A Company Wants To Sell You A Small Machine To Make Gasoline Out Of Air

It sounds kind of magical, or at least alchmical, the idea of making gasoline out of air. I suppose making anything out of air conjures up images of old men with long beards in conical hats and robes spangled with stars and comets and yodas and whatever, but in the case of gasoline, it can actually be done. In fact, it’s not even all that complicated, at least in theory. Machines that do this have actually been around for quite a while now, though so far they haven’t really made enough sense from an efficiency standpoint, and there has yet to be a real breakthrough in the size/complexity/affordability/efficiency matrix to push these systems mainstream.

There is a company called Aircela that seems hopeful, and just a bit ago they gave a demonstration in NYC of a machine, maybe about the size of a sit-down arcade driving video game machine, that should be able to make about a gallon of gas a day from just the surrounding air. Aircela is targeting to sell this machine for between $15,000 to $20,000 initially, though they claim that eventual volume production should drop that price a bit.

Here’s some video of their rooftop NYC demonstration, which feels like a weird place to show off a machine that makes gasoline, unless they were planning to make everyone some gasoline-based cocktails, like a G&T, but, you know, the G doesn’t stand for gin. Anyway, here’s the video:

That dude sure is a sloppy gas-filler! Still, it’s impressive and seems magical, but it’s really pretty straightforward. After all, chemically, gasoline is a hydrocarbon, which means it’s pretty much just hydrogen and carbon. It’s a little more complicated than that, but octane, one of the crucial components of what we call gasoline, is just carbon and hydrogen:

C8H18

That’s the formula for octane: eight carbon atoms, 18 hydrogen. It’s often used as a close-enough formula for gasoline. There are other hydrocarbons in gas, but for the level we’re talking about, that’ll work. Now, in the air we breathe, we have an awful lot of carbon dioxide, because you and I and your weird college roommate and your hamster and other notable mammals, like famed Mets pitcher Dock Ellis, all exhale carbon dioxide into the air, which is used by plants and also a key component of climate change.

There’s also water vapor in the air, and water is partly hydrogen (H2O, remember), so between those two things, we have all the parts we need to make gasoline! We just need to put them together, in the right way, as this little video explains:

As the video said, the big issues with pulling hydrogen and carbon out of the air and combining it into a hydrocarbon fuel is that it takes a lot of energy. Most systems that perform this electrochemical alchemy require about twice as much energy going in as is contained in the gasoline coming out. I asked Aircela for some details about what they do, and that’s effectively the same ratio they’re getting for energy in to energy out:

In short, gasoline (or any hydrocarbon) is made up of carbon and hydrogen molecules. Aircela gets the carbon building blocks by pulling CO2 from ambient air (Direct Air Capture) and its hydrogen from splitting water (H2O) into hydrogen and oxygen. The CO2 and H2 gas is mixed, compressed to a high pressure, heated, and then passed over a catalyst that stimulate the production of methanol. The methanol is subsequently turned into gasoline in a second reactor train.

Aircela is targeting >50% end to end power efficiency. Since there is about 37kWh of energy in a gallon of gasoline we will require about 75kWh to make it. When we power our machines with standalone, off-grid, photovoltaic panels this will correspond to less than $1.50/gallon in energy cost.

If we watch this CNN report about a British company doing this same thing about 12 years ago, we see essentially the same sorts of results:

Now, this isn’t to downplay what Aircela seems to have accomplished here: that report from a dozen years ago is showing machines that were built into shipping containers; Aircela’s machine could sit comfortably in the corner of a small parking lot, taking up about the same amount of space as one of those automated pay-to-park kiosks. They’ve done a hell of a lot of miniaturization work.

And, their point about powering the machines with solar panels or other sources of renewable energy – wind, geothermal, hydro, connecting every treadmill and stationary bike at a gym, and so son – then things start to make a lot more sense. Plus, there are benefits like how the machine can capture and recycle up to 22 pounds of CO2 from the air per day, though all of these benefits are really, really dependent on where the electricity to drive it all comes from.

If you’re running a coal plant to make gasoline, this probably makes no sense. But if you’re using some sort of “free” energy like solar or wind, especially if it’s excess, then I think there’s a real place for this sort of thing. In some ways, I can see machines like these becoming valuable to our very specific niche of hardcore gearheads who may still want to drive combustion cars even after the world has transitioned to electric cars.

Imagine a good ways into the future, assuming EVs become the default, and gas stations begin to fade away. In that case, having a small machine at your house or communally owned by your combustion-car enthusiast club would be incredibly valuable. And, think about this: what if AI continues to grow and expand as it seems to be on track to do? AI demands a vast amount of electricity, so we may see a boom in electricity generation soon, with new nuclear plant designs or more solar arrays or orbiting solar platforms or who knows what else.

These will likely all be used by AI in the near term, but with the quite likely end game of AI Model Collapse on the horizon as AI large language models start to ingest more and more crap, leading to the xerox-of-a-xerox problem, eventually all this AI bullshit will die down and we’ll find ourselves with massive surpluses of electrical generation capacity.

What do we do then? Make “carbon-neutral” gasoline! And put it in ridiculous old cars with big V8s and noisy flat-fours and smoky straight-sixes and then capture all of their stinky exhausts and turn it back into gas again, all in a never-ending cycle of combustion car fun!

See? With machines like this Aircela thing in our back pocket, all this AI bullshit may have an upside!