Not sure what to think petrol from the air !

[Pallet Pete]

(broken link removed to http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article4597929.ece)

They some how used electricity to extract gas from the air in Britain its a good read at least.

Pete

 

[EatenByLimestone]

"The small company from the north England has developed “air capture” technology which creates synthetic petrol with only air and electricity.
Company chiefs say they have produced five litres of petrol in less than three months at a small refinery in Stockton-on-Tees, Teesside by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere."

I hope the electricity is cheap over there.

I can't wait to see the ecomoonbats run with this... I can't wait to fund it through taxes.

Matt

 

[eclecticcottage]

I wonder how much electricity they used to do that.

 

[Pallet Pete]

I too want to know how much fuel and electricity it takes to produce the 5 liters or 1.3 gallons of petrol over three months.

Pete

 

[begreen]

How much air does it take to make a gallon of this stuff? On this fragile planet, we're currently using about 90,000,000 barrels of oil (x42 gallons =3,780,000,000 gal ) per day!

 

[Grisu]

If it really works as described it must be a total scam/April fool's joke:
"It mixes sodium hydroxide with carbon dioxide before zapping the resulting sodium carbonate with electricity, to form pure carbon dioxide.
At the same time, hydrogen is produced by electrolysing water vapour captured with a dehumidifier.
The carbon dioxide and hydrogen are then used to produce methanol which in turn is passed through a gasoline fuel reactor, creating petrol."

You can get water out of the sea in unlimited amounts; why use a dehumidifier? Why process the hydrogen further requiring additional energy to use it in ICE cars with 25 to 30% efficiency instead of putting it in fuel cell cars that are ~50% efficient? In addition, all that electricity that they are needing could be used at ~80% efficiency in EVs. Since there is no free lunch in thermodynamics they will need at least to put as much energy in as they will get out of 1 gallon of gas. Possible? Yes. Economically feasible? No.

 

[pdf27]

Looks to be about 35% efficient - so even worse than Direct Methanol Fuel Cells. Oh, and electricity is about 25c/kWh in the UK for domestic customers.

Short version is this process came about when a rather wealthy retired guy with too much time on his hands was looking for a non-fossil-fuel way to power his helicopter. Which probably tells you all you need to know about the process.