Company officials say they had produced five litres of petrol in less than three months from a small refinery in Stockton-on-Tees, Teesside.
One of our regulars posted a somewhat gross image of a motorcycle version of this concept.ColossalContrarian wrote:All people need to do is to start farting into plastic bags and hooking the plastic bag up to their car. You could even devise an air capture system to go in the driver and passenger seats...
Despite the interest in the breakthrough, however, the company's founder and principal investor, Professor Tony Marmont, said that he and his business colleagues would not want the oil industry to take a stake in the firm even though it is actively seeking investment partners to finance the next stage of development.
Professor Marmont, who used to work for Shell, put up half of the £1.2m used to set up the company. He said he was close to a deal with a major soft-drinks company interested in using the petrol to power its carbon-neutral vehicles.
"I would shudder at the prospect of an approach from the oil industry. My reaction would be 'I don't want to know' because I'd be fearful they would buy into the business and work to shut it down," he said.
"We've had calls offering us money from all over the world. We've never had that before. We've made the first petrol with our demonstration plant but the next stage is to build a bigger plant capable of producing one tonne of petrol a day, which means we need between £5m and £6m."
ColossalContrarian wrote:All people need to do is to start farting into plastic bags and hooking the plastic bag up to their car. You could even devise an air capture system to go in the driver and passenger seats..
Laromi wrote:British engineers produce amazing 'petrol from air' technology
Revolutionary new technology that produces “petrol from air” is being produced by a British firm, it emerged tonight. 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. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
radon wrote:Fossil fuels = CO2 + H2O + Energy (1)
CO2 + H2O + Energy (2) = Synthetic fuels
Full circle, with the exception that Energy (2) is substantially greater than Energy (1). Indeed, Kin-Dza-Dza. The worst energy balance possible. Maybe, just leave the fossil fuels untouched?
Really shows the lengths at which people are ready to go to have their personal vehicles running, no negative eroeis are a problem. Probably, there is something archetypal in the humans psychology to having a personal horse.
Actually, it may well turn out that running an electric vehicles fleet is more effective than running ICEs at eroeis that make that synthetic fuel viable.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Did you see Audi's plant?Tanada wrote:I am impatient for someone somewhere to scale up these laboratory proven technologies and find out if they are practical on an industrial scale. We can test in the lab and talk about the results forever without having any real impact unless someone gets the first plant built as proof of concept and economical viability.
Audi opens renewable energy E-gas plant in GermanyAudi has opened the doors to its new power-to-gas facility, which will make what the automaker calls E-gas, in Werlte, Germany. The plant produces hydrogen and synthetic methane and these clean fuels come from renewable energy, water and carbon dioxide. Audi says it's the first automaker to "develop a chain of sustainable energy carriers."
The Audi E-gas plant uses electrolysis to split water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen, which will someday power fuel-cell vehicles. For now, methanation is the process used to make the synthetic natural gas. Audi reacts the hydrogen with CO2 to generate renewable synthetic methane. The E-gas can be delivered through existing natural gas pipes since, chemically speaking, it's nearly identical to natural gas. Delivery of E-gas through the infrastructure is scheduled to start in the fall of 2013.
Audi says E-gas from the plant can power 1,500 new Audi A3 Sportback G-tron vehicles for 15,000 CO2-neutral kilometers (about 9,321 miles) each year. The Werlte plant is part of Audi's comprehensive e-fuels strategy and sustainability initiative.
The Audi e-gas plant will produce about 1,000 metric tons of e-gas per year, chemically binding some 2,800 metric tons of CO2. This roughly corresponds to the amount that a forest of over 220,000 beech trees absorbs in one year. Water and oxygen are the only by-products.
The Audi e-gas project transcends the automobile industry. It shows how large amounts of green electricity can be stored efficiently and independently of location by transforming it into methane gas and storing it in the natural gas network, the largest public energy storage system in Germany. With the e-gas project, Audi is a part of and a driver of the energy revolution. Major German energy utilities have since taken up the idea of power-to-gas cogeneration and are following Audi with initial projects of their own.
All energy storage has negative EROEI, simple thermodynamics. Storing excess energy from wind and solar is currently problematic. Pumped hydro & underground storage are geologically constrained. Batteries are too expensive. If it turns out to be economically viable to store excess wind/solar energy in the form of synthetic fuel, seems like a good idea to me. Certainly better than corn ethanol.--close to 1 to 1 is not good enough. The industrial process should have a positive EROEI, or why bother. Throwing good energy away for bad energy makes no sense. Unless the process is incredibly cheap. Fischer-Tropf has been around for almost a century, yet has never panned out except in time of war.
--Unlike the this CO2 + H2O-perpetual-energy scheme, corn ethanol production has an positive energy return of 1.34 to 1. Yet it is not a HUGE winner, but rousing failure.
Both approaches are being pursed. Using the process for energy storage to smooth out intermittent renewables and for producing an energy carrier to power vehicles.pstarr wrote:The article in question/this discussion is not about storage, but rather energy carriers, solar-based synthetic fuels.
Wind Power-to-Gas (P2G) technologyIn Germany two demonstration power-to-gas (P2G) plants designed to store excess electricity generated by renewable sources have begun operation. The amount of electricity generated each year by renewables is rising, but the intermittency of some of these sources, such as wind and solar, poses challenges for the grid. Banking excess electricity to feed into the grid at a future point, when it is needed, can be achieved using various storage technologies such as batteries. However, P2G plants open up the possibility of using this excess energy in different ways. In Germany, which has the largest installed capacity of wind and solar, several demonstration P2G plants are being evaluated for their smart grid potential.
The plant will bank excess power that is generated by wind farms, producing about 360m³ of hydrogen an hour. The hydrogen will be fed into the natural gas pipeline at around 2% by volume, at a maximum operating pressure of 55bar, effectively storing and transporting surplus renewable energy. After converting excess wind energy to hydrogen, the plant uses the hydrogen and biogas to generate heat and power. An alkaline electrolyser is used in the plant, which has been operational since 2011.
Future
By the latter part of this decade P2G could start to establish itself as a flexible storage technology in power grids as more electricity is produced from renewable sources.
The only inputs we are talking about here are CO2, H2O, and energy. Biofuels have additional inputs. Trying to scale up biofuel production to replace current liquid fuel needs would exacerbate existing problems like topsoil depletion, dwindling phosphorus resources, etc.pstarr wrote:Biofuels are a efficient conversion from sun to liquid fuel, probably with less losses than any industrial process, including the method outlined. (That is why Bush mandated it. But of course he was wrong because of the scope and also the limited eroei)
dinopello wrote:CO2 + H2O + Energy (C12H22O11) = Soda Pop !
Synthetic fuel is a battery and can be useful but is not energy. As the formula implies, it is a consumer of energy.
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