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!
this sounds awesome. maybe a dumb question, but like what octane does it make?
Is this like ethanol in gas that takes more diesel to produce than it generates,however there are some tremendous subsidies that some people get rich from?
The device works even better in states that aren’t CARB members
Ok I think I understand. I use the solar on my roof to power this gasoline generator, which creates the gasoline for my gasoline-fueled generator, which generates the electricity to power the blower to my wood stove, which boils water to create the steam that drives the piston to create electricity to power my house!
I dunno man, I feel like you’ve missed a step somewhere
Screw this. I’ll just add another fuel shark and eBay electric turbo to my ride.
YMMV.
If you make gas out of the air what do you get when you use it? Nice to know how much kilowatts are needed but cost per kilowatts hour is a lot higher than back then. Solar seems nice but depends on where you live. Seems a better idea until you realize solar isn’t working well especially in less sunny areas. Can we get a math wizard up in the shizzle?
At their (optimistic) target efficiency, that’s 74kWh/gal. If you’re buying electricity at $0.17/kWh, that’s $12.58/gal.
If you use solar panels, there’s an opportunity cost. You could’ve sold that electricity for $4.44, in addition to the $1.50/gal cost of buying and running the equipment.
But that’s all academic. Because if you drove 37 miles per day at 25mpg, you’d need 1.48gal from 109.54kWh from 22kW of solar panels (a typical home needs 6-7kW of panel). All when you could power an electric or plug-in vehicle (~3.5mi/kWh) the same 37 miles with 1/10th of the energy.
If this thing works, it’s badass tech, and some people will love it. But presenting it as financially frugal choice is hilariously misleading.
These kind of systems probably make the most sense for system that *cant* run on electricity ie making jet fuel
Bingo!!
However at those prices the only customer will be the US military.
Commercial systems like building backup generators, firepumps and other systems will make use for a long time simply because the lifetime fuel burn is so low that it’s not worth replacing the unit before it’s end of life even if fuel costs octuples.
Those systems are better off just burning piped in natural gas or propane. Neither of those leave a varnish behind to mess up seldom used equipment
Yeah, $12/gal is a non-starter compared to pump prices and that’ll probably stay true for at least a decade or two, but if they can tweak it to produce JP-8 instead it’ll be really handy on nuclear-powered aircraft carriers
Indeed. I imagine a stationary carrier can generate quite a bit of excess power.
If wikipedia’s accurate, even when moving they produce ~100MW beyond the propulsion power. So on the order of 1000 gallons of fuel per hour. Not actually massive compared to the 3M gallon capacity, but running constantly I bet it could at least drastically reduce how much they depend on external fueling.
That’s using an existing carrier with existing reactor capacity. Future carriers designed with fuel production in mind might have much more reactor power for making jet fuel. There is also the possibility of nuclear escort ships to make even more jet fuel.
The Chinese recently had plans approved for a 24000 TEU thorium nuclear powered container ship. Something like this but making jet fuel.
https://gcaptain.com/nuclear-powered-24000-teu-containership-china/
Out in the outback
Different use case…
In some countries here in Europe you have enough renewable electricity that sometimes during sunny or windy days (or at night) you have free (or negative) electricity prices. If the investment cost is low enough, it’s a nice option, especially in flats that can’t have solar power (stick it on the balcony).
But crucially it’s competing with home power storage batteries and I doubt it’ll be able to compete, especially with EVs having V2G capabilities already
Using energy from the down time helps but still limits when and how much. Also with the new AI requirements will there be any excess power or will power costs increase?
True, the use case is certainly limited, but if they can get the cost down low enough and it’s an easy ‘plug and play’ system like a giant dehumidifier that once in a while you empty the tank into your car, I can see it being popular(ish) among a niche crowd, but I doubt they can make it work out financially for most people.
Also, the AI boom will consume some of the cheap excess power, but most centres are located in just a few locations globally, and with the world’s electricity grid being quite disconnected and power lines only able to transmit power efficiently up to ~300 miles / 500 km, you’ll always have areas where ‘free’ electricity exists.
So it *could* be great for a very small group of people. It’s like how from the 20s through to the 60s “street gas”, a difficult-to-compress unwanted by-product of the process of turning coal into cokes (for steel factories), was almost free and hence led to ‘gas bag buses’ being a thing in certain cities. It’s very niche, but worked out great for a small group of people.
However remove CO2 seems to warrant some consideration
That opportunity cost of selling the electricity on the market will vary region to region and across seasons though. As you said though, any cost analysis there is swamped by the massive energy conversion cost.
Porsche has an industrial scale air-to-fuel plant in Chile, and the business case I read for that one was to help limit the amount of new CO2 emissions. Rather than releasing captured CO2 from oil extraction, they could take the CO2 already in the air and recycle that. It doesn’t change the overall atmospheric greenhouse gas levels, but at least doesn’t add to them while still letting people use ICE vehicles.
I could also see this tech being helpful in remote locations where regular fuel deliveries aren’t feasible, but ICE vehicles are still required. I’m thinking those remote island research outposts, or active military operations.
It also increases girth, length and stamina while releasing pheromones irresistable to your desired mate.
I don’t think so. Over the last few decades I’ve increased my girth, length not stamina and I don’t know if it’s pheromones but I am releasing something and the opposite sex has not noticed
Or perhaps they have and it’s not appealing. :-/
Since my last divorce, I have been an incel. But not one of those ones that go off and shoot a place up.
I hate to be THAT guy, but Dock Ellis is a games Pirates pitcher, not Mets. I don’t read Torch articles for factual sports content, but this seems like a Hardigree influence to push a lousy Mets agenda. 1 season on the Mets does not make him a famed met.
I don’t hate to be that guy. Eff that shit. And eff Hardigree if he was behind this nonsense.
Although linked video is great and it’s been a few years since I’ve watched it.
I think Hardigree is great, but both the baseball teams he roots for suck. Muck the Fets!
I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Nanobots!
Build the whole car and housing out of pure carbon with diamond windows all assembled out of the molecules all around us. AI should be put to task to bioengineer plastic eating microbes to rid the oceans, biosphere, and food chain of the menace.
Can the microbes be trained not to eat useful plastics, like my car, all the thermoset electrical fittings and my TV?
No, so you can guarantee someone will make them and they will be released upon the public.
Easy as cat herding. I’m not suggesting they be sprinkled everywhere, and ideally, short lifespan, converting plastic into harmless molecules, and sinking to the sea floor when dead.
The idea of these eating fiberglass boats at sea makes me giggle. It’s almost as good as those orcas learning how to sink yachts in the Mediterranean.
Need to fine tune the target food into the bio-engineering of the microbes, and simultaneously develop a barrier coating.
Something with a short life will also have a quick reproductive cycle. They could evolve faster than we could react.
I wonder what the world will look like without plastic.
I wonder if the product of the microbe’s digestion is flammable.
Walmarts could explode. People will move far from anyplace with a high-concentration of Barbie dolls. This could get exciting!
I wonder what the world will look like without plastic.
Like a Renfaire but more itchy and annoying.
I hate to think what would happen in Hollywood with all the extra plastic implants.
Oh, no. Well, my VHS collection may go up in value. (as long as I can find some metal VHS cassette housings).
Reboot ‘The Graduate’ with this ‘one word’
“Benjamin?”
For a movie from 1967, it has aged a lot better than most. (Legs courtesy of Linda Grey!).
A diamond-fibre monocoque chassis with diamond glass and diamondfibre wheels would be sick.
Imagine sub-1,000 lb electric sports cars that comfortably seat 2.
Minnie the Moocher would prefer platinum wheels on hers.
You are Eric Drexler and I claim my five pounds!
“You know I always wanted to pretend to be an architect!”
75 kWh is about 25-30 solar panels. Which is triple of what is on my roof now. But then I could make 1 gallon, which gets me 30-40 miles. Directly pushing those electrons in an EV will probably get you 200 miles.
So yeah the tech works, but it’s a niche application.
The potential (and I mean potential) other benefit is that the fuel can be stored. Renewable generation isn’t connected to demand, and saving some of that energy to deal with peaks and valleys is better than saving none of it. Especially if it provides a fuel type that can be used where BEVs don’t work well.
The niche application is any existing or future ICE vehicle.
It’s wildly inefficient compared to using the electricity in an EV, but ICE is also wildly inefficient. If a government mandate banned fossil fuels (instead of banning ICE) then synthetic fuels becomes the only way to keep the entire existing ICE fleet mobile, which might be more efficient than replacing the entire ICE fleet.
This assumes an efficient grid, which is very, very far from the case. Most of the best locations for solar are not the best locations for cities, and require many miles of transmission lines and transformation stations between the two, not to mention a whole crap ton of grid demand planning and mitigation. Electrical energy is very much non-fungible, but hydrocarbons are quite fungible.
Essentially, it all comes down to how cheap you can make solar power. Which these days, is really really cheap.
Well, solar panels on the roof of your carport or apartment building
would be the best case scenario.
The windmills and solar is much closer to where I live in California’s Central Valley than the hydroelectric and nuke plants.
Every few days I drive past the first windmill to be put on the Altamont pass 50 years ago, still wearing some of its bicentennial paint job. It’s so tiny compared to to the current ones. Seems like there’s a story there.
There are some mesmerizing windmill farms throughout California and also in Texas. And I’m sure other places throughout the country and the world. The blades spinning around are beautiful and hypnotic.
Solar panels are about as passive as they can be. They don’t kill birds (not that I believe that’s a big problem with wind turbines) and can absorb a lot of heat/energy that would otherwise warm up your attic. And having lived in Texas for six+ years, was a thing.
Cooling towers for nuclear plants kind of give me PTSD about 3-Mile Island, Fukushima and Chernobyl. And it seems nobody has figured out what to do with the spent rods. So, at this point, that’s its own form of pollution. And potentially lethal at that.
Hydro generation seems to be going down a bit in the PNW as a few dams are being removed to try to help various historical salmon runs recover. I like relatively cheap electricity, but I also like natural salmon. I’m okay with the trade-offs being made these days.
We actually know exactly what to do with spent nuclear fuel- reprocess it. Full write-up (not mine) here. Roughly 96% of that “spent” fuel is actually pristine U-238 that can be re-used in new reactor designs (specifically, turned into Pu-239). The picture at the top of that link shows the entire spent fuel output of a nuclear plant that ran for 28 years. It’s roughly a football field of 30 foot high concrete casks. Virtually all of the space taken up is concrete shielding. If you had to account for the same waste from a coal plant, it would be 6 million tons of ash sitting on the same field to a depth of more than a mile.
The remaining nasty stuff that emits photons can just sit in concrete casks for 600 years, at which point it becomes so harmless you could actually just handle it without any protection whatsoever. Just don’t eat it, not because it’s still an alpha emitter and would give you cancer, but because uranium is chemically toxic and would shut down your kidneys.
It is no coincidence that every scaremongering article about nuclear waste completely fails to do any actual math.
Thanks for the link.
Roof mounted solar is nice to have for reducing your energy bill and maybe getting in some free charging for an EV, but is in no way adequate to supply the needs of a modern industrial society. If your scale for solar is not measured in kilohectares, it’s kind of lost in the noise.
And all of those windmills and solar near you are ironically making the California grid much more vulnerable because they are fundamentally intermittent sources. If you are getting power from the local wind turbine, and the wind dies, that load has to be drawn from somewhere else, which strains the grid more than would normally be the case. It is far, far easier to demand follow with constant power sources than intermittent ones.
Funny you should mention that. Just down the road is the Gianelli Power Plant, which is this nifty pumped-storage hydroelectric plant that is at the base of the San Luis Dam. Too much power? Pump the water up the hill to the main reservoir, not enough power? Run it back downhill through the generators. Actually it was built as a way of storing water but the side hustle of energy storage is icing on the cake. There are more efficient ways to of storing energy, pressurized gas, pulling weights uphill, batteries, melting salt, and that’s just of the top of my head,
Oh springs and flywheels.
I have a radio that is powered by a solar cell that winds up a spring that powers a generator that powers the radio. I don’t know if that would scale so well but it works.
Power storage is where it’s at. Given cheap enough power, storage doesn’t have to be too efficient, just well distributed, and power is getting cheaper all the time, the same as the grid is getting more expensive.
For industrial scale power needs, you put the industry where the power is. That has been true forever.
This assumes an efficient grid, which is very, very far from the case. Most of the best locations for solar are not the best locations for cities, and require many miles of transmission lines and transformation stations between the two, not to mention a whole crap ton of grid demand planning and mitigation.
And yet:
“The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that annual electricity transmission and distribution (T&D) losses averaged about 5% of the electricity transmitted and distributed in the United States in 2018 through 2022.”
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=105&t=3
There seems to be a lot of work to do to come up with the “smart,” efficient, agile grid that we need. And I don’t think it will be inexpensive.
Years ago, I read an article somewhere that posited that because Africa had so little landline telephone infrastructure, they could just leapfrog copper and just skip to cellular. No need to put all those wires in. Just put up some microwave-linked cellular towers.
My mom, who has lived out of town for more than 50 years, refuses to embrace my hand-me-down iPhones, went for five days without telephone access of any type after a windstorm took down her PacTel landline service. My brother lives maybe 15 miles from her, and I had to ask him if she’s ok. Once he got there, his cell phone worked fine. I gave her an old 6S to use for internet and wifi. Two months later, I received a package with it in its original packaging and then her asking how she could get back on the internet.
And she’ll never call me, or my brother, because she gets charged long distance fees on her landline. A lot of SMH.
Where I live, after several years of drought we had a wet winter and all the rural phone lines started getting shorted out because the insulation had been falling over the years but since it had been dry it just work. Until it got wet and didn’t. There were dozens of phone company crews trying to to fix the lines. Then we had flooding from the atmospheric river and all the utility poles fell over.
They rebuilt the phone lines, but I don’t know anyone that uses a land line around here. In NYC, they are ripping out the copper immediately if it isn’t being used in areas served by fiber to avoid any customer trying to get service on copper.
That’s the grid as currently constructed, which maximizes transmission efficiency from large single point generation stations with outputs that are constant across days, weeks, and months (hydro, coal, gas, nuclear) to large trunk connectors, and then into the distribution network. It is that efficient precisely because we have centrally located, constant output generation and a distribution network carefully optimized over a century.
Solar (and wind) is a distributed generation method with constantly varying outputs, being fed into a grid that is extremely intolerant of the level of load fluctuations normally seen in those forms of generation. Which means you need to add a whole bunch of buffers and interconnects between your intermittent sources and the grid proper, all spread over a wide geographic area.
That doesn’t mean renewables can’t be transmitted efficiently, only that they can’t use the same tech to get onto the grid. Which is fine, nobody is going to try to repurpose an old coal plant’s substation for a new solar farm.
It kind of does mean they can’t be transmitted efficiently, at least not with the grid as it is currently constructed. And since the US electrical grid is by most reckonings the single largest machine ever constructed that is a highly non-trivial issue.
Why not? Once the power gets on the grid via the aforementioned new tech it should be transmitted exactly as efficiently as old school baseline power. At that point it’s an old grid problem not a renewables problem.
Depends on what you mean by “gets on the grid”. If we’re talking about a giant battery bank, charged by solar/wind that can discharge at a constant rate, that’s fine. Pumped hydro storage is fine as well, along with flywheels, etc, but you are talking about a truly massive investment in energy storage there.
The problem is most intermittent sources are not buffered like that- they are just bolted on and we count on the fact that the grid is massive and already has engineered fast-following load solutions widely distributed to smooth things out. But this only works if (very rough math synthesized from nerdy power market blogs) <10% of your energy supply comes from intermittent sources, and weather events or system failures can put you in an extremely precarious position.
This isn’t just hypothetical btw- last week the entire Iberian peninsula’s electrical grid blacked out for most of a day despite it being high noon with near optimal solar conditions when the first disruptions occurred. Compared to the US, Spain’s grid is very simple and it still got taken offline by what appears to be a single point of failure. Add in the inevitable higher demand to the US lifestyle, and you have a recipe for dark nights.
I don’t ultimately see these as insurmountable issues. Nuclear for baseline, NG for backup, pumped hydro/pneumatic/flywheel/gravity for storage and as many renewables churning out whatever they can.
IMO most of the problems are political and emotional not technical. See nuclear.
Very much agree on that power mix, seems the best balance. And yes, nuclear has serious emotional issues- my dear grandmother, despite being an ardent environmentalist, refused to hear any explanation of how nuclear is a green energy source because of “the radioactives.” But she isn’t around to vote against it anymore, so there is that.
I wonder if she knew how common “radioactives” were in the world. Tobacco, flying long distances, bananas, concrete and coal power plants all exposed her to more radioactives than nuclear power. Unless of course she lived in certain areas of the Soviet Union.
Oh yes, we had this conversation many times. It didn’t matter. And no, she was no babuska, she was a Ivy League educated Connecticut Yankee with more than a few degrees. She, and her similarly educated environmentalist friends didn’t care- nuclear was baaaaaadddd and that was that.
In retrospect, that was my first glimpse into Environmentalism as religion- Climate Change is Original Sin, and can never be solved, and you have to repent for it constantly. Actually doing something as radical as proposing solutions makes you a heretic.
It might not have been religion but manipulation by the FF industry. Big FF has a long standing strong interest in killing nuclear and has been perfectly happy to play dirty in doing so. They funded environmental groups which took on an uncompromising, irrational “religious” anti-nuclear stance while cautiously promoting cleaner FF use:
“In 1970, a leader of the petroleum industry and the head of the Atlantic Richfield Co. named Robert O. Anderson contributed $200,000 to fund Friends of the Earth, an organization that is strident in its opposition to nuclear energy, citing both safety and cost issues.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-fossil-fuel-interests-bankrolling-the-anti-nuclear-energy-movement/
“TIME has learned that between 2007 and 2010 the Sierra Club accepted over $25 million in donations from the gas industry, mostly from Aubrey McClendon, CEO of Chesapeake Energy—one of the biggest gas drilling companies in the U.S. and a firm heavily involved in fracking—to help fund the Club’s Beyond Coal campaign. Though the group ended its relationship with Chesapeake in 2010—and the Club says it turned its back on an additional $30 million in promised donations—the news raises concerns about influence industry may have had on the Sierra Club’s independence and its support of natural gas in the past.”
https://science.time.com/2012/02/02/exclusive-how-the-sierra-club-took-millions-from-the-natural-gas-industry-and-why-they-stopped/
Now the Sierra Club may be changing that rabid anti-nuclear stance:
https://www.climatedepot.com/2024/10/16/sierra-club-goes-nuclear-renewables-not-enough-for-ai-we-need-nuclear-power-quietly-reverses-50-years-of-antinuclear-advocacy/
Which is weird since they had reaffirmed their anti nuclear stance just a few months prior:
https://www.sierraclub.org/policy/energy/nuclear-power
Reading between the few lines I can see they now oppose NEW nuclear power plants but are warming to the use of nuclear power for AI.
So who has a fuck ton of money and wants to use an existing nuclear power plant to power AI?
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-island-nuclear-power-plant-microsoft-ai
Coincidence? My tin foil hat thinks no.
Is it? The top ICE can now achieve peak efficiencies above 50%. In the winter the waste heat is usable as cabin heat.
What examples suitable for for automotive use are you thinking of?
As far as I know the only internal combustion engines that get over 50% efficiency weigh a few thousand tons like the the MAN S80ME-C7. Some of the the U.S. Army’s Tank Automotive Command adiabatic diesel engine experiments were interesting, but making a ceramic engine that runs at 2000 degrees f with no oil is a little out there. That Porsche six stroke thing might reach 50 percent with non exotic materials. Carnot cycle Engines aren’t going to happen.
The other thing about ICE engines is that it takes a lot of energy to extract, refine, and transport the fuel.
“What examples suitable for for automotive use are you thinking of?”
These:
Nissan ePower: 50%
https://www.nissan-global.com/EN/INNOVATION/TECHNOLOGY/ARCHIVE/E_POWER50/
Mercedes Benz: 50%
https://carbuzz.com/news/mercedes-amg-just-cracked-50-thermal-efficiency-with-new-f1-engine/
And most recently:
Weichai Power (diesel): 53.09%
“Weichai Power said this latest achievement has been officially recognized by TÜV SÜD, an international testing organization, and the China Automotive Technology & Research Center, a professional testing body for Chinese internal combustion engines. Both organizations issued product testing reports and certificates to Weichai Power confirming the company had achieved a new world record in diesel engine thermal efficiency.”
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/china-diesel-engine-thermal-efficiency
(Mazda also claimed 56% was likely with its Skyactiv3 in 2017 but its been crickets on that for a while now so I’m not putting a lot of hope on that one. They are now talking about a new Skyactiv Z but I haven’t seen any efficiency numbers yet.)
Thanks, I hadn’t heard of those, they sound interesting.
It sounds like all of those are only efficient at full power, good for charging batteries for a series hybrid or use in a racing car.
Are any in mass production?
I think all gasoline engines are only efficient at wide open throttle, one of the secrets of diesel engine efficiency is no throttle. Getting rid of the cooling, or having the excess heat do work is a bigger trick.
If there was a turbocharger that fed the leftover heat to a sterling engine, that would be interesting but eventually there is heat escaping into the environment.
The 2nd gen epower is in Nissan products sold in Europe and Japan. We in the US are supposed to get the 3rd gen in 2027:
https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/nissan-hybrid-suvs-e-power-first-drive.html
I dunno about the Chinese diesel. They .and engines for busses, tractors and trucks so I don’t think they have anything for light transport but they are working with BYD so maybe something will come of that.
The only-efficient-at-full-throttle I think can be solved with cylinder deactivation and/or hit and miss operation for lower than full loads.
The cylinder deactivation thing is a cute way to of getting around part throttle pumping losses I guess.
Hasn’t thought of that.
“If there was a turbocharger that fed the leftover heat to a sterling engine, that would be interesting”
How about a 20 yo BMW turbosteamer?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbosteamer
Wow, I hadn’t heard of that.
That reminds me me of NYCs energy infrastructure where ConEd pipes steam to buildings for heat. That’s why you always see clouds of steam in street scenes shot in Manhattan in the winter. It’s a bit of infrastructure that isn’t aging well. I expect that ConEd will have a much more difficult time getting out of the business of selling waste steam that is no longer a byproduct of big coal fired power plants that are long gone than shutting down their DC power grid 20 years ago.. That was a mess.
Anyway, that’s an interesting project.
Hell put it in a car to increase range not expected to replace filling up.
That is 75kWh over 24 hours, or just over 3kWh for 24 hours.
Ok – but wait – hear me out, here: What if we miniaturized it further, then built it into the car itself? Then you could fuel your car just by plugging it into a power outlet for a few hours! Brilliant!
Yes, this captures CO2, but only for as long as you don’t use the fuel.
It’s carbon neutral after burning the fuel. Is that not good enough?
Well, neutral if you don’t count the power going into it. Which is.. probably close enough to fair if you’re feeding it entirely from solar and not from the grid.
If you want to run any kid of sequestering cooking the CO2 into a liquid is about the only way
I prefer to turn it into diamonds:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/modern-alchemists-turn-airborne-co2-into-diamonds/
Absolutely not the same chemical process, but absolutely cool 🙂
Tomato, tomato, potato potato.
Wait…what octane is the end product?
Chemical Engineer here; although my career is not in the gasoline refining business, I know enough to say, this is the wrong question.
Right question:
“What is the formulation? i.e. is it 100% Benzene?
(The gasoline at the pump contains a mixture of hydrocarbons, most of which is 8-carbon molecules, but *not* all. Likely the chemical produced by this system make your car run terrible )
Probably not benzene. After all, benzene is C6H6, and has only about 85% the energy density of octane.
Over a decade ago I worked on an automotive ICE that would run on petrol, methanol or ethanol, or any combination thereof.
If the magic fuel-from-air system can’t generate something exactly like normal pump gas then it’s reasonably easy to recalibrate your car to suit whatever it does make.
This is what corn and sugar cane, etc., already do: make hydrocarbons (sugars and starches) from ambient CO2, water and solar power.
All green plants do this, not just corn and sugar. It’s called photosynthesis. But they are woefully inefficient. Even if you add the solar panels into the chain, I suspect this is still a lot more efficient than growing crops.
Crops are self assembling so manufacturing costs might be lower. Ethanol production can also produce valuable side products such as brewers grains which are highly valued animal feed. It’s oftentimes better for the animals than the original crop.
I’ve often wondered if ethanol shouldn’t be considered a valuable side product of the production of animal feed.
Plants are self assembling – crops are not. There’s alot of tractoring and nitrogen fertiliser in a crop.
Depends on the crop.
Unless it’s legumes, like alfalfa or beans. But they still need lots of water. In fact the water is the limiting factor most places.
Well there is plenty of of water, just not where it’s useful.
And most of it is the salty kind, which isn’t good for crop-growing.
Well there’s plenty of of the not salty kind too, but still not where it can be used to grow crops.
The other problem is that the history of irrigated agriculture always ends the same way. All the salts and minerals like selenium and arsenic that desolve into the water in the mountains ou wherever the water is collected, gets concentrated in the crop lands where it is used unless you have lots of runoff, meaning most of it going to the sea. Less runoff means more toxic concentrations, and no runoff means in a century or so the land is poisoned.
Groundwater depletion is the other looming problem. The majority of US agriculture is going to be dead in a hundred years. Certainly in California it will be.
Actually, the salty and non-salty kinds are really the same water. Water evaporates from the salty oceans (of course being non-salty water vapour), rains on land, seeps into the ground to become ground water and/or runs into rivers and back into the salty ocean again.
My friend has just suggested this product is misnamed. Its not Aircela. Its Aireola. Sucking the juice out of mother natures teet.
I’m still running my car on those little green pills I inherited from Grandpa, who got them from Old Henry Ford.
One pill and a gallon of water in the fuel tank, and BLAMMO!
Right before Grandpa’s mysterious death in a plane crash?
Nope. He switched to soybeans, and that sparked Old Henry’s interest.
Combine that with the “100 mpg carburetor” and a Brown’s Gas generator and you’ve practically got a perpetual motion machine!
In this post AI future, the most likely use of these would be to become Mayor of Gas Town. With a horde of War Boys in an old Planet Fitness powering old treadmills, we could make all the Guzzolene we need and still have enough left over to barter with the Bullet Farm and the Citadel.
“Hey, we can take this clean zero-emissions energy and have it create something we can burn!”
The strategy here seems near-identical to the Hydrogen power generators using excess power to create H2 for energy storage. The only advantage I see is that it’s a combustible product that we already use.
I also think that is the only viable option for this but unlike H2 generation this makes a much more stable-ish and transportable fuel. The constant argument is that we can put up tons of solar or wind but excess goes to waste usually and chemical storage is just so much more energy dense vs any battery tech we currently have. And in this case makes a near net zero cycle.
Though I would wonder how much scaling is needed at 75kWh per gallon to generate.
I’d be interested in seeing a full rundown of the environmental issues. Hydrocarbon fuels are awful if they spill and burning them creates pollution, but on the other side batteries aren’t problem free in terms of mining and dealing with depleted ones.
It’s far beyond my qualifications to know, but I’d be curious what experts had to say.
Pure hydrogen is a storage (and safety) challenge. Liquid hydrocarbons that can be stored at STP are a hell of a lot cheaper and safer to deal with.
Pure hydrogen is a storage (and safety) challenge
I dunno. High (10k PSI) pressure tanks that don’t suffer embrittlement have been installed in HCV vehicles for quite a while now and I haven’t read a lot of stores of these tanks failing. The challenge is long term storage as these tanks will vent when heated but underground storage is a well established way to keep temps constant. There are natural deposits of hydrogen turning up now and I have no idea how long they have been around, maybe hundreds, maybe hundreds of thousands of years.
(One nice thing about refined hydrogen is it has no shelf life. As long as its in the tank it’s good to use. )
As far as safety goes hydrogen is safer than most flammable gasses as it dissipates much more rapidly so it doesn’t pool on the ground as do heavier than air gasses.
Liquid hydrocarbons that can be stored at STP are a hell of a lot cheaper and safer to deal with.
Unless its stored in an inappropriately. Like in plastic garbage bags as we see idiots doing every time there’s a hiccup in the gasoline supply.
“As long as it’s in the tank it’s good to use”
This glosses over the problem of hydrogen escape. Hydrogen escapes containment.
Toyota Mirai owners have complained of losing most of a tankful of hydrogen in a month while just sitting in the driveway. Leaving for vacation and coming back to a car half empty in the airport parking lot is not an enviable experience.
“This glosses over the problem of hydrogen escape. Hydrogen escapes containment”
Helium is an even greater escape artist yet tanks can store compressed helium for a long time.
I haven’t seen any such complaints in my own readings of Mirai reviews. I could see some boil off of a very full tank on a hot day so someone parking your Mirai at the Phoenix airport for a month in summer may have returned to an unpleasant surprise but even so it shouldn’t be empty enough to leave one stranded.
Hydrogen is the smallest molecule and escapes containment much easier than helium, especially during transfer. That’s why the hydrogen fuel station model often involves production on site.
Losing most of a tankful while sitting idle would not only be expensive, but could easily leave you far from where the next rare station exists.
Hydrogen is very safe as a fuel, but its other disadvantages are immense. There’s no chance it will ever be adopted at large scale, not even for trucking.
Hydrogen in its diatomic elemental form is indeed the smallest molecule. And that molecule is a great escape artist.
However helium is a noble gas so it doesn’t form bonds easily. Its natural form is as a single atom. Its nobility means its as hard to hold as a greased pig. So it gets the crown for best escape artist:
“Why use helium to test hydrogen components?
As the smallest atom in the periodic system, one could reason that hydrogen would be the best gas to identify the smallest leaks. However, the electron configuration of helium actually makes it “smaller” than hydrogen. And furthermore, hydrogen always comes in a pair (H2). This means that through the same leak opening, more helium atoms would leak out than hydrogen atoms, making it easier to identify the smallest leaks, and delivering a more accurate leak measurement.”
https://blog.innomatec.com/why-use-helium-test-hydrogen-components
(I don’t agree with the idea that helium is better because more gets out rather that the only helium you’re likely to pick up is from the leak.)
“Losing most of a tankful while sitting idle would not only be expensive, but could easily leave you far from where the next rare station exists.”
True if true. Again I haven’t seen any complaints on this from Mirai drivers. There were such complaints from the BMW hydrogen 7 but that used cryonic hydrogen storage which is more prone to boil off.
Interesting, thanks.
Still willing to call hydrogen too difficult to contain for use in consumer vehicles effectively and efficiently.
Oh I agree wholeheartedly with that! Hydrogen MIGHT be a solution for long distance trucking is as close as I’m willing to go.
BUT
I do think though any renewably generated hydrogen is best utilized by manufacturing rather than transport. Any left over from that is better used to make jetfuel than hydrogen for transport. And heavy trucks can burn jetfuel too.
In theory, practice and theory are the same…
The tanks themselves are seldom the issue. It’s the plumbing- any valve or tubing connections will leak hydrogen, and there’s no real way to prevent that. So you have to treat hydrogen plumbing with extreme caution, like way way more caution that even for something like natural gas.
My lab in grad school had more than one hydrogen fire in our tubing, we had to keep it in a blast proof room for that exact reason.
Understood. I don’t know much about the Mirai’s plumbing but it would make sense for it to have an electromechanical leakproof shutoff at the tank that’s only open while the car is in use to minimize such losses.
As to the issue of safety venting according to Toyota the Mirai’s tanks: “have been subjected to extremely severe testing. They are designed to withstand up to 225% of their operating pressure, which is clearly a very comfortable safety margin.”. So I think its unlikely those tanks will ever need to be vented even if left full to capacity at the Phoenix airport for a month in summer.
To be clear – it’s producing (more or less) carbon neutral fuel. The advantage over H2 is that the energy density is much better – this kind of technology is the likely development path for us to keep making jetfuel into the future.
The production may be possible to be carbon neutral, but that ends once it’s used (burnt) – and that equation no longer works. And it’s only carbon neutral based on the energy used to power it.
No you’re wrong (Assuming you use solar/wind/etc to power the unit) – it sucks up CO2 from the air, it turns that CO2 into fuel. You burn the fuel – it releases the same amount of CO2 into the air as it sucked up to produce the fuel.
That’s carbon neutral.
To elaborate – its essentially using external renewable energy to reverse this reaction with atmospheric CO2 and water being the source of the feedmass.
2 C8H18 + 25 O2 → 16 CO2 + 18 H2O
I think that the distinction needs to be made between hydrocarbon fossil fuel which is taking carbon out of the ground and putting it into the atmosphere, and synthetic hydrocarbon fuel which is borrowing carbon from the air to make hydrogen more useful.
Some people can’t seem to wrap their minds around that.
The other thing is that using energy to take the carbon out of the air , combine it with hydrogen, and then extract useful energy out of it seems less efficient than other forms of energy storage and transport.
The bookkeeping on burning fossil fuel, then taking the carbon out of the air and burying it seems to be nowhere close to as efficient as leaving it in the ground in the first place.
But, if energy gets cheap enough I guess efficiency doesn’t matter. There is plenty of non carbon energy, it’s a distribution problem.
We also use hydrogen, quite a bit of it to make steel and other useful things. Those industries cannot switch to something else to make those things, they HAVE to use hydrogen. Right now almost all that hydrogen is made from natural gas. So any renewably made hydrogen is far better utilized to make those things rather than be used inefficiently for transport.
Along those lines as others have pointed out any liquid fuels produced are far more useful to power things that can’t practically use hydrogen or electricity for power. Large, long distance aircraft spring to mind.
A combustible product that makes the billions of internal combustion engines currently in service around the world potentially carbon neutral without having to junk them and replace them with newly built battery powered units.
This whole thing really turns the whole idea of fossil fuels as a non-renewable resource on it’s head. I mean these aren’t fossil fuels, but for my entire life there’s been the spectre of gasoling running out because we can only get it from out of the ground, surprise! Sure it’s currently not a sustainable ratio of energy to product, but as you say running it off of solar or water could defintely yield “renewable” results.
Many modern oil fields have an EROEI ratio < 2:1. With enough cheap renewable energy production, it is plausible that in the future this could be a more efficient means of obtaining gasoline than drilling for more oil and cracking the gasoline out of it.
If gasoline-electric fuel cells ever see mass production, it would be a boon for EREVs. You could have light EVs with packs sized for 50-100 miles, and extend the range to hundreds of miles while not having a ICE onboard.
Synthetic fuel would open the floodgates for gas-electric fuel cells. Gasoline is a blend of more hydrocarbons than one fuel cell can convert, but synfuel? Synfuel is pure.
All of the carbon that’s in those underground fossil fuels was originally in the atmosphere circa 500 million years ago during the Cambrian period, and was eventually deposited underground by lots of dead microorganisms and even more time.
So it kind of is fossil fuels, just skipping a few hundred million years.
Imagine a few of these set around a farm with solar/wind/battery to power them.
Imagine some of these on off road trails far off grid with with associated solar/wind/battery to power the generator in your EREV.
By my calculations, if I use a couple of these and a chain of fuel sharks, plus shine my headlights on a solar panel, I should have unlimited energy!
(This actually could be pretty useful with the right application, though. Seems like pulling hydrocarbons out of the atmosphere is good on its own, and putting them to use is impressive.)
What if you plug the fuel sharks directly into your Aircela?!? o.O
I guess “Vaporware” was already taken?
This is an awesome idea and I hope it continues progressing.
neat. hooked up to my standard meter that would cost about $15/gallon.
but with a renewable like solar pumping it off-grid, that becomes real cheap real fast.
I really see something like this sitting on a farm. Solar panels on the farm to run the house and such, and the excess just generating gasoline (don’t know if they can do diesel) to power the tractor. Need to see what the cost vs batteries would be.
Hmm… all those vintage tractors some folks in farm country like to collect might have a cheap fuel source. And some of those old, unkillable machines can still be useful outside of industrial-scale farming.
Diesel is longer hydrocarbon chains. I’m no engineer. That said, it seems like tweaking the catalyst would get whatever liquid hydrocarbon was desired. Whether it’s economically feasible to do so……
Someone else pointed out that it takes ~3x more panels than the average home.
All for 1 gallon a day.
For applications that don’t have reasonable alternatives (jet fuel) this is likely fine.