[Closed] Petrol from thin air.

Heard this on the radio last night, thought it was April Fools day.

They seemed quite hopeful that in two years they will be able to make a lot of this fuel.

I can see the creationists being all over this;

"look, it proves you don't need to bury stuff in the ground for millions of years to get oil, the earth could have been created last Tuesday with a couple of air pockets on it that have magically turned to oil"

I too heard it on the radio and I too thought it was April Fool's day

That technology could be earth-shattering in it's implications.

Excellent - not content with polluting our air we're now going to start burning it! 😆

Yup it does a bit April fool like, but it seems to have a pretty big endorsement from iMechE and is on their home page.
[url] http://www.imeche.org/ [/url]

Edit/ Scrap what I just said, they're talking about nitrogen capture on their home-page. Misread the liquidair as petrol.

[i]That technology could be earth-shattering in it's implications[/i]

It's fracking but with air 🙂

they had produced five litres of petrol in less than three months

So it'll take about a year to produce enough fuel for me to drive to work and back for a month? 😉

Good luck to them TBH, I hope they get full backing from the big players in the fuel industry, however my no.1 question is that how much energy is used in production of it? I know they said that if they use renewable power for it it'll be carbon neutral but what are the real chances of that in the next 20 years?

The fuel that is produced can be used in any regular petrol tank and, [b]if renewable energy[/b] is used to provide the electricity it could become “completely carbon neutral”.

Emphasis mine. A potentially useful method of storing energy (and that is a good thing) but not in any way shape or form is it an energy source and a very misleading headline.

5 litres in 3 months....

Is it too late to invest?

Given they need electricity to make the 'petrol' then really they're making a battery of sorts (all be it a battery that you burn), rather than a fuel - they're converting that electrical energy into something portable and burnable. Its an interesting exercise but I'm not really clear what its a solution to. Hydrogen and hydrogen fuel cells have been around for about a century and have never found any real practical everyday application.

But petrol is in effect stored solar energy.

Hydrogen and hydrogen fuel cells have been around for about a century and have never found any real practical everyday application.

Petrol is incredibly energy dense, much more so than Hydrogen, plus we already have an infrastructure in place around it. I suppose it's a way of generating a source of petrol without the need for oil, which is kind of cool but I agree that trumpeting it as some sort of carbon neutral fuel is just plain wrong.

It doesn't seem particularly scalable does it. It also probably uses a great deal of electricity. With enough green electricity or whenever we get nuclear fusion energy it might be worthwhile (plus buy stocks in NaOH manufacture!). Although why not use that electricity for electric cars?. Otherwise it's slightly crackpot.

I guess the obvious advantage is that you don't really need much infrastructure change. So hydrogen cars / fuel cells / batteries add lots of new individual manufacturing costs.
But the big question really is how energy efficient is it, how energy efficient does it have to be to be more viable than existing alternative energy sources.

As for scalability, I've no idea. It's currently a research process so saying 5 litres isn't very impressive may be missing the point.

I've built fuel cell powered bikes - the fuel storage is the problem, Air Products get jittery when you tell them you're strapping a high pressure hydrogen tank to a bicycle 🙂

The matrix storage canisters are much better, but expensive. There are some fuel cells that burn methanol - much better as it's a liquid so you can tank it, though it's a bit toxic. They really do the opposite of this process, they crack the methanol to get CO2 and hydrogen, then burn the hydrogen in a fuel cell.

The advantage of this process is that it produces a fuel that'll burn in unmodified petrol engines - I'm not sure why they're not electolysing water, though, that seems simpler.

looks like cover for a Meth lab to me.

I can see the creationists being all over this;

"look, it proves you don't need to bury stuff in the ground for millions of years to get oil, the earth could have been created last Tuesday with a couple of air pockets on it that have magically turned to oil"

Nah, don't me mad.

Earth was created with oil/coal/gas fields already there.

Obvious really.

Alternatively, 1 'day' in the Biblical creation is not a literal day, could be millions or billions of years.

Anyway, I digress.

As you were.

Petrol is incredibly energy dense, much more so than Hydrogen

How dense is air though - as resource to mine

Alternatively, 1 'day' in the Biblical creation is not a literal day, could be millions or billions of years.

indeed, and metaphors aside - I think god can make days as long or short as he likes, its one of the perks of the job 🙂 Time's quite an elastic concept when you're whisking up a whole universe from nothing (or if you're building a brick shed). Theres nothing less credulous about a god creating a universe in 6 days than Brian Cox on TV smiling at the sun claiming that pretty much the same thing happen in the second billionth of a second after the big bang.

Alternatively, 1 'day' in the Biblical creation is not a literal day, could be millions or billions of years.

True, and a useful get out clause for more moderate (sane) Christians.
But that isn't what the real young Earth creationists say.
They claim [url= http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_creationism ]Earth is around 6000 HUMAN years old[/url].

How dense is air though - as resource to mine

Not sure what you mean by this. In terms of combustion the energy density of air is zero.

Theres nothing less credulous about a god creating a universe in 6 days than Brian Cox on TV smiling at the sun claiming that pretty much the same thing happen in the second billionth of a second after the big bang.

Very wrong. The first part is non falsifiable, the second is falsifiable (although not by me).

But that isn't what the real young Earth creationists say.

Yes, but they're loons so we can just ignore them. There's no point even trying to engage with people who lack the ability to think rationally.

it has yet to capture the interest of major oil companies

Well, of course not, they're still easily generating billions from raping the earth's fossil fuel resources whilst using speculators to hold the world to ransom with never ending artificially created price rises.

Yes, but they're loons so we can just ignore them. There's no point even trying to engage with people who lack the ability to think rationally.

Scarily, that's a lot of [s]people[/s] loons in this case. From the [url= http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_creationism ]Wiki article[/url]:

When asked for their views on the origin and development of human beings, between 40% and 50% of adults in the United States say they share the beliefs of young Earth creationism, depending on the poll.
The percentage of believers decreases as the level of education increases — only 22% of respondents with postgraduate degrees believed compared with 47% of those with a high school education or less.

This is what I wonder about in my more cynical moods - is it that people with the ability to think rationally go on to higher education, or is it that it's possible to teach people to think rationally?

In other words, is it worth trying to get the loons to think?

Given they need electricity to make the 'petrol' then really they're making a battery of sorts (all be it a battery that you burn), rather than a fuel - they're converting that electrical energy into something portable and burnable. Its an interesting exercise but I'm not really clear what its a solution to.

It's a solution to energy storage, which is a massive problem. People are always saying that renewable energy is not constant - it's not windy or sunny all the time. Well now, that doesn't matter. You can produce loads of petrol when the wind's blowing, and use it when it's not. You can also produce it in the Sahara Desert, the middle of the Pacific, Iceland or the plains of Siberia, and ship it to where it's needed.

It's a very very big deal! It solves most of the major issues surrounding renewable energy with a single invention. Amazing!

I'm not sure why they're not electolysing water, though, that seems simpler.

Because hydrogen is really hard to store, and does not give much energy per litre of fuel ie it's not energy dense.

Yes, but they're using hydrogen anyway - they're producing it from water vapour. Why not produce it from water?

Assuming it isn't just for marketing tosh, it might be that some other part of the process uses a dehumidifier, and water is just a by-product of this.

Plenty of water vapour in the air isn't there? Or had you not noticed your trails being rather damp? 🙂

Also water vapour is purer than other sources of water.

I'd like to see the power consumption v power liberated but putting that aside chemical fuel is much easier to live with for transport than electrical so if the electricity can be obtained in an 'environmentally friendly' manner then it could still end up being very viable.

It makes sense to build things like this and things like water desalination into marine and offshore wind turbines that then work when they have energy input and then pump the resulting product. For desalination you can skip the electrical energy stage and use the turbine to boil the water directly, it is also sitting right in the sea water that it is desalinating.

If I were a Middle-Eastern oil producing state with dwindling reserves, I'd be looking at my thousands of square miles of parched desert, and my fuel storage and distribution infrastructure, and be sending some guys with briefcases full of cash to Stockton on Tees.

You still beed energy to make the 'petrol', so it's not exactly a solution to the worlds energy crisis. You still need to make the electricity.

The way this story has been reported in the mainstream media is awful. It's a method of energy storage, and not a very good one at it's current stage of development.

The fundamental fact that the media have failed to mention is:

Petrol + Air = CO2 + Water + Energy

They are basically doing this in reverse. It's not magic, just a chemical way of storing energy.

More detail here: [url= http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/exclusive-the-scientists-who-turned-fresh-air-into-petrol-8217382.html#access_token=AAADWQ6323IoBAGC6BicRxEqmEraGCrBgwGJtlNdwWmZCoEjUEuW1IuNsnwgYtmLahBGTA9ZBas7Jl6oJ0yrDKdDV7CsoZC8WcPfinbFqCFoKJwCbwo5&expires_in=6181 ]CLICKY[/url]

I just had the same April fool response! Hydrogen and carbon are abundant, stick 'em together and what have you got? Bibbidy bobbidy [b]boom![/b]

As the technology is developed the economy of scale improves. Compare the cost of an offshore oil rig and pipeline with the early stages of fuel development. I wonder if the technology will be bought and silenced?

The £1.1m project, in development for the past two years, is being funded by a group of unnamed philanthropists who believe the technology could prove to be a lucrative way of creating renewable energy.

That's pretty small scale, no wonder they only have a flask of the stuff so far!

Is this Teeside technology radically different from the guys James May showed in a USA desert trying to create petrol from the air, with parabolic solar relectors being the [i]source[/i] of energy?

What's also interesting is that many many countries have enough wind/solar resources to produce at least some of this fuel. Rather than the current situation where oil production is owned by a small number of states.

Is this Teeside technology radically different from the guys James May showed in a USA desert trying to create petrol from the air, with parabolic solar relectors being the source of energy?

[i]*looks out at the thick fog hanging over the North East*[/i]

I hope so, cos they won't get far with solar reflectors round here!

Witchcraft, I tell thee...

So how much petrol would they produce if they wanted to reduce air's CO2 ppm by 100?

None, because this won't reduce atmospheric CO2 - it goes right back into the air when you burn it 🙂

Well it will be reduced as long as we store lots of fuel produced by it.

It really isn't much different to oil stored under ground - at some point it was in the air and it got consumed by a biological process.

Now if someone could genetically engineer a plant or bacteria to do the conversion it could be a lot easier. Although I think the bacteria thing may have been done or being done.

None, because this won't reduce atmospheric CO2 - it goes right back into the air when you burn it

Er yes it will, cos whilst we are burning this stuff we're NOT burning fossil CO2. And natural carbon sequestration will continue to take CO2 out of the air.

Now if someone could genetically engineer a plant or bacteria to do the conversion it could be a lot easier. Although I think the bacteria thing may have been done or being done.

Like photosynthesis, you mean?

Er yes it will, cos whilst we are burning this stuff we're NOT burning fossil CO2. And natural carbon sequestration will continue to take CO2 out of the air.

You know more than most people I work with then... 🙄

Noone knows what would happen, but I'm not aware of anyone in the field who would state with any certainty that natural sequestration would reduce CO2 levels by anything appreciable, especially if the climate continued to warm, thereby stimulating microbial degradation of organic matter, releasing CO2

So we need to create the fuel, then stick it back in the empty oil wells.
...

Er yes it will, cos whilst we are burning this stuff we're NOT burning fossil CO2.

That's not reducing CO2, it's just not increasing CO2 🙂

It's CO2-neutral, like biofuels - not counting the CO2 you produce making the biofuels, of course.

You can't really stick oil back in the wells, unfortunately...

If I were a Middle-Eastern oil producing state with dwindling reserves, I'd be looking at my thousands of square miles of parched desert, and my fuel storage and distribution infrastructure, and be sending some guys with briefcases full of cash to Stockton on Tees.

I see your point, but you missed one tiny detail..!
This process uses water vapor from the air, yes?
What do deserts, by definition, lack? (Even in the air)

🙂

sounds good indeed 🙂
i also remember watching one of the james may programs on bbc2 last year,where there was a scientist who could produce petrol,straight from the sun's rays (it involved amplifying the sun onto a mirror,and then into some type of distillation (?!) chamber (or something along those lines).
like the op's link though,he wasn't able to get much petrol to begin with (but the technology is definitely worth getting major investment in).
this in fact

🙂

You can't really stick oil back in the wells, unfortunately...

Because we fill them with water?
OK, so take out that water, use it with atmospheric CO2 to create oil, then pump it back in!

Sorted. Although something tells me that wouldn't happen.

I'll ask some people in the business, but I don't think it's that simple - besides, what's to stop some other sod drilling a well a mile away and nicking the oil you've just put down there? 🙂

One of the process engineering design porjects at uni was to design a plant for this process. The reaction is as old as the oil industry, Ficher-Trophs reaction, just run in the at the extream end of how it's conventionaly done, it usualy starts with an energy souce like coal or gas (refered to as CTL or GTL, coal or gas to liquid), burn half of it to fuel the process and the other half becomes petrol, originaly developed by Nazi Germany when no one wanted to fuel their tanks, then used extensively by other countries with lots of coal but no one wanted to sell them oil for political reasons South Africa so SASOL are biggest users.

It doesn't work on an economic scale if you try and start with CO2.

They just asked the manager on the BBC "How efficient is it, how much electricity do you need to produce a litre?" and he answered mainly "it's good for global warming"...

This would not be a solution to global climate change, but it would be a possible solution to the end of our finite carbon fuels. The hunt for a 'drop in' replacement, particularly in the aviation world, has always been the holy grail. If you don't have to have a whole new infrastructure to support a fuel, it is cheaper and easier to adopt.

This would not be a solution to global climate change, but it would be a possible solution to the end of our finite carbon fuels. The hunt for a 'drop in' replacement, particularly in the aviation world, has always been the holy grail. If you don't have to have a whole new infrastructure to support a fuel, it is cheaper and easier to adopt.

When I said uneconomic think of the old joke about a full tank of fuel doubling the value of a Skoda, but substitute in an F1 car.

There are natural sequestration processes though? I'm sure I remember hearing many times that CO2 levels would go down if all anthropogenic CO2 emissions ceased. I also remember hearing that there was an amount we could emit without overall levels increasing.

Now I know about some of the various tipping points above which negative feedback cycles become positive ones, but until we reach those....?

[i] I remember hearing many times that CO2 levels would go down if all anthropogenic CO2 emissions ceased[/i]

I must confess it's not a phrase that's come up much in conversations I've had.

I shall use anthropogenic at the dinner table tonight, though, and how the kids react.

There are natural sequestration processes though?

Yes, but how balanced or not they are with natural emission processes, especially given the unprecidented rate at which atmospheric CO2 concentrations and temperature have risen is anyone's guess. Noone knows with any degree of certainty.

I'm sure I remember hearing many times that CO2 levels would go down if all anthropogenic CO2 emissions ceased.

They may go down quickly, they may go down slowly, they may not go down at all, or they may carry on increasing. Basically, over the past 200 years we've done quite a successful job of screwing up with the equilibrium of consumption vs emission. Yes there are models out there predicting all these scenarios, but as my research demonstrates on a daily basis we know didly-squat about the actual hows, whats and whys beyond a very crude level.

I also remember hearing that there was an amount we could emit without overall levels increasing.

Possibly, and this is related to the theory of tipping points. Again, noone knows what the threshold levels really are. What we do know is that there is at least a 20 year lag between us stopping emitting now and temperature rises attenuating. In the crudest possible sense, if we stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, we'd have to wait a couple of decades with baited breath to find out if it was soon enough.

One of the reasons for the wide range of numbers you get out of climate models is that these thresholds are seen as big step events, triggering one gives you a completely different answer to not doing so, and it's just one group's educated guesses (predictions) as to what should trigger those events in a model simulation.

Very interesting Zokes. I like to hear scientists approaching predictions with humility. The Earth is a big place after all!
It wasn't the Industrial Revolution it's the Industrial Experiment and it's still ongoing.

It wasn't the Industrial Revolution it's the Industrial Experiment and it's still ongoing.

There's actually a reasonable amount of scientific thought about whether or not on a lesser scale we've been affecting climate for much longer than that - ever since intensification of rice paddies (and associated N2O and CH4 emissions) about 5000 years ago

Brilliant news!

I'm off out to buy a 5l gas guzzlin yankmobile and rag its ass hard!!

bruumm bruuummm!

Wouldn't it also be possible to make other petrochemical substitutes the same way? So plastics etc?

Then you could make crap, bury it when it gets thrown away, and bingo - sequestration.

Stop!

"Hydrogen is then produced by electrolysing water vapour"

From Wiki:-

"The barrier to lowering the price of high purity hydrogen is a cost of more than 35 kWh of electricity used to generate each kilogram of hydrogen gas."

If hydrogen was so cheap to produce then we'd be rocking around using fuel cells rather that using it to make petrol ? Enter Nuclear fusion...

#OnlyGlancedAtArticleButHydrogenThangStoodOut

Engineers generally aren't stupid, and they've spent more time thinking about it than we have. So one would hope that they have done a very simple back of an envelope calculation to find out if it's going to be feasible.

The engineer's must be on to something revolutionary as the comments on the article seem to think it's a crock 🙂 And I concur..

I'll ask some people in the business, but I don't think it's that simple

Actually it pretty much would be. After all if we can drill the holes and pump the stuff on shore from the middle of the sea then what's to stop the process being run in reverse (besides the non trivial task of making the oil!). You wouldn't start with off shore of course but we've been doing it for decades with gas.

From a technical perspective it doesn't seem to me to be that hard, although there will be some technical challenges, it's more a matter of who pays for it that is the big question. That and the fact that simple injection of CO2 gas seems much easier.

A potentially useful method of storing energy (and that is a good thing) but not in any way shape or form is it an energy source and a very misleading headline.

After all if we can drill the holes and pump the stuff on shore from the middle of the sea then what's to stop the process being run in reverse

Afaik pumping stuff into oil wells is straightforward, it was discussed a lot when carbon storage was in the news. Apparently some Norwegian fields already pump CO2 back down the hole to help get the rest of the oil out.

Wouldn't it also be possible to make other petrochemical substitutes the same way? So plastics etc?

Possibly, Especially as few people seem to realise that when we run out of oil, we run out of plastic: something that would present much more of a challenge than fuelling cars some other way.

Then you could make crap, bury it when it gets thrown away, and bingo - sequestration.

You'd need to make a hell of a lot of 'crap' to make the slightest difference. Really, the answer is to stop digging up fossil fuels in the first place. They're quite well sequestered in the first place.

This is what I wonder about in my more cynical moods - is it that people with the ability to think rationally go on to higher education, or is it that it's possible to teach people to think rationally?

In other words, is it worth trying to get the loons to think?

Welcome to my world. I started considering many of my fellow humans as being no smarter than retarded chimpanzee's with a bad case of the 'superstition of the pigeon' when I was about 13.

I would have thought it would be easier to combine C02 and Water together with substantial sums of energy to make Methane more easily than Petrol. I know it's not energy dense enough for running cars and planes, but it's much safer to handle and transport than hydrogen and as above we already have all the infrastructure in place...