[quote]A British firm has produced the first ‘petrol from air’, it emerged today - in a pioneering scientific breakthrough that could end mankind’s reliance on declining fossil fuels.
Air Fuel Synthesis in Stockton-on-Tees, Teesside, claims to have made five litres of petrol since August using a small refinery that synthesises the fuel from carbon dioxide and water vapour…The technology involves mixing air with sodium hydroxide, then electrolysing the resultant sodium carbonate to release pure carbon dioxide.
This is then reacted with hydrogen electrolysed from water to make a hydrocarbon mixture, with the reaction conditions varied depending on the type of fuel desired.
The fuel that is produced can be made ready for use in any petrol tank with the addition of the same additives currently added to fuel…[/quote]
You can make diesel from natural gas or coal , but it’s not worthwhile in general. Also why would you waste energy taking water from air, condensing it and adding more energy and low efficiency processes to turn it into petrol. It has some potential for energy storage, but this is just a PR release to me, and it would also not help with carbon reduction.
Quite, except that maybe 5% of the British population can spell “thermodynamics” and 0.1% of them know what the first and second laws are. So it makes a great news story, especially for a worthless rag like the Daily Hate Mail. I’m surprised they haven’t come up with a machine for turning immigrants into kerosene.
Quite, except that maybe 5% of the British population can spell “thermodynamics” and 0.1% of them know what the first and second laws are. So it makes a great news story, especially for a worthless rag like the Daily Hate Mail. I’m surprised they haven’t come up with a machine for turning immigrants into kerosene.[/quote]
LOL So true. Thermodynamics aside though, If they can produce using existing sources such as solar, wind etc., then they could produce power for existing petrol powered technologies. It really will likely boil down to cost of production. If they could master that and bring it down to petrol prices, then we have a winner, wouldn’t you say?
Certainly … up to a point. There is only one type of machine that I can think of that (a) we’re unlikely to discard in the future (b) is extremely useful and (c) needs an ultra-dense fuel. Aircraft. Everything else we’re ever likely to need can be run directly from renewables. I don’t necessarily mean the systems we’re using today, which were mostly badly-designed around the assumption of almost-free energy, but equivalent ones which make better use of what’s available.
An environmentally friendly and cheap way to create a store of energy would go a long way to making renewables pay for themselves, in fact it is the missing link in the chain. Batteries based on metals have major issues environmentally aswell as cost effectiveness and performance lagging overtime, plus they are usually powered by fossil fuels dug out of the ground. Something that is carbon neutral would be great, costs are a big issue though which is always going to be a problem relative to stores of energy rich carbon which simply need to be extracted and refined a little.
There are two always to go about it, one is to create better energy storage methods, two is to make everything connected so energy is constantly flowing to where it is needed from surplus areas.
There’s a third way, but people pay almost no attention to it because it’s boring and doesn’t involve gee-whiz technology: dynamic load balancing.
We do this already, but it’s a perverse sort of method that encourages waste. The aim (for the power companies) is to keep the generators running because it’s uneconomic, or technically difficult, to shut them down. They achieve this by selling energy at or below cost during off-peak hours. With a solar/wind/tidal infrastructure, the correct method would be to implement real-time billing to reflect instantaneous power availability. Middle of the night? Calm, cloudy day? Prices go up. Midday in summer with a stiff breeze? Prices dirt-cheap. Consumer systems will adapt to suit: lighting and climate control that dials itself up and down (taking advantage of thermal inertia and human ability to adapt to different light levels), computers that dynamically adjust their clock speed and power supplies (which they can do already), vehicle-to-grid systems … there are all sorts of possibilities.
You’re quite right that we’ll still need some storage, and a functioning national grid, but with those adaptations, it can be pretty lightweight stuff. My own opinion is that we’re going to see more fuel diversity in the future. Some will be derived from biomass, some synthetic, but they’ll all be pretty expensive compared to renewables, so they’ll only end up being used in very small niches.
creating fuel out of CO2 is a great way to remove CO2, provided that the electricity used to power the fuel creation is not itself generating CO2 in production. If you could harvest enough sunlight, etc and use that to make fuel from CO2, then you’d end up with a wonderful CO2-neutral fuel supply AND more importantly, find some way to keep a whole host of infrastructure still relevant: the whole internal combustion engine thing is actually quite a useful mobile power converter system after all, with a hundred years of efficiency built in. Throwing that all away to have to deal with a new form of energy conversion will be a very expensive process.
Personally I agree, and for immediate and realistic results it’s better switching to lower carbon emission fossil fuels such as natural gas. I also agree with Finley that demand management needs to be part of the solution.
It’s like all the new TVs sold, supposedly more efficient but actually require more power per unit due to larger size and vampire load of associated peripherals.
Depends what you mean by ‘efficient’. An ICE, all by itself, can be made quite efficient at converting chemical energy into kinetic energy. Maybe 40%. But a car is not just an engine; it’s a system that operates with and within other systems (the driver and the road network). As a form of transport, cars are hopelessly inefficient. If it wasn’t so tragic it’d be funny. You can do some back-of-an-envelope math:
At 100ml/km and 35MJ/litre available in fuel, a US-spec car averages 3.5MJ = 1kWh/km. Over its lifetime, a typical car seems to average 60kph [my personal observation of several rental-car computer stats], which implies an average burn rate (of fuel) of 60kWh/h = 60kW.
By comparison, a cyclist might average 15kph and burn energy at 5.5METs. Over an hour, an 80kg rider will burn 440kCal = 1.9MJ = 0.5kWh. Average burn rate (of food) is therefore 500W, or more than 100 times more efficient, despite only being four times slower.
Humans are actually only about 20% efficient at turning food into mechanical energy (ie., the cyclist’s power output is ~125W). An electric scooter also averages about 500W (accounting for charge/discharge loss and powertrain) at 30kph, which is about 200 times more efficient (J/km) than a gasoline-fuelled car, with only a 50% reduction in speed. Of course, if the energy is coming from a fossil-fuel-fired power station (efficiency: 50%) then it’s basically the same as cycling in terms of energy/km.
If we were to eliminate the various delays and inefficiencies built in to the human-driver/road system, we could easily achieve journey times equivalent to a car at 60kph with car-like comfort and electric-scooter-like energy consumption. However, as urodacus said, that’s not going to happen in “civilised” countries because of the sunk cost already invested in vehicles and infrastructure.
Yes, but you’re not adding the enjoyment of driving into that, are you now!!!
That’s going to be worth at least 500 MW per year.
The efficiency was referring to is the fact that we have developed the engines for 100 years, so now they are very close to being as efficient as possible. If we start with a whole new technology, we’re going to be well down the potential efficiency curve for more than a few years. This could be seen as less of a problem if ultimate efficiency is much higher, of course.
Cycling is great for short solo trips with no load in a very narrow temperature range, on flat ground. It begins to suck when you do anything else, especially if you’re unfit or unused to it (tho regular cyclists are fitter, and thinner, and faster, so it’s a bit moot).
I commute about an hour each way on the bike, up hill and down dale, and I know very few who would join me. I’m not even going to think about carrying the boat on the bike, or even shopping for more than a newspaper and a bottle of milk.
Yeah, but that’s not what (production) cars are for. They’re for transport (or so we’re told). If you want fun, then this is what you want:
And if you can’t handle that, then auto-based fun is not for you.
Not so. For one thing, the system efficiency is nothing to do with the engine efficiency (as I tried to illustrate). You could make the engine 60% efficient (ie., as close as you can feasibly get to the Carnot limit) and cars would still burn a stupid amount of juice. The problem is not the engine, but the system it’s used in.
As for “whole new technologies”, the electric induction motor has been around for about as long as the ICE. It’s really just a fluke of history that the ICE became more popular: if reliable rectifier diodes and Continuously Variable Transmission had been available at the same time, I bet we’d all be driving electric cars right now. Semiconductor-based motor drives are about ~40 years old (IGBTs and control systems theory have only been perfected in the last decade, but that’s a trivial detail). A mediocre motor-battery-drive combination is 70-75% efficient (at the power plug). The drive train itself is typically 85% efficient; some manage 95-97%. Personal Rapid Transport is a mature technology (20-30 years), but so far it’s only allowed in airports and on private property because governments are too timid to deploy it en masse, which in turn means that investors see no benefit in perfecting it.
Sure - I wasn’t suggesting we should all go around on cycles. I was saying a properly-designed electric vehicle, and a modern transport infrastructure, would be at least as efficient as cycling, and probably more so.
[quote=“finley”]- By comparison, a cyclist might average 15kph and burn energy at 5.5METs. Over an hour, an 80kg rider will burn 440kCal = 1.9MJ = 0.5kWh. Average burn rate (of food) is therefore 500W, or more than 100 times more efficient, despite only being four times slower.
Humans are actually only about 20% efficient at turning food into mechanical energy (ie., the cyclist’s power output is ~125W). An electric scooter also averages about 500W (accounting for charge/discharge loss and powertrain) at 30kph, which is about 200 times more efficient (J/km) than a gasoline-fuelled car, with only a 50% reduction in speed. Of course, if the energy is coming from a fossil-fuel-fired power station (efficiency: 50%) then it’s basically the same as cycling in terms of energy/km.[/quote]
Then we also have to account for the energy delivery to the cyclist. As food production and deliver also heavily relies on fossil fuels, this also severely decreases from the cyclist’s efficiency rating, and then even further more when car sharing is considered. Of course, I am referring to additional calories required to cycle, not the calories we burn sitting. And, yes, it does depend on the cyclist’s diet and geographic location.
I wonder if efficiency is always preferable though. China for example encourages the use of electric vehicles such as scooters and buses within its cities, but then it produces 70% of its electricity through the burning of coal.
Yes indeed. If we’re being intellectually honest we have to consider “well-to-wheel” costs, or in this case “field-to-wheel” costs. And then you have to start considering all sorts of things like water use, labour exploitation, agricultural pollution … it gets reallly complicated. One of the great things about (for example) solar photovoltaics is that they’re fairly easy to cost: the pollution and energy use of manufacture is not too difficult to measure, and once deployed, it’s just maintenance.
Right - that’s what I was trying to say above. Simply pulling out an ICE and replacing it with an electric motor and a battery pack achieves nothing. In fact, considering China’s attitude to pollution, the battery manufacture is probably an environmental disaster. It’s all just a PR stunt. Look how green and modern China is! Bollocks.
The point about electric vehicles is that they allow you to optimise other bits of the system, which in turn allows you to optimize the vehicles. Consider a hypothetical society that relies entirely on solar PV. With a PRT-type transport system (that is, fully automated vehicles) the road network and the power system can work together. When power is abundant, any currently-unused vehicles can drive themselves off to the nearest power point and recharge cheaply. When it’s very scarce, they can “dump” energy that they don’t expect to use back into the grid. If the PV installations are highly distributed (which, in practice, they have to be) then vehicles can get their power right from the source, minimizing transmission losses; and since that means charge points are everywhere, batteries can be very small.
As for efficiency, an automated vehicle has a priori knowledge of the road and traffic conditions, so it can adjust its speed profile to virtually eliminate lossy braking and unnecessary acceleration; instead, it will re-use potential energy either by freewheeling or regeneration. It’s about system design, not just about engines or motors.
I wonder if efficiency is always preferable though. China for example encourages the use of electric vehicles such as scooters and buses within its cities, but then it produces 70% of its electricity through the burning of coal.[/quote]
That’s temporary. Well measured in decades of course but there’s nowhere pushing into wind solar hydro and nuclear like China.
Besides it’s still preferable to have pollution minimized in urban areas. Imagine a Taipei with electric scooters?
Measured in decades is not really temporary is it. In fact I recall reading statistics that China will depend on increasing coal plants well into the future and nuclear and other sources of power only ever playing a minor role. From the graph below we can see an almost exponential increase in thermal powered electricity generation. China has one of the world’s biggest coal mining industries, this is also not going to help matters. And if they cut back on coal for environmental reasons its most likely gas is going to take it’s place. China probably has significant reserves of gas (fracking) and gas should remain relatively cheap for the next couple of decades. In fact it seems to be the only solution in the medium term! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricit … c_of_China
Their mates in India are desperate for the black stuff. India is already more polluted than China in some urban areas, imagine what it is going to be like within 10 years. economist.com/node/21543138
Of course I would bet that they have not factored in a rationalisation in the industrial structure in China, such as that China may start to see decreasing energy demand from a peak within a decade. I’m guessing here, but I could see it happening.
I think the simplest solution is to power electricity generation by natural gas, and encourage electric , public transport and LPG systems in the cities. Fix local urban pollution if we can’t fix all of it in one go.
HH, yes coal will dominate for decades but China is making a serious push into wind and solar. So much that an article from 2009 is ancient history. They have also commited hundreds of billions to upgrading the electric grid.
Last year investment was aroubd $40 billion which is close to the target set in that article ($900 billion over 20 years). So most every point in that last article had been met.
So true. Thermodynamics aside though, If they can produce using existing sources such as solar, wind etc., then they could produce power for existing petrol powered technologies. It really will likely boil down to cost of production. If they could master that and bring it down to petrol prices, then we have a winner, wouldn’t you say?
