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Company makes petrol from air 
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Independent article

basically, they 'crack' CO2 to get carbon, then combine it with water through a catalyst to get methanol, which they then push through a further catalysed process to get petrol. I remember seeing a show with James May ages ago where a californian company were trying to do the same thing using focussed sunlight to crack the CO2 but I don't know if that ever got off the ground. This lot have a prototype industrial process up and running (although the amount of petrol they've made is pretty minimal on the industrial scale) and they plan to use renewable energy - wind farms, mostly - to make the thing viable. because obviously burning fossil fuels to get petrol doesn't really make much sense.

Even if they can scale it up to where they claim they can, it's still a big jump to replace fossil petrol sources. A ton a day is still a drop in the bucket of the amount of petrol even the UK uses. Although if they can miniaturise it enough, I suppose every petrol station could have it's own 'petrol generator' and thus become self-supporting, as long as it has a power supply?


Fri Oct 19, 2012 8:31 am
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Even if the process were 100% efficient, the biggest problem is getting enough renewable energy. The amount of petrol we use is really rather huge. There's about 10KWhr in every litre, 50 litres in every car and how many hundreds of cars go through a garage?

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Fri Oct 19, 2012 9:12 am
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JJW009 wrote:
Even if the process were 100% efficient, the biggest problem is getting enough renewable energy. The amount of petrol we use is really rather huge. There's about 10KWhr in every litre, 50 litres in every car and how many hundreds of cars go through a garage?

Hundreds a day would be my guess although I would imagine the average fill is less than a whole tank.

I'm not sure you need the process to be 100% efficient though, as I'm not sure the energy required in the process is the equivalent of the energy the resultant petrol would provide when burned in an an engine. There is some symmetry in having CO2 and water, fiddling with it, putting it in an engine and getting CO2 and water out but it doesn't necessarily follow the process is a closed loop. Obviously the company is being quite cautious about detailing it's exact process (for perfectly good reasons) but until the fine details are known - which may not happen until after any patents they have run out - we're basically guessing as to what the energy requirements of the process are. As the article says, at the moment the main issue is getting enough CO2 into the machine to work properly even before you worry about the power requirement.

It's not a long term solution because it probably isn't as efficient as just using the electricity involved to power an electric car/charge a battery but in the short/medium term it could be useful to enable the inevitable changeover from internal combustion engines to be a bit less socially traumatic.


Fri Oct 19, 2012 9:50 am
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jonbwfc wrote:
in the short/medium term it could be useful to enable the inevitable changeover from internal combustion engines to be a bit less socially traumatic.

Absolutely. Even if we had a massive push towards alternatives, there's going to be a lot of petrol engines around for at least the next fifty years I'd have thought!

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Fri Oct 19, 2012 9:57 am
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hmm..

Apparently one litre of petrol weighs 737 grams. Say the average fill is 35 litres (roughly 3/4 of a tank) and a petrol station has 600 customers a day - which is one every two minutes over an 18 hour active day. That's 15477 grams of petrol a day, which is, what 15.5 kilograms near enough? That means a plant like they're talking about that generates a ton of fuel a day would be able to service 64 petrol stations per day, or it would be able to service one petrol station if it ran 22 minutes per day.

That suggests you don't really need a plant that big, assuming you're planning to give every petrol station one. You need one that's much, much smaller. In theory you could build up a store of electrical energy during the day with solar panels or wind power, then run the thing in the middle of the night to generate the juice you need for the next day when demand is low - or even keep the petrol reservoir current stations have and top up as necessary.

So those numbers look right? I'm beginning to believe I've woefully underestimated the number of customers a petrol station gets in a day.


Fri Oct 19, 2012 10:05 am
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jonbwfc wrote:
hmm..

Apparently one litre of petrol weighs 737 grams. Say the average fill is 35 litres (roughly 3/4 of a tank) and a petrol station has 600 customers a day - which is one every two minutes over an 18 hour active day. That's 15477 grams of petrol a day, which is, what 15.5 kilograms near enough? That means a plant like they're talking about that generates a ton of fuel a day would be able to service 64 petrol stations per day, or it would be able to service one petrol station if it ran 22 minutes per day.

I think you're probably about right for a busy service station, but my sums make it 15.5 tonnes.

Of course... my sums are not 100% reliable!

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Fri Oct 19, 2012 10:25 am
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JJW009 wrote:
I think you're probably about right for a busy service station, but my sums make it 15.5 tonnes.
Of course... my sums are not 100% reliable!

You're right. I was multiplying the number of litres sold per day by .737 rather than 737 so I thought i was working in grams but I was actually working in kilos. It's 15,477 kilograms of petrol, not grams of petrol. Which is indeed 15.5 metric tons. D'oh.

Apparently, the UK uses roughly 2 billion litres of petrol a year. A plant that could put out a ton a day would be putting out 1356 litres of petrol per day. It would take two days to fill a standard UK road tanker full of go juice. Running 365 days a year, it would generate roughly half a million litres per year. So we'd need 4000 plants to supply the UK.


Fri Oct 19, 2012 11:01 am
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The main components CO2 Water and energy could be provided at home. So if they can make small domestic units it will solve many of the problems. It will mean that road fund license will go up because they will not be able to collect duty from oil companies.

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Fri Oct 19, 2012 1:55 pm
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Amnesia10 wrote:
The main components CO2 Water and energy could be provided at home. So if they can make small domestic units it will solve many of the problems. It will mean that road fund license will go up because they will not be able to collect duty from oil companies.

There are valid safety reason why storing large amounts of petrol in your home is illegal. The major advantage of this method is we can use existing fuel distribution systems, just the 'point of origin' for the fuel is a CO2 cracking plant rather than an oil refinery. if we're going to shift to having the fuel 'refined' at home rather than at a central location and bought from a distribution point, we might as well switch to a better solution to fueling cars full stop. if you can have a CO2 cracking plant in your home, you can have something that will fill a fuel cell or recharge a high-capacity battery.


Fri Oct 19, 2012 2:06 pm
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jonbwfc wrote:
Amnesia10 wrote:
The main components CO2 Water and energy could be provided at home. So if they can make small domestic units it will solve many of the problems. It will mean that road fund license will go up because they will not be able to collect duty from oil companies.

There are valid safety reason why storing large amounts of petrol in your home is illegal. The major advantage of this method is we can use existing fuel distribution systems, just the 'point of origin' for the fuel is a CO2 cracking plant rather than an oil refinery. if we're going to shift to having the fuel 'refined' at home rather than at a central location and bought from a distribution point, we might as well switch to a better solution to fueling cars full stop. if you can have a CO2 cracking plant in your home, you can have something that will fill a fuel cell or recharge a high-capacity battery.

My assumption was that people would be making fuel as they needed and topping up the tank at home. Though as you say you could have a hybrid and top up petrol at petrol stations and use electricity at home. Though with many being dependent on the petrol as they do not have the space to create their own fuel or electrically charge them it could lead to two tier market. Though for someone with the space to put up some windmills they could get the wind energy to provide their fuel, and power any electric vehicles for free.

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Fri Oct 19, 2012 2:28 pm
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Do we have enough CO2 in the atmosphere?

An analogy, IIRC was to compare air to an american football field. The majority of it is nitrogen and oxygen. CO2 represented by the width of a painted line on the field and hence the amount of CO2 increased would equivalent to a pencil line. Would make more sense to use and then generate Nitrogen or oxygen.

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Fri Oct 19, 2012 5:14 pm
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cloaked_wolf wrote:
Do we have enough CO2 in the atmosphere?

Yes there's plenty. It's a cycle that's worked fine for animals and plants for millions of years, so why not vehicles and fuel plants?

Although it is quite dilute and you'd have to suck a lot of air through, there is a lot of air. Remember all the CO2 used will go directly back into the air when it's combusted in a perfectly closed cycle. The problem is the cost of doing it, quoted in the article at £400 a tonne, but that might come down with development I imagine.

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Fri Oct 19, 2012 6:50 pm
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Lets take a small family (petrol) car as an example:
153 g/km CO2 (officially). So 1 that is 0.000153 MT/km
1 / 0.000153 = 6536 Km or 4061 miles.
Let's say the car does 40 mpg, that's 40 / 4.546 = 8.79 miles per litre.
4061 miles / 8.79 mpl = 462 litres of fuel to produce 1 tonne of CO2.
So the additional cost of removing the CO2 at the source = £0.86 per litre.

Yep, that's not going to happen any time soon.

On a separate note, the could pump the collected CO2 down old gas wells. There are plenty of them in the southern North Sea, and the pipelines are already in place.

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Fri Oct 19, 2012 8:21 pm
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Wouldn't it be more sense to use the energy to electrolyse water into H2 andO2, then burn that?

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Fri Oct 19, 2012 8:42 pm
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Possibly. I've no idea how efficient/inefficient that it.
Currently for H2 cars they strip the carbon out of methane gas.

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