FRIEZE NEW YORK 2013
INTERNATIONAL HOME + HOUSEWARES SHOW 2013
TOKYO DESIGN WEEK 2012
BEIJING DESIGN WEEK 2012
As of this weekend, the big story in the Tri-State Area is gas. Whether you're in Jersey or the five boroughs, petrol is scarce, lines are long and tempers are running short. So I was extra astonished to read, in the Telegraph, that a UK-based energy company has made a novel breakthrough: They can now create synthetic gasoline—out of air.
The company, Air Fuel Synthesis, explains it as follows:
Air Fuel Synthesis uses renewable energy to do what nature does with photosynthesis and time, converting carbon dioxide into oil. Put simply, Air Fuel Synthesis converts carbon dioxide and water into synthetic hydrocarbon liquids from which sustainable fuels or other oil based products can be made....Oil is basically made from carbon and hydrogen. Carbon is in the air in the form of carbon dioxide and hydrogen can be found in water.
In this manner, AFS was able to produce five liters of gasoline in less than three months. Obviously that's not quick enough by conventional standards, but the fact that it can be done at all is amazing. They're aiming to scale up to "a large plant, which could produce more than a tonne of petrol every day, within two years and a refinery size operation within the next 15 years."
While the synthetic fuel presumably gives off the same emissions as regular petrol when run through an engine, harvesting it is a carbon-neutral affair, as AFS uses renewable energy sources for the electricity required during the conversion. "But the best news," the company writes, "is that (once the capital investment is covered) the manufacture of sustainable, carbon-neutral AFS fuels is unrestricted by the price of raw materials, geo or local politics and avoids the land use or food availability issues that affect biofuels. Thus fuel production costs are low and predictable for the life of the plant."
You can learn more about the technology here.
Comments
This seems very fishy. Firstly, I will say that I certainly believe their claims, but I can't think how this can actually be sustainable, as I asume they use electricity to make this fuel, thus they use the require energy to break and reattach the molecular bonds, which is what gives fuel its energy, so essentially we're converting electricity into gasoline, and probably fairly inefficiently considering the efficiency of electrical grids, chemical processes and such.
In the end, this will use more energy than it produces, just like the corn ethanol that was so popular a while back.
That might be true evan, but this will help us get around the problem of transforming everything, from ships to trains, to electric motors and developing the batteries they need, and it's a better alternative to regular petrol, considering it sequesters CO2 from the air and can be generated from solar energy.
I want something like this in my car. Fill up with water and use solar to provide the electricity to convert it.