Instead of blasting rock and forcing oil sludge to the earth’s surface; instead of usurping land rights from American citizens to allow a Canadian company to lay thousands of miles of environmentally risky pipeline across our nation; instead of tainting underground water supplies because of fracking – what if we just simply drained the excess carbon from our atmosphere and converted it into cleaner gasoline that has been refined using solar electricity?
According to the Telegraph, a company in Teeside, northern England has taken the first step toward accomplishing that goal: they have used “air capture” technology to create synthetic petroleum from carbon that has been removed from the atmosphere and then combined with hydrogen that has been extracted from water.
Experts tonight hailed the astonishing breakthrough as a potential “game-changer” in the battle against climate change and a saviour for the world’s energy crisis.
The technology, presented to a London engineering conference this week, removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
The “petrol from air” technology involves taking sodium hydroxide and mixing it with carbon dioxide before "electrolysing" the sodium carbonate that it produces to form pure carbon dioxide.
Hydrogen is then produced by electrolysing water vapour captured with a dehumidifier.
The company, Air Fuel Synthesis, then uses the carbon dioxide and hydrogen to produce methanol which in turn is passed through a gasoline fuel reactor, creating petrol.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/...
Reuters describes the process this way:
The technique involves extracting carbon dioxide from air and hydrogen from water, and combining them in a reactor with a catalyst to make methanol. The methanol is then converted into petrol.
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"It's actually cleaner because it's synthetic," Peter Harrison, chief executive officer of AFS, said in an interview.
"You just make what you need to make in terms of the contents of it, so it doesn't contain what might be seen as pollutants, like sulphur," he said.
http://www.reuters.com/...
Scientists have been familiar with the technology for sometime, but the British company has actually brought it to small scale fruition. AFS hopes to build a plant within two years that has the capacity to produce 317 gallons of gasoline per day. A refinery-sized operation could be up and running within fifteen years.
The Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) officials said the process “could prove to be a “game-changer” in the battle against climate change.”
The technology takes only one small step toward solving global warming, but it is the first positive environmental news that we've received in years.