News Boffins ready air-to-fuel converter

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/01/08/boffins_ready_air_to_fuel_converter/1

A Sandia National Laboratories-based team is working on a device that can recover the building blocks of liquid fuels from the waste gases generated by combustion.

 

wow.... that is amazing, whoever thought we could do that from plain air. I know that they can do that for making water in disaster releif areas but never thought of it as being possible with fuel.

 

I do wonder how much energy goes into the reconversion. Is it all supplied by the sun?

 

we kind of need it now.... not latter.....

 

Boffins? Are you trying to be The Register or The Inquirer or something?

 

Plenty of co2 in the air, will be for generations. We need this tech now true, but we will still need it later, perhaps more so than now.

 

This is just fantastic.

Anyone here know the Greg Mandell novels by Peter F. Hamilton?
In one of the books, can't remember which one at the moment, he tells about a no-exhaust solution put on vehicles with internal combustion engines. These devices take all the exhaust gases and store them in pressure tanks to be converted back to liquid hydrocarbons at a later date. It sounded like an incredible system, fully plausible, and now I read this. Oh it's a brave new world alright.
I've always said that the boundaries between science-fiction and science-fact is just a matter of time and imagination.
Excellent.

 

Ops. Forgot the 't' in combustion in my previous comment. My apologies.

 

err, hate to bring a downer on the whole green stuff, but isn't carbon monoxide the extremely poisonous, invisible WORST kind of car exhaust that's also better than CO2 at warming up the globe? Why would anyone want to make that? The best idea so far for getting fuel back from the air is growing sugar plants imo, as not only do you take nasty co2 out but you get loads of oxygen and some of the cleaner combustables as products (which also work in cars, deisel engines can run on vegetable oil perfectly at 10p per litre)

 

If you read the article properly you've have read that they were going to take the CO and turn it into new petrol chemicals. Vegetable oil is not carbon neutral it fact there a growing research that shows that it could worse for than the planet than fossil fuels.

 

Ummm.... one really big problem with this. How are you going to capture the exhaust gases? It won't work on atmospheric air because CO2 is IIRC something like .03 percent of the air, and there's no point in designing a portable version because you may as well just power the car from solar power directly (same point applies to power stations). About the only use I can think of for it is as an alternative to carbon sequestration for chemical/industrial processes where burning Carbon is inevitable (cement kilns, blast furnaces, etc.), and possibly as a way of generating synthetic fuels in the future from sequestrated CO2 - but only if atmospheric CO2 levels have dropped significantly and it is considered safe to vent the sequestrated CO2.

 

I think its designed to run from coal fired power stations which generate huge amounts of co2 and generate much more power per sq meter than solar also they can run at night... So you run your cheap coal power station all day store the gases and proccess them when it sunny sell the syth fuel to pay for the device then sell your carbon credits and your making money from both ends.
/toddles off to buy a few coal power stations.

 

Damn right - boffin is exactly the right word to use in this context!

Very cool, interesting the news story to by the way; keep it up Gareth!

 

I guess I wasn't so crazy... I had no idea that this technology existed.

 

True enough. You could probably also say that he fits the definition of "dude", but you wouldn't write "dude readies...". Boffins is very The Sun in style. It doesn't really tell us anything, and it does it in an (imo) slightly faux-prole and colloquial manner. Fair enough I guess, if that's the direction Bit wants to head. But communicating info with as little bias, editorial implication, and simplification as possible would be my preferred direction.

As for the story, this is a fairly interested progression, but one without any end as of yet. All they've really managed to do is make CO so far, which although admittedly an important step, is hardly useful in that state given it's intense toxicity to humans. Whether they can find ways of turning CO into actual fuel without using more energy than they recieve from the finished product will be the important point, I think.

So that's China's CO2 problem solved then - since they're heading for champion of the world at having dirty coal-fired power plants.

My faith still lies in nuclear. A nuclear and hydrogen economy may not be in action, but it's certainly so far the most promising replacement for our massively fossil fuel based economies. I think if more people were aware how much oil prices are going to be increasing in the next 20-50 years, and how totaly our entire civilisation is dependant on oil for it's existance - they'd be complaining about governments not building nuclear power plants.

 

Then stop wasting time and get to work on my Star Trek Transporters!

 

what about a c02 to air generator. Solves alot of problems i think. Even so, do you know you can buy a mini-nuclear-reactor that is putting out 200KW for 40 years. You are then totaly independent of your local energysuplier and can deliver energy fotr your whole block.

 

Assuming you mean CO2 to O2 (oxygen), there are already billions of those generators all over the world.

 

Yeah but you have to wait on them to grow, every one knows biotech is flaky at best.