Emission-free car fuel made from air and water

[rasomaso]

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

[Clarke]

1250 litres of petrol, per day.

[Raiden]

Originally Posted by Clarke

1250 litres of petrol, per day.

They're doing it on kind of a small scale for now.

If you read part of the way down, they have a plan for building a plant that could produce a ton per day.

[Clarke]

1200-1300 litres of petrol do weigh a ton. However, that's not enough to make even a small dent compared to the amount we use.

[Human No More]

Scale is the problem - this isn't the first hopeful article about synthetic hydrocarbons... but actually producing an end product is better than so many others. It's a great idea if it can cure the world of the biofuels placebo.

[Clarke]

Originally Posted by Human No More

Scale is the problem - this isn't the first hopeful article about synthetic hydrocarbons... but actually producing an end product is better than so many others. It's a great idea if it can cure the world of the biofuels placebo.

Biofuels are technically more efficient than this, considering that biofuels have net energy output.

[Human No More]

They also use up food production land, and since there's so much NIMBYism about increasing yield relative to land, they have a negative effect when they cause more land to be turned into farms.

[auroraglacialis]

Interesting but at this time basically not worth much. Mainly because it has a lot of the same issues as hydrogen in that it is only a transport medium for energy - and one that is produced at a loss. During production, energy is lost and then it is usd to drive these inefficient combustion engines - this makes little sense I think. Even electric cars probably are better, at least they can use more of that electric energy that is needed here.
Of course, presently most of the energy is produced by non-renewable sources, which makes this sort of thing completely useless. It is a technology that can only make sense if the majority of energy is already generated by renewable, clean sources. Otherwise, it probably is better to drive that car with fossil gasoline and use the solar panels and windmills to replace some of these dirty coal plants.

The main advantage of this is basically that people can be lazy and do not have to change anything - and still drive those early 20th century technology of gasoline combustion cars with the sae old technology of gas stations, pipelines, refineries,....

And as I understand it, the product of this technology is about as toxic as fossil oil - so the same issues - oil spills and the lot.

[Clarke]

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

Interesting but at this time basically not worth much. Mainly because it has a lot of the same issues as hydrogen in that it is only a transport medium for energy - and one that is produced at a loss. During production, energy is lost and then it is usd to drive these inefficient combustion engines - this makes little sense I think. Even electric cars probably are better, at least they can use more of that electric energy that is needed here.
Of course, presently most of the energy is produced by non-renewable sources, which makes this sort of thing completely useless. It is a technology that can only make sense if the majority of energy is already generated by renewable, clean sources. Otherwise, it probably is better to drive that car with fossil gasoline and use the solar panels and windmills to replace some of these dirty coal plants.

The main advantage of this is basically that people can be lazy and do not have to change anything - and still drive those early 20th century technology of gasoline combustion cars with the sae old technology of gas stations, pipelines, refineries,....

And as I understand it, the product of this technology is about as toxic as fossil oil - so the same issues - oil spills and the lot.

The product of this technology is exactly as toxic as fossil oil - it is the same substance.

However, this means that carbon-neutral cars actually work. The main problem with electric cars is the energy density of the "fuel" tank, which this neatly circumvents, having the same energy density as conventional fuel.

Also, it's easier to upgrade the synthesis infrastructure than it is to upgrade every single one of millions of cars. The issue being that your power requirements have just increased hugely. (A rough calculation says a 20% increase in power required across the country over the year.)

[auroraglacialis]

Originally Posted by Clarke

The main problem with electric cars is the energy density of the "fuel" tank, which this neatly circumvents, having the same energy density as conventional fuel. Also, it's easier to upgrade the synthesis infrastructure than it is to upgrade every single one of millions of cars.

Thats the main TECHNICAL problem, yes.
The real problem is that there are too many cars and that the oil is toxic and that the exhaust fumes are toxic and that an oil economy needs pipelines and gas stations and the lot. And too many cars are also the reson for this:

The issue being that your power requirements have just increased hugely.

It is crazy to keep up this consumption. And every such technological "improvement" seems to do mainly one thing: Consume more energy

CO2 is not the only issue - oil has many more problems and personal automobiles are just incredibly wasteful.

[Human No More]

They're also the only practical method for people who can't do things remotely. Yes, ideally people could live anywhere and work remotely, even having things like food delivered rather than having to drive just for the capacity, and with a PRT system to get to places (think automated taxi-style vehicles that run on track rather than (or built into) a road, which can pick you up at your location and don't stop every 10 seconds for other people, but only share with people going to the same place as long as the detour is only short), but that requires restructuring. The world is going that way, and maybe in 10 years it will be practical on a larger scale, but as it is right now, unless you live somewhere like London or New York, there's no comparable way to get anywhere.

[Clarke]

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

Thats the main TECHNICAL problem, yes.
The real problem is that there are too many cars and that the oil is toxic and that the exhaust fumes are toxic and that an oil economy needs pipelines and gas stations and the lot.

Well, yeah, but the toxicity here is "conserved" - if the oil is in your vehicle, it can't be polluting anything.

It is crazy to keep up this consumption. And every such technological "improvement" seems to do mainly one thing: Consume more energy

Consuming energy, in and of itself, is not a problem. After all, if we actually got fusion working, and used shiny and efficient nuclear for everything, we could consume PWhs or even EWhs of energy with comparatively negligible impact on the environment.

The problem is that our energy-generation processes produce harmful by-products and use resources in ways that aren't sustainable for the time-scale we'd like. Sufficiently advanced engineering can change this - we merely have to develop and use it.

Fixing the latter is easier than changing the former for two reasons:
1) To change how people consume energy, you must convince them of a benefit that's very hard to visualize. In order to generate power efficiently, you must invent a device and convince a business to use it. The latter is massively easier than the former - people in general are irrational and bad at forward thinking, whereas business managers are generally frustratingly rational and far better at forward thinking, especially where investments are concerned.
2) Attempting to significantly lower the energy used by people directly impacts their quality of life - and therefore attempting to do it directly contradicts most humans' nature. Good luck.

[auroraglacialis]

Originally Posted by Human No More

They're also the only practical method for people who can't do things remotely. Yes, ideally people could live anywhere and work remotely, even having things like food delivered rather than having to drive just for the capacity, and with a PRT system to get to places (think automated [Globidigoo fantasy stuff]), but that requires restructuring. The world is going that way, and maybe in 10 years it will be practical on a larger scale, but as it is right now, unless you live somewhere like London or New York, there's no comparable way to get anywhere.

Public transport is one way - relocalizing work is another. Here is a radical idea - actually build the companies close to the peoples homes and vice versa - not according to where it is cheap. But I know, that is a planned economy and that is communist....
But even without this, you just made the point that this sort of fuel technology is nonsensical because it certainly will take the 10 years you proposed for the practicality of a public transport system that you like to erect and power and fuel all the infrastructure to make this artificial oil plus the power plants that run it. I dare say that this would probably take even longer - certainly it would take a lot longer and will be a lot more expensive than to do something rather simple as to double or quadruple or even increase by an order of magnitude the availability of public transport. The costs of getting 10x as many busses and 4x as many trains and 10x as many people who drive the busses is quite a bargain compared to basically increasing the number of power plants by 20 or 50 or 100% in addition to building massive numbers of high tech factories to produce oil from that power.
I just dont get it why people always think that problems cannot be tackled right now with existing technologies but just shifted priorities of how to spend money and how to run an economy.

Originally Posted by Clarke

Well, yeah, but the toxicity here is "conserved" - if the oil is in your vehicle, it can't be polluting anything.

Luckily you put in that wink smilie to indicate it as sarcasm, otherwise this would have been one of the most stupid comments I ever read

Consuming energy, in and of itself, is not a problem. After all, if we actually got fusion working, and used shiny and efficient nuclear for everything, we could consume PWhs or even EWhs of energy with comparatively negligible impact on the environment.

The problem is that our energy-generation processes produce harmful by-products and use resources in ways that aren't sustainable for the time-scale we'd like. Sufficiently advanced engineering can change this - we merely have to develop and use it.

Do you know Physics? There is something called thermodynamics and what it says basically is that if you transform energy from one form to another, you always loose something and you always create at least "disorder". Basically this means that ALL types of "creating" energy (what really is done is that energy is converted into electricity mostly) will have an impact on the environment. What you can do is to increase efficiency - the output of energy in relation to the waste you produce - but increasing efficiency does not guaerantee you a lowered impact. In fact history shows that usually the other case is happening, that people simply increase their standard of living and eventually you have what is called I believe a backlash which results in the impacts overall actually increasing. Something like fusion would be a huge improvement in efficiency and I am sure the standard of living for people would increase dramatically with people being able to do a vacation on Mars or go to the Moon colony for shopping or be able to build a skyscraper with thousands of appartments that have their own swimming pool and artificial sunlight in an indoor garden or whatever one can come up with - but it will most certainly not decrease the impact on the natural world but rather increase that. At least as long as the social parameters, the economic parameters and the culture is unchanged - because all of these are forces that turn any gains in efficiency eventually into an increase in affluence/wealth/standard of living instead of actually reducing the impact they have with their present way of life.

Fixing the latter is easier than changing the former for two reasons:
1) To change how people consume energy, you must convince them of a benefit that's very hard to visualize. In order to generate power efficiently, you must invent a device and convince a business to use it. The latter is massively easier than the former - people in general are irrational and bad at forward thinking, whereas business managers are generally frustratingly rational and far better at forward thinking, especially where investments are concerned.
2) Attempting to significantly lower the energy used by people directly impacts their quality of life - and therefore attempting to do it directly contradicts most humans' nature. Good luck.

#2 is exactly the cause of what I described above - people never will accept a lowered or even steady state standard of living. I do not call it quality of life, because that has a value attached to it that certainly equated material affluence with quality. Arguably people can be quite happy and have not much material wealth while people in wealthy nations are record breakers in depression and anxiety. Also I refuse to call it "human nature" because much of what we think of as human nature is a cultural construct - humans are cultural beings who act to a very large degree on what they learn instead of somethign they are born with. Numerous culutres existed that did not confuse material affluence with quality of life.
And #1 is again trying to solve a problem on a level of thinking that created it. You try to use market based economy, businesses and the ideology of solutions through increases in efficiency as means to reach a solution for a problem that was precisely caused by these things playing out in the past. I am not interested in that. The problem cannot be solved within that framework. If people cannot break out of this framework, they WILL destroy the natural world and eventually themselves.

[Moco Loco]

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

I just dont get it why people always think that problems cannot be tackled right now with existing technologies but just shifted priorities of how to spend money and how to run an economy.

Tell that to world leaders and business owners There has to be some kind of more instant gratification or profit, or nobody wants to do it.

[auroraglacialis]

Originally Posted by Moco Loco

Tell that to world leaders and business owners There has to be some kind of more instant gratification or profit, or nobody wants to do it.

I am not interested in business owners or world leaders that seek for profit or instant gratification. This is exactly that kind of "values" that destroy this world. To try and make change to the better for the environment by feeding into these old and destructive mechanisms will just make it worse. This is what can be learned from 40 years of liberal environmentalism that tried to make a change by appealing to "world leaders" and businesspeople with carbon credits and subsidies and economic growth of "green economies" and selling "premium green products". Essentially nothing significant will come from that except replacing lightbulbs with toxic bulbs, people dringin larger cars instead of ones that use less gasoline and people burning coal here but finance poor people in other countries to burn down their trees and bury the charcoal (which is the top of insanity in carbon trading schemes).
Essentially what has to change is the culture. It has to leave fromt he false idea that there is a progress happening, that it is somehow better to work 10 or 12 hours a day in an office, get anxiety and depression just to get enough money to buy a vacation on the beach than to work less, have less stuff and be more happy. How that has to happen is the big question. Probably it has to be a grassroots movement, possibly it may be forced upon people by economic breakdown. Another way to solve this problem, and one that I dont like too much, is by governments actually acting in the interest of the people (which most of them dont right now) and simply making regulations that ban destructive technologies. This is a brute force method but it can work. In Germany it does. Germans have voted against GMOs, so there are no GMOs planted in Germany, no matter what the businesspeople want to make profit. People wanted to get rid of nuclear power, so the government simply made a law that bans nuclear power after 2022 and the companies will have to comply to that, even if it is not a economic gain or a gratification for them. As much as I dislike governments, at the moment they are, as long as they still have a shred of democracy in them, the only ones powerful enough to create change that is not driven by economic incentives. But even that mechanism only works upon cultural change. It would not have worked in Germany for example if Germans would not have realized the danger of nuclear power and the potential dangers of GMOs.

So in the end, it ALL comes down to changing the culture so that people actually WANT sustainability and a healthy natural world and then giving them the POWER to force businesses to comply to that demand. If the people just adhere to the old insane selfish consumerist culture (the wetiko diseased), they will not want to give that up and thus not want a change towards sanity. If the people want it but have no power except "voting with your wallet" (which gives rich people that profit from business much more power than the larger portion of poor people), they will not be able to make that change either - except maybe when they really get angry and put their bodies in the line or start committing civil disobedience or even more than that. I'd definitely prefer democratic solutions.