sources, without the expense of creating a new infrastructure based on heavy, expensive to produce batteries, or low density, hard to store hydrogen.
Click to expand...

+1 Asumming they can actually do this on a large scale.

However, the environmentalist will hate and try to kill it since it doesn't get rid of our gas powers cars.
 
Gasoline is an energy source.

Physics tells us that "you can't even break even", meaning that its impossible to produce gasoline from air using less energy than you can get from the gasoline in the end.

So unless they find some great trick where they can somehow use useless forms of energy to produce the gasoline, its entirely moot.

After all, that is the same issue with the hydrogen economy everyone was on about. Hydrogen is crazy abundant, but its always bound to other stuff, and extracting that hydrogen takes a lot of energy (such as electrolysis). In the end, it becomes less efficient than just charging a chemical battery.
 
One place where this might be useful is for aircraft. Gas/kerosene has very high energy density (important for when you're trying to minimize weight), and literally disappears as you use it. Aircraft often take off with more weight than their structure can handle during landing, but that doesn't matter because the plane will be much lighter during landing with all the fuel burned off. If the plane's weight stayed constant, you either carry much less fuel or much stronger landing gear.
 
Great idea, but much the same as creating Hydrogen for fuel cells by splitting water, you have to put more energy in than you get out.

Once we have nearly-free clean energy available (in-space solar collectors, mass-scale wind and wave power, etc,) sure. But until then, it isn't financially feasible. But, once those ARE available, it will mean being able to run existing vehicles on completely renewable source-energy. That's the problem now, and even the problem with current electric cars - is that the source power is often not clean.
 
CharonPDX said:
Great idea, but much the same as creating Hydrogen for fuel cells by splitting water, you have to put more energy in than you get out.

Once we have nearly-free clean energy available (in-space solar collectors, mass-scale wind and wave power, etc,) sure. But until then, it isn't financially feasible. But, once those ARE available, it will mean being able to run existing vehicles on completely renewable source-energy. That's the problem now, and even the problem with current electric cars - is that the source power is often not clean.
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This line of thought made me laugh because the green energy supporters hate hydrocarbon products and the hydrocarbon product supporters hate green energy. The last thing the green energy supporters would want to do is make hydrocarbon products out of the energy collected and without those hydrocarbon products the other side won't support green energy. Add to that the concern about global warming and carbon sequestration along with the fact that we would be 'recycling' carbon and things get even more twisted.

:D
 
I don't get this CO2 crapola. I look at everything that is green and growing. All plants take in CO2 and give off Oxygen. They need the CO2 we need the O2. A scam to tax us and take more money from the people. If they want to eliminate CO2, have the politicians stop breathing. Cap & Trade coming to CA in January, thank you gubenor Moonbeam. The state is bankrupt, now you are going to tax all business based on CO2 emisions, and still want to build a mega billion dollar dumbass train to nowhere.
 
I still think that Thorium powered vehicles sound most efficient in terms of cost. Sadly it's the whole "nuclear power" stigma that will most likely stand in its way due to peoples' lack of knowledge of different types of materials.
It seems like they play down the fact that it's not just cost to create a unit of fuel but also power generated per unit that can make it unfeasible compared to other fuels. Infrastructure development also plays a huge role in it.
Most alternative energy vehicles are so inefficient that it makes you wonder if they're not just in it for the grant/investment money.
 
Ducman69 said:
Gasoline is an energy source.

Physics tells us that "you can't even break even", meaning that its impossible to produce gasoline from air using less energy than you can get from the gasoline in the end.

So unless they find some great trick where they can somehow use useless forms of energy to produce the gasoline, its entirely moot.

After all, that is the same issue with the hydrogen economy everyone was on about. Hydrogen is crazy abundant, but its always bound to other stuff, and extracting that hydrogen takes a lot of energy (such as electrolysis). In the end, it becomes less efficient than just charging a chemical battery.
Click to expand...

The point of this is not to produce a better energy source. It's clear you can't get energy out of producing gasoline from co2 and h20 and then burning it again. Similarly, there was never a serious argument about whether or not Hydrogen fuel was an actual energy source.

The article uses statements like "using a revolutionary technology that promises to solve the energy crisis", but the media always try to add there own spin to everything, and sometimes it's blatantly false.

The reason hydrogen didn't catch on is NOT because it was realized it's not an energy source (this was known from the beginning). Hydrogen was to be used a storage medium just as batteries are used. The problem with hydrogen is there is no effective way of storing hydrogen. Compressing it into a tank is quite dangerous for every vehicle to have.

Similarly, there is no way of producing energy from the process described in this article, but argue as you like, gasoline is an energy dense storage medium (Joules / Volume) that burns easily and doesn't require anything exotic to store it, so it makes sense there is some interest in synthesizing it.

None the less, i dont see too many applications for this.
 
"We've taken carbon dioxide from air and hydrogen FROM water and turned these elements into petrol," said Peter Harrison, the company's chief executive, who revealed the breakthrough at a conference at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in London.
Click to expand...

Not feasible for mass consumption, not for many decades.
 
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