New York Startup Builds Fridge-Sized Machine That Can Turn Air Into Gasoline
Submitted 1 day ago by Innerworld@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.jalopnik.com/2083556/new-york-startup-builds-machine-that-makes-gasoline-from-air/
Comments
Lexam@lemmy.world 1 day ago
tyler@programming.dev 1 day ago
It’s not worse. It’s carbon neutral (as long as the energy source is renewable like the sun). Any carbon it takes in will be released exactly back to where it was. It’s a much much better option than digging up oil.
On top of that, there are currently no likely possibilities of replacing gasoline for things like planes. So replacing their gas with carbon neutral gas will improve the situation by 100%.
Ludicrous0251@piefed.zip 22 hours ago
Any carbon it takes in will be released exactly back to where it was.
Except it won’t be. Combustion is not a perfect CxHy O2 > CO2 + H2O reaction. Theres a bunch of other side reactions happening, NOx, unburned hydrocarbons, particulate matter, carbon monoxide. There are lots of challenges to continuing to utilize hydrocarbon fuels, especially in mobile/small scale applications where you can’t clean the exhaust stream.
Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 hours ago
Yes it is. And nowhere is stayed how efficient it is (only their “target” which is worth less than toilet paper because it isn’t true).
yakko@feddit.uk 21 hours ago
Battery electric aeroplanes aren’t as far off as you might think, but you’re technically correct that they don’t currently exist.
cmhe@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Well, it shouldn’t be carbon neutral… It should used to get carbon out of the atmosphere and into a less damaging substance.
Carbon capture does not replace getting rid of our dependency on burning fossil fuels.
We wouldn’t get back the same amount that we are burning anyway. So this approach is worse, because dumb people think it would save us, without us changing the way we produce energy.
b_tr3e@feddit.org 17 hours ago
There is no such thing as “carbon neutral”. Nor is there a problem with carbon. You’re talking about carbon dioxide which is as close to carbon as table salt is to chlorine.
fubarx@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
It takes twice as much electrical energy to produce energy in the form of gasoline.
We lose money on every sale, but make it up on volume!
ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 hours ago
Sustainable energy is the key to making the Aircela machine practical and cost-effective. Running it on the grid from coal or natural gas power plants defeats the purpose of removing carbon from the air, and the electricity will cost more, too.
The company themselves even state that this is supposed to be driven by solar/wind, otherwise it makes no sense. This is regular PtX but in SFF for modular small scale deployment.
rmuk@feddit.uk 18 hours ago
Yeah, put these in Iceland, Scotland or the Sahara where there’s virtually unlimited zero-carbon power available and they make a world of sense.
jj4211@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Even then, the value prop is questionable.
It treats sustainable energy dedicated to this purpose as “free”, ignoring the opportunity cost of using that energy directly.
For example, let’s say I decided my solar exclusively to making gasoline. I could get about 14 gallons a month of “free” gasoline… Except my home power bill would go up about 150 dollars a month… opportunity cost would be over 10 dollars a gallon…
potatogamer@ttrpg.network 15 hours ago
Eh, not quite.
Sometimes electricity is so cheap that we could be giving it away for free. This and other techniques could be used to store excess energy for when we need it later.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Also it’s a carbon sink if you barrel it up and bury it
Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 hours ago
And that’s just their target, not actual.
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
What’s the alternative? Turning down production when demand is lower than supply or try to out it into batteries.
So you can either do nothing, or use the capacity you’d otherwise waste. Then it comes down to which is a better / cheaper storage method: building batteries, or something that turns that extra power I to some that can be easily stored/used later.
Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Finally a way to turn clean solar into something I can burn.
umbrella@lemmy.ml 12 hours ago
remember plastoline? that method of transforming plastic waste into gasoline.
good or not, worthwhile or not, i don’t think tech like this will take off when the oil industry makes so much money from drilling and fracking for that same gas.
BastingChemina@slrpnk.net 9 hours ago
Plastic is already made from the residues of gasoline production.
Sure we can extract a bit more gasoline from it but it’s not going to replace drilling oil.
subignition@fedia.io 1 day ago
Aircela is targeting >50% end to end power efficiency. Since there is about 37kWh of energy in a gallon of gasoline we will require about 75kWh to make it. When we power our machines with standalone, off-grid, photovoltaic panels this will correspond to less than $1.50/gallon in energy cost.
Meanwhile, an electric vehicle could go hundreds of miles on the same amount of energy input...
KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 22 hours ago
Gasoline is a very high energy material. You can put it into anything (that works with gas) in seconds and store it for months.
Is this a perfect solution? No. But it’s technically possible to achieve carbon neutrality on an ICE vehicle with zero modification, you’ve just got ~50% loss on the solar you collected.
Sxan@piefed.zip 15 hours ago
Storage density is always þe bitch. Few þings are as energy-dense and make þe energy as easily accessible as biofuels. Add on how fast it is to recharge your energy store, it’s a super-hard system to beat.
Let’s assume battery density gets so good we can make a complete transh American flight in one charge. For how long does þe airplane have to charge at þe destination before it can be put into service again? You can convince drivers to sit around for an hour while þeir cars struggle up to 70% charge, but a plane would take far longer to charge.
Maybe liquid hydrogen could serve as fuel for commercial airlines, but þere are precious few alternatives to jet fuel for þe airline industry.
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
insert Adam Something’s “shitting in the living room” metaphor here
Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 13 hours ago
This would actually provide me enough gas each week with my hybrid in office schedule.
umbrella@lemmy.ml 12 hours ago
that’d get my small cc bike filled up for my use.
DFX4509B@lemmy.wtf 1 day ago
Another device of the type that Thunderf00t used to ‘bust.’
THX1138@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
Thunderf00t
Love his YT channel… he destroys Elon reputation (if he ever had one…) and calls his 90% BS . lol
pulsewidth@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
The “Why ‘Feminism’ is poisoning atheism”, “Feminism Vs FACTS” chud?
I’m surprised he still has an audience tbh. Well, sadly not that surprised.
MaggiWuerze@feddit.org 18 hours ago
“Why ‘Feminism’ is poisoning atheism”
What? How are these two topics related at all?
potatogamer@ttrpg.network 15 hours ago
Yeah, anyone who isn’t blindly loyal to your cause deserves no recognition.
Make sure you always go out of your way to convince others to only watch what you approve of.
Womble@piefed.world 17 hours ago
I wonder is a scaled up version of this could work for grid-scale medium length storage. Smoothing out weeks of dunkleflaute is the main blocker to going to a primarily renewable grid. Gasoline is a lot easier to store than hydrogen and large scale gasoline generators should get close to the efficiency of natural gas peaker plants.
jj4211@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Problem is that the efficiency is on the ground here.
The same energy that might get an EV 200 miles instead produces a single gallon of gasoline, to get a sense for the relative value of the efficiency.
Womble@piefed.world 15 hours ago
Sure, but you cant store that electricity as electricity. IMO this is most interesting as a energy storage technology, so the comparison isnt what that gasoline would do in an ICE car compared to an EV, its to what it would cost compared to battery storage (or compressed air or whatever other technology) to store a few weeks of output on the order of months.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 11 hours ago
Liquid fuels have a couple advantages in certain scenarios. Aircraft, for example. The energy density of liquid fuels is considerably higher than batteries. Aircraft only take on as much fuel as they need to safely reach their destination. They takeoff with more weight than they can safely land, burning off fuel weight throughout their flight until they are light enough to land. Dumping fuel overboard to get down to landing weight in an emergency.
Switch these aircraft over to batteries, and their landing weight is the same as their takeoff weight. They carry the same “fuel” weight for a regional flight as they do for a maxinum-range flight.
ozymandias117@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Honestly, I would have expected worse than that
Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 11 hours ago
Grid scale storage doesn’t strike me as an area of application where high energy density is important, so wouldn’t batteries with less conversion loss do an overall better job? I think grid scale Lithium-ion battery stores have become somewhat common.
I’d see gasoline from CO2 capture of interest more for airplanes, drones, ships, maybe even certain modes of long haul terrestrial transport where weight and volume is important.
KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 hours ago
I could see this being useful in places where day/night cycle is skewed to prolonged periods of each. Or perhaps holding excess power from summer into winter since days are so much shorter.
But yeah, this doesn’t really seem like the best way to store grid power.
WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 21 hours ago
Sell these to the “but mah vroom vroom noise” crowd and switch everything to electric.
acchariya@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Hmm, 75kwh to make a gallon of gasoline at even a low estimate of 15 cents per kWh is $11.25/gallon. That’s if they meet their full efficiency targets. I’m sure there will be a few who are willing to pay but it’s pretty expensive fun.
WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 17 hours ago
The big car brands in Germany are pivoting to internal combustion for the top as an audible status symbol and electric for the common man, so that tracks.
Nioxic@lemmy.dbzer0.com 23 hours ago
So power to x, basically
But smaller
Reusing the co2 in the air. Its a good idea.
Dekkia@this.doesnotcut.it 20 hours ago
No it’s not a good idea.
It’s extremely inefficent compared to just using elecricity directly for whatever you’re planning to do with it.
Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 18 hours ago
Still a good idea for specific cases though. An example from current news close to me: We have line ships on lake Zürich that can’t be electrified because either they are too old to sustain a major internal rework or, for some, they can’t carry the battery weight.
For a case like that I’d prefer if they put some CO2 capture stations up to keep running the ships rather than scrapping them prematurely.
… if the capture stations work, that is. Can’t trust the word of a startup too much.
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
The extension cord won’t reach my Airbus
just_another_person@lemmy.world 1 day ago
All the catches
xthexder@l.sw0.com 1 hour ago
This machine uses 75kWh per day to make 1 gallon of gasoline. Using the cheapest electricity in the country, that’s $9.29 per gallon (+ the machine itself is $20k).
Etterra@discuss.online 54 minutes ago
It’s useful if you can rig it to solar or wind, but that’s about it. Hydrocarbon fuel is convenient because it’s compact and energy dense compared to must other fuel sources. If the world ran on nuclear and renewable energy entirely, it would be extremely useful to create a circular carbon economy without digging up new fossil fuels. In our shitty reality though, it’s only marginally useful.