Brits Develop Fuel that Scrubs the Air of Carbon

This ought to die quickly. It would mean competition for the fossil fuel industries.

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Engineers in London said this week that they’ve developed a new type of synthetic vehicle fuel that’s created out of water and thin air, literally by pulling carbon molecules out of the atmosphere and recycling them.

Speaking to a conference this week put on by the British Institution of Mechanical Engineers, researchers with Air Fuel Synthesis, Ltd. said they’ve successfully married a synthetic fuel production technique that dates back to World War II with modern atmospheric carbon capture and sequestration methods.
The resulting product, they said, works in all current vehicles, can be blended with conventional fuels, and just might be a game changer for human energy and the fight against climate change if it’s ever produced on a large enough scale.
“We haven’t broken the Second Law of Thermodynamics or anything,” Air Fuel Synthesis spokesperson Graham Truscott told Raw Story. “We take carbon, we combine it with hydrogen, put it in a reactor to make methanol, then we take the methanol and put that in another reactor to make petrol. The processes of making synthetic petrol from carbon are well known and have been around for many, many years. The Germans were doing it during the Second World War. The South Africans were doing it during the apartheid years. But they were taking their carbon source from coal. We’re taking our carbon source from the atmosphere.”

http://1.rp-api.com/3090359/via.pngRaw Story (http://s.tt/1qvgA)

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So, how long before this is forgotten?

Pogue carburetor, or realsies? ;)

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Originally Posted by WØTKX

Pogue carburetor, or realsies? ;)

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Oh, not one of those 250MPG carbs that never really worked (ala Mythbusters) this is a scientific paper on making fuel out of airborne carbon.

Lots of things work on paper. Let's see if they can actually build the device that can do this.

In before Alex Jones and the Chemtrails.

I have my doubts. No I am not saying it can;t be done the question is, how much energy needs to be put into the system versus energy output. Apparently the important paragraph is this on

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he drawback, of course, is that the process of creating this synthetic fuel is quite energy intensive, so it doesn’t get nearly as far toward its goal of being carbon neutral if the electricity used to synthesize atmospheric carbon into gas comes from burning fossil fuel. It’s also expensive: the team only produced about five liters of their synthetic fuel, at a cost of about $1 million for the whole project. But that’s not the point, they say.

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Likely input energy > output energy.

Years ago there was an experimenter who got fuel from water using RF. He would expose the water to an intense RF field causing the hydrogen/qxygen bonds to break and be liberated. This H2/O2 mix could then be burned as fuel and the combustion byproduct is water H2O which can be captured and broken down again. . Great... solves our energy problem... Wrong. To produce the RF to break the hydrogen/oxygen bonds required more energy input than output. Yeah, okay, in an ideal system input = output but there is the factor of efficiency such that input energy > output energy.

It has already made some actual petroleum fuel but the real issue is how much energy was required to produce it versus the energy output of the product?

A company spokesman said that any electricity required could be made from "renewable" sources ("renewable is another discussion topic). This has to be s stage better than biofuels anyway.

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Originally Posted by n2ize

Likely input energy > output energy.

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It is, most likely. However, the energy input to make and refine petrol is also greater than the output energy. And, the benefits of petrol isn't the input vs. output amounts, it's the energy density.

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Originally Posted by KC2UGV

It is, most likely. However, the energy input to make and refine petrol is also greater than the output energy. And, the benefits of petrol isn't the input vs. output amounts, it's the energy density.

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Well yeah, there is a lot of potential energy in a given volume of petrol. But any system than converts one form of energy to another is going to be at max efficiency "in=out" and more likely "in>out". "in < out" of course would require violating the fundamental laws on nature which as present is impossible. The idea of making fuel out of carbon scrubbed from the atmosphere is nice but not practical if we need to burn fossil fuel to make "fossil fuel" particularly if the system operates at a net loss overall. If it breaks even we are still not gaining much ground. Now if it can be designed to run efficiently off nuclear or renewable (solar, wind, etc) then it may be worthwhile to play around with, even just for sake of cleaning some of the crap out of the air.But as it stands at present this is not going to knock the oil companies out of business.

Maybe, just maybe, if this is run at geothermal or hydropower sites it might make more cents.

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Originally Posted by WØTKX

Maybe, just maybe, if this is run at geothermal or hydropower sites it might make more cents.

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It would be interesting to learn the details of this method. At least they are not claiming "perpetual motion" or "work via zero point energy".