Practically Classics Forum

Petrol 'produced from air and water'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20003704

A British firm based on Teesside says it's designed revolutionary new technology that can produce petrol using air and water.

Air Fuel Synthesis in Stockton-on-Tees has produced five litres of petrol since August, but hopes to be in production by 2015 making synthetic fuel targeted at the motor sports sector.

The company believes the technique could help solve energy supply problems and curb global warming.

Also

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/artic ... -engineers

And on the Reuters news site

http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/10/1 ... C920121019

Engineers at Air Fuel Synthesis (AFS) in Teeside, northern England, say they have produced 5 litres of synthetic petrol over a period of three months.

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.

By using renewable energy to power the process, it is possible to create carbon-neutral fuel that can be used in an identical way to standard petrol, scientists behind the technology say.

"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.

The work is part of a two-year project that has so far cost around 1 million pounds.

The green petrol will not appear on forecourts any time soon, though.

"We can't make (the petrol) at pump prices, but we will do eventually," Harrison said. "All we need is renewable energy to make it, and so when oil becomes a problem we will be able to make a contribution to keep cars moving or to keep aeroplanes moving."

AFS said it was confident the technology could be scaled up to refinery size in the future. Each of the processes that go into making the fuel already take place separately on an industrial scale.

For now, however, AFS plans to build a commercial plant in the next two years that will produce around 1,200 litres a day of specialist fuels for the motorsports sector, Harrison said.

(Reporting by Alice Baghdjian; Editing by Chris Wickham and Jane Baird)

I'm no chemist but I do know that methanol has to be drained from tanks after use, as it gums up the fuel system (Fuel consumption is very high with methanol too). I hope that this product doesn't have the same problems as bio fuels/methanol.

There is am american firm that has been doing it for years. They use hundreds of mirrors to reflect and focus enough sunlight to create the huge amount of heat which is needed to do it. Unfortunately it produces such a small amount of fuel for the energy required and expense of setting up, it is economically not viable. However as a concept it is quite interesting.

When someone invents a system that connects to your exhaust pipe and fuel tank so your fumes are converted back in to petrol and go straight back in ideally at the same rate you burn it, i will be interested

Much like fusion power, these things are interesting experiments but a long way off being even remotely viable. They're to some extent an engineering dead end because the real solution to the hydrocarbon problem is more or less there now anyway, hydrogen fuel cell cars.

I saw the Honda hydrogen fuel cell car on top gear some time ago.

But as May said, hydrogen forms strong bonds so we need to figure a way of producing large enough quantities cheaply enough - which seems to be the same problem that the methanol from air and water producers are having.

In the long run, I would put my bets on the hydrogen as it is used to run an electric rather than an internal combustion engine. This would be the way to go because you would have only 2 bearings and a set of brushes to worry about as well as getting full torque from almost zero rpm. The only real calamity might be burning out the windings.

You could run a "normal" car on hydrogen too. It's great stuff if a little bit on the dangerous side. (Think about being involved in a car crash with 50l of it in your boot)

You can make diesel from almost any hydrocarbon based material using relatively little energy. I read an article about it sometime back where the German firm involved said that they had made fuel from dead cats and dogs. The USAF has been experimenting with jet fuel made from coal, too, but I prefer the dead cats option.

2.5L per dead cat sounds good to me. http://www.geek.com/articles/news/germa ... -20070316/

True Richard. I remember Dick Strawbridge picking up old cooking oil from the chippy to convert at home for his Land Rover.

Problem with a lot of home made "bio diesel" is quality and a lot of modern cars have fuel system software that senses this stuff as "bad quality fuel" likely to damage the engine (on moderns it often can) so puts the engine into limp home mode.

Many French drivers used to run their Peugot diesels on a mixture of pump diesel and 25% cooking oil and technically, Peugot were OK with this, but we are going back over 10 years now.

A local Land Rover specialist reckons the old 2.25's will run OK on pure veg oil, but anything newer and you are asking for trouble.

The TD5 runs ok 50/50 veg oil and diesel in the summer months. Aparantly it would be OK in the winter if we fitted a fuel heater. It also runs on kerosine but feels down on power.

TerryG wrote:It also runs on kerosine but feels down on power

Tut, tut, I wouldn't admit to that in a public forum, it's illegal if you don't pay duty on it. Besides, I wouldn't run any diesel on kerosene, it causes accelerated wear of the injection components, and probably the bores, as it doesn't have the lubricating properties of diesel.