Magical Gas Conjured from Thin Air

October 19th, 2012 by Chris Milton

Temperatures are rising. Not only are environmentalists getting hot under the collar, but the world is too.

It’s all to do with that nasty carbon dioxide which cars and industrial processes pump out. Surely, there has to be a neat easy and simple solution to take all this nasty carbon dioxide and turn it into fuel?

Well now there is.

Magic green gas

Air Fuel Synthesis (AFS) in the UK has developed a system which combines carbon dioxide and water to produce a hydrocarbon base product. This base product can then be converted into most of the gasoline products we’ve got used to getting from oil.

It’s not that the science is particularly complicated; it’s just that AFS has managed to nail the end-to-end process and use renewable energy to power it.

In essence, it works like this:

Wind turbines produce electricity to power an electrolyser. This splits water into hydrogen and oxygen and the hydrogen is combined with carbon dioxide from the air to make the base hydrocarbon. The hydrocarbon can then be used to produce gas, lubricants, plastics, and all other sorts of goodies.

Furthermore, the gas doesn’t need any special additives and can go straight into today’s cars without engine modifications. No batteries, no hydrogen fuel cells, nothing. Just pump it in like regular gas, from a regular pump.

The company has already built a demonstrator unit at its $1.7m development base which is churning out up to 10 litres of hydrocarbon a day. Its next aim is to raise the funding to take the project to the next level.

“We think that by the end of 2014, provided we can get the funding going, we can be producing petrol using renewable energy and doing it on a commercial basis,” says AFS CEO Peter Harrison. “We ought to be aiming for a refinery-scale operation within the next 15 years.”

He’s also fully aware of the impact the company’s process could have on an oil-dominated world.

“You have the potential to change the economics of a country if you can make your own fuel,” Harrison continues. “We’re talking to a number of island communities around the world and other niche markets to help solve their energy problems.”

There’s a whole basketful of if’s and but’s, the most important of which are: 1) whether the scaled up process can run exclusively from renewable energy, and 2) what the cost will be.

That said, this is believed to be the first such end-to-end process anywhere in the world. Not so much “carbon capture and storage,” as carbon capture and reuse.

A holy grail for clean technology if ever there was one, and perhaps the horizon of a post–fossil fuel economy.

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Tags: afs, alternative fuel systems, gas from air, gas from water, holy grail, hydrocarbon, peter harrison

About the Author

Chris Milton is a seasoned sustainability journalist focusing on business, finance and clean technology. His writing's been carried by a number of highly respected publishers, including The Guardian, The Washington Post and Scientific American. You can follow him on twitter as @britesprite, where he's one of Mashable's top green tweeters and Fast Company's CSR thought leaders. Alternatively you can follow him to the shops... but that would be boring.

Charles Hammond

1.2mil for just a few ounces of fuel. What a joke.
Charles Hammond

Buld it next to a coal fired plant or a refinery and get some good co2.
Altair IV

I’m personally not too thrilled over developments like this. It may be carbon-neutral, but it does little to address more localized problems of smog and noise pollution. I’m want to see cities full of quiet, efficient, non-emitting electric vehicles (and other motorized devices), not a continuation of our current noisome, gas-guzzling ways.

The only area where I can really see this as being beneficial is in aviation fuel and the like, where high-density portable energy storage is still needed. AFAIK, a 747 can’t run on batteries.
Craig Allen

On their website they lay out aspirational plans, but provide no specifics about any technology they have produced. They have pictures of devices in a room that are supposedly their pilot plant, but provide no details about what they are except for a cartoonish diagram and talk of using “off the shelf” equipment. Sounds dodgy.
Ronald Brak

One potential source of carbon neutral CO2 is fermentation. Yeast could turn sugar or other organic material into alcohol or other liquid fuel and the almost pure CO2 released could be used to create additional liquid fuel. On the other hand, if we start to electrify ground transport in a major way we should have plenty of oil left over for flight and we could remove and sequester the CO2 released rather than use synthetic fuels if that turns out to be more practical.
Bob_Wallace

Here’s the problem with these schemes – they require a concentrated CO2 input. They don’t work with recycled CO2 from the air.

They will get built where they can suck up the CO2 from coal plants. To the extent they displace some oil consumption, that’s good. But they would likely help extend the amount of time we continue to burn coal.

It would be much harder to shut down a coal plant if it was sistered to a liquid fuel plant. We should do nothing that extends the life of coal.

There’s a much better idea. Drive with renewable electricity. Skip the CO2 altogether.
- James Wimberley
  
  The company claim they extract the CO2 directly from air. See http://airfuelsynthesis.com/technology/technical-review.html
  
  You may well be right about cars, but planes and perhaps ships and trucks will still require hydrocarbons, absent some colossal breakthrough in batteries.
  
  What I like about this technology is that it offers a way to store variable solar and wind energy in a readily usable and concentrated form. You could for example run gas turbine generators when the renewables are taking a break.
  - Bob_Wallace
    
    You’re right. They seem to be saying that they can use atmospheric CO2. If so, then I’ve got no complaints with what they are doing. We will need some liquid fuels and if they can be made efficiently using atmospheric carbon then that’s great.
    
    (But keep your eye on them. Another company that was claiming they could use atmospheric finally admitted they were going to be locating next to coal plants where they could pump in concentrated CO2. Remember, there’s only 391.57 *parts per million CO2 in atmospheric air. Too much for the climate, but an awfully small amount for manufacturing.*)
    
    —
    
    We can cut our use of liquid fuels for airplanes by ~50% by moving moderate distance travel to electrified high speed rail. Get there as quickly and in a lot more comfort.
    
    We can drastically cut our use of liquid fuels by moving most freight to electrified rail. Just use trucks for shuttling from rail siding to warehouse/factory. We’ve already got battery powered 18-wheelers with a 100 mile range. Trucks would be great candidates for battery swapping at the rail siding.
    
    Ships. Already we’re seeing significant increases in efficiency. And we need to move more manufacturing closer to markets and avoid long distance shipping as much as possible.