Petrol from thin air

[Rich Jordan]

Article here

The current development uses grid power, air, and water, extracting CO2 from the air, hydrogen from the water, and creates fuel.

Be interesting if it can be made to produce adequately exonomical fuel, plus it 'extracts greenhouse gasses from the air' as it works

[Aglifter]

Just a engine more optimized to run on wood gas would be nifty... (I might have a clunker converted over to that, actually - as waste wood chunks/saw dust/brush, etc is free in most agrarian environments.)

[Aglifter]

Er... Maybe... Big, big maybe...

Now, an important part of the issue - and one which isn't mentioned, is that "fossil fuels" started as "green energy" which got captured by a natural process, and converted by nature to a more energy dense form...

There's a possibility of getting more efficient than nature (eg, plants) at capturing CO2, and fixing it into a hydrocarbon, as that's not the fundamental purpose of life, but I think you'd be better off trying to optimize a natural means of doing it (diesel from algae, ethanol from cellulose, etc), than trying to find a chemical means - they've produced 5L in several months.

Even at a lab scale, that's not much - perhaps if it had been a table-top unit, but that facility looks pretty large.

The chemistry isn't complicated - they're just doing various forms of organic reactions - but the energy efficiency will be quite poor.

If it can be done profitably, and doesn't require much water, great. There's plenty of desert which is not even of any use to life, which it may be an efficient use of. But, it won't solve the "energy crisis", which mostly seems to exist in the minds of people/due to regulatory hurdles. (Energy firms are laying off traders because NG has gotten too cheap to bother w. trying to trade, and we keep finding more of it all over.)

Now, if they found an efficient way to convert methane to octane, that would be useful - and the energy industry will be singing their praises, and showering them w. ducats in short order...

[Thomas]

All this is unnecessary, this is the future....

Natural gas to diesel......

Once you convert it, you can transport with the existing infrastructure.....

No conversion at the consumers end and it burns clean like NG.

http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/09/news/ec ... /index.htm

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7815172/ns/ ... IHMgm_A-So

[HTRN]

Article here

This isn't new technology. It's been around since the 30s, called the Fischer-Tropsch process. The reason why it isn't used is costs. Synthetic fuel is far more expensive to make that to pull oil out of the ground an crack it.

The Nazi's actually used it during the war, because of drastic fuel shortages.

What is different here is the feedstock - most of the time they start with coal, natural gas, etc. This time they're using just air and CO2. If you can get electricity into the "Damn near free" category(like say, if they crack the secrets of fusion tommorrow, or we actually get a president with vision and start mass producing LFTR reactors), then it becomes viable. At 9c/Kwhr? Not gonna happen.

[308Mike]

All this is unnecessary, this is the future....

Natural gas to diesel......

Once you convert it, you can transport with the existing infrastructure.....

No conversion at the consumers end and it burns clean like NG.

http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/09/news/ec ... /index.htm

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7815172/ns/ ... IHMgm_A-So

I wish they had created a central investment organization which I could invest in, other than several large companies. I'd MUCH rather invest in something specific like this technology than the entire company surrounding it (and the others too). This way I could specify (not really specify, but allows me to invest in only THAT company's technology and doesn't go into the general operating of the parent companies) and they KNOW WHY I'm investing in their company and/or technology, and to further add to their $7 BILLION investment to produce this fuel and get it down to a economic level that's sustainable and flexible.

Too bad they haven't been able to really harness the energy in those frozen nitrates found along the seabed and under the sea floor (going off my faulty memory about that they've found and discarded since they haven't found a way to use them and harness their energy output yet). I'm probably talking about the wrong thing here (maybe not), but remember it was remarkable in the amount of energy these little packets of crystals (which burn when lighted at sea-level with a match - I think they might be methane of something similar) - it's been a while since I've seen anything about them but it appeared they *might* have great promise to help our energy issues.

Just remember, I occasionally suffer from CRS (Can't Remember Shit).

[Greg]

Article here

This isn't new technology. It's been around since the 30s, called the Fischer-Tropsch process. The reason why it isn't used is costs. Synthetic fuel is far more expensive to make that to pull oil out of the ground an crack it.

The Nazi's actually used it during the war, because of drastic fuel shortages.

What is different here is the feedstock - most of the time they start with coal, natural gas, etc. This time they're using just air and CO2. If you can get electricity into the "Damn near free" category(like say, if they crack the secrets of fusion tommorrow, or we actually get a president with vision and start mass producing LFTR reactors), then it becomes viable. At 9c/Kwhr? Not gonna happen.

Particularly when your electricity generating plants are burning hydrocarbons. And the electricity generated is going to... produce hydrocarbons. You'd be better off sticking your head up your own asshole, it's more efficient.

The best way this would make sense is if you're using electricity generated by non-hydrocarbon means (like solar or wind) that has availability issues and you're using this process to solve the power storage problem, instead of batteries or flywheels or whatnot. This might almost be worth doing, now.

Another way it could make sense would be if you had more electricity than you needed (would require tech advances, yes) and you wanted to turn some of that electricity into hydrocarbons because you wanted lubricants, say, or industrial feed stocks. In our current world, this makes negative sense.

[Aglifter]

If they are actually producing straight chain octane, at a reasonable cost, that would be great - presuming it can also use methane.

Part of the issue w natural gas is transport. I know they used to flare it off, because it wasn't cost effective to haul from some places...

That is, essentially both free energy and feedstock, if you can get the plant cheap enough - and, if its fuel additive grade octane or diesel, you might be able to... It seems like diesel wouldn't be that hard to get, but if I was right, they would be violins multi billion dollar plants in Qutar to do that.

[Aglifter]

So, I guess they are doing this, a few times, to get octane... I don't see any reason why it couldn't be done 3 times to get octane but its been a long time since organic...

[slowpoke]

No need to goe for octane. We should be changing to flex fuel for methanol. Most methanol is produced from natural gas anyway.