Turning Fresh Air and Water into Petrol. I knew it was possible!

[dosxuk]

I'm really not trying to invent or discover something ground breaking, or something that breaks the known laws of anything, but I do draw the line at being so arrogant as to say that something is utterly impossible.

 

Your scientific knowledge of such things and others is actually quite impressive, albeit, you frequently break into techno-babble to reenforce that fact. Yes those laws you refer to may have been proven and unshakeable for 150 years! They thought the earth was flat for thousands of years! Does that make it an unshakeable and dispovable theory in today world?

 

If these laws were as unreliable as you seem to infer, they would have been replaced, and we'd have lightbulbs pointing at solar power panels and fans pointed at wind turbines to take advantage of the free energy. As far as the entire Human race is aware, the laws mentionare are impossible to break, and have been demonstrated as accurate and fundemental to the entire operation of the Universe on numerous occaisions. So someone on here saying it's impossible to break the laws on conservation of energy is not being arrogant, because everybody with any knowledge on the subject will concur.

 

Here's an analogy for what these people are trying to get funded :- lets say you invent a machine to make pound coins really really shiny - they make people go "oooh!" when they see them. However, to do this process, you have to put 100 pound coins in, but you only get 3 of these super shiny coins out.

 

Now, there may be some uses for your invention, coin collectors might want shiny coins in their collections, but for the vast majority of people they'd be better off just using the tarnished coins to buy stuff rather than the shiny ones which are worth just as much.

 

I can think of a tiny number of uses for an air-to-petrol system, but it's not going to replace or even supplement the mainstream supply of fuel for cars. And even if it did, the cost on the forecourts would price so many people out of driving that you'd all be clamouring to buy a new electric / hydrogen / whatever powered car.

[maxmaximus]

The process to do this is relatively easy - it's not too dissimilar from the Fischer Tropsch process that makes synfuel from coal. The problem is that it uses immense amounts of energy.

 

They are looking for a way to store renewable energy. It doesn’t really matter if the stored energy has less energy that the original energy, because the stored energy is more easily used in existing cars.

 

 

To revert back the products to the reactants, costs more energy than you get from the reactants. If for example you were going to use this for solving carbon emissions from a coal power station, you would need to provide renewable input to do this. It's be far far better to never burn the coal in the first place - you would then have the renewable input of electricity still. If you wanted to store the power, then pumped storage is far and away a better bet.

This isn't their proposal, they don't want to use it for this and cars don't run to well off pumped storage.

 

 

Looking forward on the long term, moving from IC cars that do burn fuel to something like a hydrogen powered car, or electric would be a better bet as well, and would be vastly more energy efficient too. As I've said before, this really does seem to be a solution looking for a problem - it can't fix the large scale issues, and where you want to look at the small scale issues it's just easier to refine the fuel normally.

Yes but that doesn't solve the emendate problems and converting all cars to run on hydrogen and replacing all the existing petrol station would be extremely expensive. How many hydrogen powered cars are their now and how much do they cost, how are they refuelled.

 

For something like making specialist pure lubricants, it's probably got some significant advantages, but that's hardly the "solving the fossil fuel shortage" that the media is touting about.

 

It would go some way to making the UK less reliant of oil if and when they can produce it on a mass scale, which they plan to do in the next few years.

[Alcoblog]

It's been true for a long time Pete, and until proven otherwise will remain so.

 

You can try if you wish, but the only person who will make a fool of you is yourself - if you are going to come to a debate based on science and engineering with a profound lack of knowledge in the subject it's like bringing a knife to a gunfight. Very messy, and you tend to lose.

 

It's not being arrogant to say that because a well founded law that has stood rigorous scientific tests for a century and a half predicts that something will come true. That's not arrogance, that's science.

 

To then apply that science to building something useful is again not arrogance, that's engineering.

 

I realise that you obviously know a fair amount on the laws of science, but let's not forget that these laws aren't necessarily 'the be all and end all' ... they just fit nicely with what we understand at the moment.

 

Don't forget, it's only 350 years since Robert Boyle suggested that matter may be composed of 'different corpuscules' (atom), rather than the common belief of it being made from 'earth, fire, air and water'.

 

It's was only slightly more than 100 years ago that the atom was discovered to contain much smaller bits.

 

Only this year (as you know), the Higgs Bosun was discovered ... with all it's implications.

 

I think you'd be the first person to admit that we don't know everything ... in fact, hardly anything at all.

Do you not think that it'd be rather naive to suggest that future science won't discover such things as free energy, space-time travel, perpetual motion and the like ... just because they don't conform to our scientific understanding at the moment?

What we see as 'science fiction' very often becomes 'science fact' ... laws are made to be broken.

[PeteMorris]

I realise that you obviously know a fair amount on the laws of science, but let's not forget that these laws aren't necessarily 'the be all and end all' ... they just fit nicely with what we understand at the moment.

 

Don't forget, it's only 350 years since Robert Boyle suggested that matter may be composed of 'different corpuscules' (atom), rather than the common belief of it being made from 'earth, fire, air and water'.

 

It's was only slightly more than 100 years ago that the atom was discovered to contain much smaller bits.

 

Only this year (as you know), the Higgs Bosun was discovered ... with all it's implications.

 

I think you'd be the first person to admit that we don't know everything ... in fact, hardly anything at all.

Do you not think that it'd be rather naive to suggest that future science won't discover such things as free energy, space-time travel, perpetual motion and the like ... just because they don't conform to our scientific understanding at the moment?

What we see as 'science fiction' very often becomes 'science fact' ... laws are made to be broken.

 

The voice of sanity at last!...Well put Alco!

[truman]

I realise that you obviously know a fair amount on the laws of science, but let's not forget that these laws aren't necessarily 'the be all and end all' ... they just fit nicely with what we understand at the moment.

 

Don't forget, it's only 350 years since Robert Boyle suggested that matter may be composed of 'different corpuscules' (atom), rather than the common belief of it being made from 'earth, fire, air and water'.

 

It's was only slightly more than 100 years ago that the atom was discovered to contain much smaller bits.

 

Only this year (as you know), the Higgs Bosun was discovered ... with all it's implications.

 

I think you'd be the first person to admit that we don't know everything ... in fact, hardly anything at all.

Do you not think that it'd be rather naive to suggest that future science won't discover such things as free energy, space-time travel, perpetual motion and the like ... just because they don't conform to our scientific understanding at the moment?

What we see as 'science fiction' very often becomes 'science fact' ... laws are made to be broken.

 

If the first law of thermodynamics was wrong wouldn't you have expected to have seen some evidence of it..surely it would happen even if we didn't know it existed..eg spinning wheels speeding up after they are started,engines needing no fuel once they've got going etcetc?..

[dosxuk]

Do you not think that it'd be rather naive to suggest that future science won't discover such things as free energy, space-time travel, perpetual motion and the like ... just because they don't conform to our scientific understanding at the moment?

 

No, I don't think it would. If the possibility of free energy existed, we would have examples of it. The "basic" laws being brought up in this thread are just that - the basis of laws which are constantly being refined. However, nobody, ever, has done an experiment and gone "oh hang on, we got more out than we put in, that's odd" (and then not gone on to discover a flaw in their process).

 

Things like the structure of atoms were discovered because we couldn't explain some of their behaviours, so people did research and found the sub-atomic particles.

 

Again, there have been no examples of weird "free energy" anomolies in any experiments.

 

What we see as 'science fiction' very often becomes 'science fact' ... laws are made to be broken.

 

No they aren't. They're there to be adapted and refined. Even in your example of scientists saying that materials were formed of four elements is still in force today, only we know there are many more elements than those scientists understood. We didn't throw away their hypothesis, we built on it.

[retep]

What do all the scientific minds think should be done with the extra energy that is produced but remains unused because of lack of storage.

[Obelix]

I realise that you obviously know a fair amount on the laws of science, but let's not forget that these laws aren't necessarily 'the be all and end all' ... they just fit nicely with what we understand at the moment.

 

Don't forget, it's only 350 years since Robert Boyle suggested that matter may be composed of 'different corpuscules' (atom), rather than the common belief of it being made from 'earth, fire, air and water'.

 

It's was only slightly more than 100 years ago that the atom was discovered to contain much smaller bits.

 

Only this year (as you know), the Higgs Bosun was discovered ... with all it's implications.

 

I think you'd be the first person to admit that we don't know everything ... in fact, hardly anything at all.

Do you not think that it'd be rather naive to suggest that future science won't discover such things as free energy, space-time travel, perpetual motion and the like ... just because they don't conform to our scientific understanding at the moment?

What we see as 'science fiction' very often becomes 'science fact' ... laws are made to be broken.

 

Discovering the Higgs Boson had no consequence for conservation of energy - in fact the discovery of it relies quite heavily on that principle. Once a properly tested and rigourously proven theory is in place it is most unlikley it will be overturned. It may be refined - relativity for example provides a better description of the movement of planets but that doesnt mean that Newtonian mechanics is suddenly wrong and apples will fall upwards. It just means that it is refined a little more. That said, it's not impossible for any scientific theory to be totally wrong - it's just incredibly, vanishingly unlikley that they will ever be found wrong.

[Obelix]

What do all the scientific minds think should be done with the extra energy that is produced but remains unused because of lack of storage.

 

Where is this energy that you speak of? You cannot produce energy and it dissappear - it has to go somewhere and in the case of electricity it has to do it fairly quickly.

[Obelix]

The voice of sanity at last!...Well put Alco!

 

Except that it's not well put and you still don't understand.