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

[Cyclone]

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Is the production of hydrogen much more efficient than the production of petrol?

[maxmaximus]

Air Fuel Synthesis plan to produce 1,000 tonnes of liquid hydrocarbon fuel per day using approx 3,000 MW of renewable electricity.

[retep]

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.

 

The energy that has to be turned off and paid for, as in the case of wind turbines, as the grid can't cope with too much electricity, or store it, which I thought the opening article was about, using excess power to make the petrol.

[Obelix]

Is the production of hydrogen much more efficient than the production of petrol?

 

On a thermal cycle yes. The idea is to generate it by a nuclear plant process. There are a number of Gen 4 designes that provide sufficient heat for the sulphur iodine cycle. This is a thermochemical cycle and is well over 50% efficient.

 

More importantly you don't need to use electricity, so you dont have the associated generation losses - you can cut out that process that loses over half the energy and use direct heat from the primary reactor loop. The idea is that you generate electricity during the day, and at night instead of reducing reactor power you generate hydrogen instead.

[Obelix]

The energy that has to be turned off and paid for, as in the case of wind turbines, as the grid can't cope with too much electricity, or store it, which I thought the opening article was about, using excess power to make the petrol.

 

The number of times that we actually have too much wind is very small though - it's not really that big an issue and the payments to stop making power is a political problem.

[Alcoblog]

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?..

 

Erm ... I'm not getting into an argument about this. All I'm pointing out is that things which seem absolute aren't necessarily so, as has been proved on many occasions. The human brain is very small in the scheme of things.

[retep]

The number of times that we actually have too much wind is very small though - it's not really that big an issue and the payments to stop making power is a political problem.

 

I did post this earlier, but not the headline, seems big enough to me if thats just the bill for Scotland

 

http://www.communitiesagainstturbinesscotland.com/2011/10/9453249-to-stand-idle-in-september-was-paid-to-wind-farms-in-scotland-contributing-to-the-inflated-energy-company-profits/

 

£9,453,249-to stand idle- in September- was paid to wind farms in Scotland-contributing to the inflated energy company profits!

[Obelix]

Air Fuel Synthesis plan to produce 1,000 tonnes of liquid hydrocarbon fuel per day using approx 3,000 MW of renewable electricity.

 

Where are you going to get 3GW of renewable power from? That's the same as three Sizewell B nuclear plants and is effectivly our entire installed renewable capacity, most of which goes to provide power to the grid.

 

All that to produce less than 1% of the total hydrocarbon demand in the UK.

 

Just saying....

[Cyclone]

Erm ... I'm not getting into an argument about this. All I'm pointing out is that things which seem absolute aren't necessarily so, as has been proved on many occasions. The human brain is very small in the scheme of things.

 

In this case though there is no evidence that they have broken the laws of thermodynamics, the process is operating within them (as does everything that we have ever thought to try) and it is 20% efficient, which is rubbish.

[dosxuk]

All I'm pointing out is that things which seem absolute aren't necessarily so, as has been proved on many occasions.

 

For free energy and perpetual motion to be possible it would require the current laws to be completely wrong. And if that was the case, we would have some indication of that.

 

The reasons why we don't get free energy are pretty well understood. For it to suddenly be possible would require centuries of research and understanding to all be completely wrong.

 

And we're not talking about a "flat earth" style wrongness - that was primarily driven by assumption, and was disproved as soon as people started researching it and experimenting and they found the results did not match the hypothesis.