British engineers produce amazing 'petrol from air' technology

[jeongyun]

Hello,

I thought this news belongs here.

British engineers produce amazing 'petrol from air' technology - Telegraph

The technology, presented to a London engineering conference this week, removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The “petrol from air” technology involves taking sodium hydroxide and mixing it with carbon dioxide before "electrolysing" the sodium carbonate that it produces to form pure carbon dioxide.

Hydrogen is then produced by electrolysing water vapour captured with a dehumidifier.

The company, Air Fuel Synthesis, then uses the carbon dioxide and hydrogen to produce methanol which in turn is passed through a gasoline fuel reactor, creating petrol.

and then

Company officials say they had produced five litres of petrol in less than three months from a small refinery in Stockton-on-Tees, Teesside.

[gone-ot]

...huh? Our (USA) politicians have been producing "hot air" for eons!

...and, remember, hot air is the energy that makes hot-air balloons "rise & float"!

[Ryland]

While it's not practical if you just want to burn it in a gasoline engine, I think that their point is that it's possible and instead of taking 50,000,000 years it only took 3 months! and it's being synthesized from air and water, not from more complex base stock.

[UFO]

I know nothing of the chemistry involved, but it sounds pretty good.

[JRMichler]

This definitely belongs in the Unicorn Corral. Just look at the KwH to make a gallon of fuel by their process.

There's a better way going commercial right now in the US. Google Algenol and also Joule Unlimited. These two companies are going to blast corn ethanol right out of the market.

[euromodder]

What's missing : how much energy goes in, and how much comes out ...

[RobertISaar]

and here's the big question:

how much energy was consumed to create these 5 liters of gasoline? the only way this could possibly work out is if the electricity required was generated via water/solar/etc.... not that it would be a bad thing, but it's still not anywhere near as prevalent as it needs to be.

[gone-ot]

efficiency = output / input

[Arragonis]

We brits invented the steam engine and the jet engine. That was when we had engineers thinking about stuff in the real world. Now we have greenies thinking in terms of Narnia, so we end up with pish like this.

No way to run an empire is it ?

[Ryland]

That's a great point, it takes a ton of energy to produce a gallon of gasoline... so should we find a better way to make gasoline or should we stop using so much of it because it's so hard to make?

Also, energy is energy, so using solar to make gasoline is kind of a dumb idea as well because you will be producing so much waste/heat that it might as well be a heater that has a byproduct of gasoline.