News Boffins ready air-to-fuel converter

Hehehe!

 

yay! tech to save our planet!

 

Doesn't make sense to do that. You're better off using the Fischer-Tropsch process to convert the coal to hydrocarbon fuel, and use the solar energy directly to generate energy.

 

Indeed. And as soon as people realise that cutting down forest land to grow biofuels is counter productive the better.

 

Fischer Tropsch requires huge amounts of water, many countries don't have the spare water. China is depleting the water supply in many areas using this tech. KW/SQM coal is much better than solar and it works what ever the weather, besides all that this device doesn't generate electricity its a solar furnace only. Have a look at the article, this system means you have the best of both systems. Remember we don't have infrastructure for large scale solar, we do for coal so while it may seem great just to switch to solar but honestly it isn't going to happen in the next 30 years this way increases the efficiency of what we have now

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/01/S2P

 

i used to be a boff in the uk... then i came to portugal and its crappy teaching system, now i'm just a slave to the system.

 

The Fisher Tropsch method is only going to create problems when water is taken from underground resovoirs though, and that's just accellerating an already worldwide issue that needs solving. So long as there are suitable basin's and suchlike that are surface based, capturing sufficient rainfall to water a population shouldn't be too much of a problem. Overall though, if you use water to make hydrocarbons, when you burn those hydrocarbons you get your water back. Just like a hydrogen economy, the water part is essentially renewable.

As for going over to coal, I think you're nuts tbh dude. We can switch to coal, and along with the rest of the world use the stuff up within 200-300 years, but why not save the coal for transformation into oil like substances that we require and havn't yet got substitutes for, and use nuclear energy for power. It's cleaner, it's a long term solution, and it's going to be the eventual solution whether we move to coal now or not. The way I figure it, the sooner the world moves to a nuclear power economy, with the resultant heavy research into the industry and more satisfactory solutions to waste thereof - the better.

What does KW/SQM stand for, out of interest?

 

An out of my arse unit for kilowatts per square meter.
I see what you mean about saving coal for better uses. However the water thing would be problem i'll try and find some links tomorrow at work but basically china has suspended any new projects on both bio ethanol and CTO (coal to oil) in large parts of the country. Parts of the country become net exporters of water and many of them can't afford to be.

Personally i think tech like this is generally a good thing to supplement our energy sources not replace them. If we have to build new power plants best to maximize the energy released from the fuel source, using the co2 for extending the life of oil fields is also something which we could do more of here.

 

Oh, right. kWm^2, or kW/m2 would probably be a better way of doing it

As you say, water is a big problem, but it's going to be a big problem in 30 years time anyway. We humey's have been relying on vast underground repositories of water which have taken thousands (or much more in some cases) of years to build up. We're exhausting them in decades. I believe something ridiculous like 90% of all of our water comes from underground resovoirs. Now some of these will be being refilled, but many aren't. Once they all run out, we're stuck using surface water or desalinated water (which requires tonnes of power...another reason for my hearty endorsement of nukes). Water is gonna be a big problem whether we use lots now or not. Because just like oil, we're using what are in a way finite supplies much much faster than they're being replenished.

 

Breakout your Stillsuit the Arrakis days are coming.

 

my future car will be a plugin and if i can i will cover my house with solar panels... we have tons of sun here......

 

that's pretty cool

 

Sunlight and air... sounds a lot like the other mythical fuel we've been promised before... Rainbows and unicorn farts!

Seriously though, this is a great idea. Even though solar is becoming more and more efficient, especially in less than 100% perpendicular sunlight, as well as more durable, we definitely need something to counteract the massive quantities of CO2 we're pumping out. Since the US government is so far in the pocket of the oil companies, all we can do is alleviate the symptoms, not reform the causes.

 

There are already people working on that, however there is the small issue of the Heisenberg stabiliser. Maybe the combined genius here at bit-tech can come up with something. Of course, we'd need a dilithium core and a matter/anti-matter reaction chamber, but those are small fish I wager.

On a more serious note though; I read somewhere, might have been scientific american, that they have now reached the point where they are able to teleport molecules over distances of a few feet. I'll do some research on this - been a while since I read up on teleportation.

 

Noted

 

If you mean trees, thats ok, But a lot of industrial powerplants exhaust co2 by the milions. In my country they are storing the exhaust into the ground where natural gasses used to be (the gas is used to power the powerplants). A better way should be to redirect this enormous underground co2 fields into a co2>oxygen generator. We are then wasting natural sources still. But at least we puting back fresh air into the skys.

 

And how do you propose we power said CO2 > O2 generator? With more CO2 producing power? Underground storage in depleted natural gas resoviors is a good way of storing CO2 imo, the idea that we should somehow attempt to turn all the CO2 back into O2 may chime nicely with lots of people, but I very much doubt it'll happen in the near future.

 

You do realise that doing so would take about 3 times the energy that you generated from burning the coal in the first place? Again, unless you have unlimited energy supplies it makes no sense whatsoever to do anything but leave the CO2 there and use the solar energy to generate eletricity.

 

Well The c02 is forced into the ground, its sits there under presure. So opening a release valve would force the co2 out of it. So not much energy is needed to get it out the ground again, and how do you know it would take 3 times the energy to exchange co2 to O2. I dont even know if it is posible to do this, and what kind of technology is needed to make it work. So i dont know how much energy it takes.

 

Peak efficiency for burning coal is ~45%, or ~58% for oil/gas. That's the Carnot efficiency limit - a very hard ceiling you can't break through without either going to fuel cells or improved metallurgy.
Cracking molecules like CO2 back to their constituent parts again is even less efficient - for instance from memory electrolysis of water is only about 60% efficient, and that's a relatively simple job. Put the two efficiencies together and you're only recovering about 30% of the energy that went in in the first place. Solar furnaces can manage about 60% energy efficiency right off the bat.