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%.
Battery electric aeroplanes aren’t as far off as you might think, but you’re technically correct that they don’t currently exist.
No they do exist! But most scientists agree that we are unlikely to ever see commercial airliners using it, nor will freight liners use it. We would have to see ENORMOUS scientific improvements and many many many things that seem incredibly far fetched invented to get to that point.
You overstate your case, several firms are already at various stages. Wright Electric is working on a >500km range passenger craft for easyJet right now. That won’t be able to fill every role, but a worthwhile number of them to be sure.
If you could link that it would be great. As far as I understand it, a commercial passenger plane (which holds several hundred people) is no where close to being possible. If you are talking about small planes that hold maximum ten-15 people then sure.
I just read it from the Wikipedia page. Their site doesn’t have a lot of info other than a white paper
There are lots of claims going around, but the physics just isn’t there. Battery storage density isn’t high enough currently (and doesn’t look to be close) to support large planes. It’s the same problem as with 18 wheelers. The larger the vehicle, the battery size increases superlinearly, not linearly. Because adding in battery storage increases the weight required to carry the vehicle, thus increasing the battery storage needs, thus … and so on. With liquid fuel, the weight is variable based on the passengers, and the weight drops as the flight continues, thus increasing fuel efficiency the more weight is lost.
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.
You can vote me down as much as you want. You still have no clue of chemistry - or anything else you’re babbling about. Morons.
How about you go argue with the scientists calling it carbon neutral. My wife literally works in the field. It’s called carbon neutral.
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).
The efficiency doesn’t matter (to a point of manufacturing solar cells, or wind turbines, or whatever your equipment is for your renewable energy source). If all of the gasoline is generated from the air using renewable energy, it could take 100x the energy and still be completely carbon neutral. Carbon neutrality is based on the amount of excess carbon added to the air. If no carbon is added then by definition it’s carbon neutral.
Porsche already has a factory in Chile that is doing this exact same thing at a much larger scale.
This is just wrong, except if you live in some theory reality. It’s like saying if a car can go a hundred miles in a hundred years it’ll get there.
There’s a reason why people don’t build small dinky toys like this and efficiency is why, anong other things like that pesky “cost”.
Please do explain how it’s wrong. Go on, I’ll wait.
The cost of that thingy outweights the benefits. It misses out economy of scale that you get in big plants. Even with “free” electricity, It’s probably making both more expensive gas and is worse for the climate when you throw it away after it breaks down for the twelfth time in a year and you wonder why it cost so much initially.
But you think it’s kind of neat I guess.
No I’m asking you to explain how it’s not carbon neutral. I do not give one shit about the cost, I do not give one shit about how much the gas it produces costs (for reference the Porsche plant is at over $40 a LITER). You have stated it’s not carbon neutral. Explain how. If the machine does what it says then it is carbon neutral.
I have an electric car, I do not care about this machine. But I do care when people claim something and have zero evidence to back it up.
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.
It is worse, because it is a distraction from actually doing something.
Until we get rid of the necessity for gasoline, this is better than extracting new fossil fuels and might be better than biofuels produced far away.
Also, I don’t think any form of carbon capture from atmosphere is realistic at scale to reduce CO2. You need atv least as much energy as we are burning just to keep up, and that’s assuming 100% efficiency which is impossible. Focusing on reducing new CO2 emitted seems more effective
Finally a way to turn clean solar into something I can burn.
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!
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.
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.
Carbon dioxide needs to be captured were there is a lot of carbon dioxide in the air. So especially around cities with lots of car traffic, or around fossil fuel power plants…
So… It would be better to stop car traffic and fossil fuel power plants first, before doing carbon capture. And the purpose of that should be, making the air cleaner. And putting that carbon back into a less environmental damaging state.
CO2 doesn’t vary much in concentration by how close you are to an emission source unless you are literally sucking air out of a tailpipe. You might get a 10-20% increase in the centre of a city instead of the countryside, hardly enough to make up for being somewhere with so much energy coming in that they frequently have to curtail it (which could then be used for this instead).
This isnt CCS which cheaply turns CO2 into an inert form of carbon, its an expensive process for turning CO2 into a very useful form.
Sort of. Wind is very good at stirring things up, but you can still see differences in places where there are a lot of plants (1-2%). This things needs CO2 to function and that means it needs concentration so the more CO2 to start with the better.
Fortunately this is small and electric is something we already move to cities in large quantities. Putting it in a city makes sense - assuming it works and is safe of course.
I didn’t know the machine needed no maintenance and that its own life cycle was carbon neutral. TIL/s
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 dedicated 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…
Sure, for a homeowner it doesn’t make sense. But what about at grid scale when there isn’t enough demand for that electricity?
What opportunity cost is there to NOT do it when the power would otherwise be wasted or generation capacity reduced? If anything, I’d say the opportunity cost is of not doing this with over generation on the grid/plant
How much do we have an over generation problem in general though? I suppose the argument would be that solar is curtailed because they don’t want to deal with the potential for overgeneration, but we already have a number of approaches for energy storage. Their pricing for generating at most a gallon a day is a price exceeding a battery system of LFP that could do a lot more than a gallon of gas. This is ignoring the rather significant potential of Sodium batteries.
So this doesn’t look to be cheaper than battery systems, it looks to be way less efficient than battery systems. The biggest use case as energy storage in general seems to be if you want it to spend a few months (but not too many months, fuel degrades in the tank after all). The more narrow use case is to cater to scenarios where you absolutely need the energy density of gasoline, so boats and airplanes critically so, maybe some heavy equipment. I’ll grant that, but if particularly sodium batteries will be an acceptable approach, it’ll be better than this solution in that very wide variety of circumstances.
Over generation is very big. I agree batteries are better, though.
We need to be able to support peak winter heating and peak summer cooling and we need to do that with excess margin.
Everything in between we have excess power, unless it’s something like hydro dams which are easy to control and aren’t a big extra cost and part of how they naturally operate.
We generally use gas peaker plants to help which we can turn off or on, but it’s more efficient to not do that, and those are expensive.
It would also make it easier to build big nuclear plants if we could manage the off peak load into batteries for the day.
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.
And that’s just their target, not actual.
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…
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.
Triggered by “ICE” rn
First Magic: The Gathering, and now this. Have Republicans no shame?
What Republican reference is MTG?
Marjorie Taylor Greene - former(recently) GA House rep
I have never heard of her…but I don’t follow US politics either so that’s probably why.
Your life is better for it
remember plastoline? that method of relatively easily 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.
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.
insert Adam Something’s “shitting in the living room” metaphor here
Kind of pretty important and relevant:
The main reason why this process isn’t “something for nothing” is that it takes twice as much electrical energy to produce energy in the form of gasoline. As Aircela told The Autopian:
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.
So basically juat imagine a gas powered generator hooked up to this to power the process of pulling gasoline out of the air.
Ok, see how that’s silly?
Right, now, if you do run it off solar power, then sure! That makes more sense.
Hate hyrdocarbon fuels all you want, they are very good at being dense, portable, and exist in the vast majority of pre-existing logistics infrastructure.
But the thing isn’t magic, it takes energy to convert air into basically a form of liquid energy.
And… you’d probably have to refine it or chemically treat it at least somewhat.
I’m not a chemist, but I am guessing this is the case, if you want gasoline that is just equivalent to what your car would expect.
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.
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.
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. The big advantage I see here is that unlike those other technologies capacity is dirt cheap to build, its just a metal tank. So whenever a renewable plant would curtail its output it can instead redirect to creating gasoline to burn when the renewables arent producing much electricity.
Honestly, I would have expected worse than that
At least taking their figures at face value, about 75kwh to generate a gallon of gas, and let’s say 67 kwh to get a an EV 200 miles (assuming some losses between the generation and the actual battery capacity, and 3 miles/kwh which is on the low-ish end of EVs, but realistically close). The most aggressive hybrids getting 50 mpg so we end up with it being about 4x worse than charging an EV with that energy source.
At least at residential rates where I live, that’s about $10, so it would only really make sense when gas gets to $10/gallon, otherwise, go to the pump for the fossil fuel. That’s ignoring the cost of the station itself.
So maybe nearer than one might imagine, but still highly impractical. Maybe if they doubled the efficiency and gas eeks up without residential electricity rates going up…
But all this is assuming it will work exactly as well as they say it is, and I’ve learned to have a healthy dose of skepticism… Here though I can be as optimistic as they like and it’s still a tough sell…
This would actually provide me enough gas each week with my hybrid in office schedule.
that’d get my small cc bike filled up for my use.
So power to x, basically
But smaller
Reusing the co2 in the air. Its a good idea.
I imagine this as a system that uses spare renewable energy like solar to generate gas that can be used to smooth the curve that is a renewable power source. It’s real value is that it reduces infrastructure needs, allowing its use in remote environments. But it does add a lot of additional failure points.
The machine also traps water vapor, and uses electrolysis to break water down into hydrogen and oxygen instead of destroying your car’s cooling system.
what the fuck does this even mean
There is a lot of water (H2O) in the air too. This is bad for the car.
The machine uses electricity to force the H2O molecule to break down into H2 and O2, common gases. This does not hurt the car.
All the catches
I swear Porche was already doing something similar…years ago.
