Petrol from Air - Renewable Energy Solution?

British engineers produce amazing 'petrol from air' technology

Revolutionary new technology that produces “petrol from air” is being produced by a British firm, it emerged tonight.

Image 1 of 4

An Air Fuel Synthesis technical team member with a flask of AFS fuel Photo: Air Fuel Synthesis

By Andrew Hough

11:30PM BST 18 Oct 2012

233 Comments

A small company in the north of England has developed the “air capture” technology to create synthetic petrol using only air and electricity.

Experts tonight hailed the astonishing breakthrough as a potential “game-changer” in the battle against climate change and a saviour for the world’s energy crisis.

The technology, presented to a London engineering conference this week, removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The “petrol from air” technology involves taking sodium hydroxide and mixing it with carbon dioxide before "electrolysing" the sodium carbonate that it produces to form pure carbon dioxide.

Hydrogen is then produced by electrolysing water vapour captured with a dehumidifier.

RELATED ARTICLES

• Cheaper petrol possible as OFT launches price review 
  05 Sep 2012
• Food prices set to rise because of extreme weather, consumers warned 
  05 Sep 2012
• Watchdog orders redress over premium rate texts 
  03 Sep 2012
• How to save £1,500 on household bills 
  24 Aug 2012
• One in five struggles to pay bills 
  23 Aug 2012
• Five million homes face 'shock' energy rise 
  22 Aug 2012

The company, Air Fuel Syndication, then uses the carbon dioxide and hydrogen to produce methanol which in turn is passed through a gasoline fuel reactor, creating petrol.

Company officials say they had produced five litres of petrol in less than three months from a small refinery in Stockton-on-Tees, Teesside.

The fuel that is produced can be used in any regular petrol tank and, if renewable energy is used to provide the electricity it could become “completely carbon neutral”.

The £1.1m project, in development for the past two years, is being funded by a group of unnamed philanthropists who believe the technology could prove to be a lucrative way of creating renewable energy.

While the technology has the backing of Britain’s Institution of Mechanical Engineers, it has yet to capture the interest of major oil companies.

But company executives hope to build 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.

Tonight Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) officials admitted that while the described the technology as being “too good to be true but it is true”, it could prove to be a “game-changer” in the battle against climate change.

Stephen Tetlow, the IMechE chief executive, hailed the breakthrough as “truly groundbreaking”.

“It has the potential to become a great British success story, which opens up a crucial opportunity to reduce carbon emissions,” he said.

“It also has the potential to reduce our exposure to an increasingly volatile global energy market.

“The potential to provide a variety of sustainable fuels for today’s vehicles and infrastructure is especially exciting.”

Dr Tim Fox, the organisation's head of energy and environment, added: “Air capture technology ultimately has the potential to become a game-changer in our quest to avoid dangerous climate change.”

Peter Harrison, the company’s 58 year-old chief executive, told The Daily Telegraph that he was “excited” about the technology’s potential, which “uses renewable energy in a slightly different way”.

“People do find it unusual when I tell them what we are working on and realise what it means,” said Mr Harrison, a civil engineer from Darlington, Co Durham.

“It is an opportunity for a technology to make an impact on climate change and make an impact on the energy crisis facing this country and the world.

"It looks and smells like petrol but it is much cleaner and we don't have any nasty bits."

Europe's top industrial firms have a cache of 240m pollution permits

European Commission estimates energy-intensive sector will have accumulated allowances worth €7-12bn by the end of 2012

Damian Carrington
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 19 June 2011 15.38 BST
larger | smaller

ArcelorMittal steel worker
Steel producer ArcelorMittal tops the list of firms with surplus of emissions trading permits, according to thinktank Sandbag. Photograph AP

Some of Europe's largest industrial companies gained billions of euros from the carbon emission rules they lobbied fiercely against, new analysis reveals today.

Ten steel and cement companies have amassed 240m carbon pollution permits from generous allocations, according to a report by Sandbag, the carbon trading thinktank, seen by the Guardian.

The free permits, granted to companies with a market value of €4bn (£3.5bn), can be sold or kept for future use. The European commission estimates that the entire energy-intensive sector will have accumulated allowances worth €7bn-€12bn by the end of 2012.

"More and more businesses see that Europe's future lies in a highly efficient economy with low pollution," Baroness Worthington, Sandbag's founding director, said. "But a small group of carbon fat-cat companies are trying to stop this, in spite of making billions from a windfall of free pollution permits."

The steelmaker ArcelorMittal leads the list of companies in the report, with a current surplus valued at €1.7bn, followed by Lafarge, the cement group.

Tata Steel, in third place with a surplus valued at €393m, last month announced 1,500 job losses at its plants in Lincolnshire and Teesside, blaming emissions regulations as well as the economic downturn. Karl-Ulrich Köhler, chief executive of Tata Steel Europe, said at the time: "EU carbon legislation threatens to impose huge additional costs on the steel industry." Tata Steel declined to comment on the report.

The European Union emissions trading scheme (ETS) puts a cap on the carbon pollution emitted by energy and industrial companies. Those reducing their emissions can sell their spare permits to those who do not. But a combination of initial over-allocation by national governments and the economic decline has left the steel, cement, chemical, ceramic and paper sectors with many more permits than they need. The industries have lobbied hard against calls from governments including the UK for the tightening of the ETS and other emissions targets.

Eurofer, the lobby group representing all of Europe's steelmakers, said last month: "To remain competitive in the free, global steel markets, European steel needs … legislation that does not harm its competitiveness. But we are gravely concerned that EU climate change policy will do precisely that."

Cembureau, which lobbies for the cement industry, takes a similar line, stating: "It would be irresponsible to shift the [emissions] goalposts."

In the UK, the government has proposed incentivising low-carbon innovation by setting a British floor price for carbon from 2013. But this is opposed by the CBI. John Cridland, the director general of the employers' group, said: "It risks tipping energy-intensive industries over the edge."

The government has made some concessions, promising to produce plans later in 2011 to compensate businesses for any competitive disadvantage.

However, independent analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance found that the carbon permits held by the steel industry would cover its emissions for the next 12 years. "If the steel sector [on aggregate] did not sell any of its surplus, it would not have a need to purchase emissions until 2023," said Guy Turner at Bloomberg NEF.

The Sandbag report, based on public data, also found that nine of the 10 "carbon fat cats" bought between them 24.4m permits from the cheaper international market, mainly from companies in China and India. These can be used within the EU's trading scheme, enabling companies to retain the more valuable European ETS permits. Furthermore, despite the European companies claiming that tougher emissions rules would drive business overseas, some were paying overseas steel and cement companies for their international carbon permits.

"Purchasing carbon offsets from foreign competitors would not seem to be the actions of businesses genuinely concerned that the ETS will drive business abroad," said Worthington.

Not all companies are resisting the tightening of the European ETS. Five major energy groups, including Britain's Scottish and Southern Energy, last week called for spare permits to be withdrawn, a proposal supported by Sandbag.

"Failure to do so could severely hamper business incentives to invest in low-carbon technologies, as the price signal will be skewed in favour of fossil-based solutions," their statement said.

The Guardian contacted all the companies named by Sandbag. Those who responded argued that the surplus permits arose from decreased production and might be needed when the economy recovered. They said that without protection, steel and cement making would be driven to countries with less CO2-efficient manufacturing practices. Many called for global regulation of emissions

A spokesperson for ArcelorMittal said: "As part of our corporate responsibility strategy, we have decided that any sale of such surplus allowances will be reinvested into projects aimed at the improvement of our energy efficiency footprint, as this will help to reduce our overall CO2 emissions."

Erwin Schneider, at the steelmaker ThyssenKrupp, said: "Companies make decisions based on expected future developments. Any earnings from the past will either have been reinvested already or paid out to shareholders. Therefore it seems to be very misleading to use historic numbers to address our future position."

Don't be fooled by Bush's defection: his cures are another form of denial

The president's avowed conversion on climate change is illusory. He is just drumming up new business for his chums

George Monbiot
Tuesday January 30, 2007
The Guardian

George Bush proposes to deal with climate change by means of smoke and mirrors. So what's new? Only that it is no longer just a metaphor. After six years of obfuscation and denial, the US now insists that we find ways to block some of the sunlight reaching the earth. This means launching either mirrors or clouds of small particles into the atmosphere.
The demand appears in a recent US memo to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It describes "modifying solar radiance" as "important insurance" against the threat of climate change. A more accurate description might be important insurance against the need to cut emissions.
Every scheme that could give us a chance of preventing runaway climate change should be considered on its merits. But the proposals for building a global parasol don't have very many. A group of nuclear weapons scientists at the Lawrence Livermore laboratory in California, apparently bored of experimenting with only one kind of mass death, have proposed launching into the atmosphere a million tonnes of tiny aluminium balloons, filled with hydrogen, every year. One unfortunate side-effect would be to eliminate the ozone layer.
Another proposal, from a scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colorado, suggests spraying billions of tonnes of sea-water into the air. Regrettably, the production of small salt particles, while generating obscuring mists, could cause droughts in the countries downwind. Another scheme would inject sulphate particles into the stratosphere. It is perhaps less dangerous than the others, but still carries a risk of causing changes in rainfall patterns. As for flipping a giant mirror into orbit, the necessary technologies are probably a century away. All these fixes appear more expensive than cutting the amount of energy we consume. None reduces the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which threatens to acidify the oceans, with grave consequences for the food chain.
The demand that money and research be diverted into these quixotic solutions is another indication that Bush's avowed conversion to the cause of cutting emissions is illusory. He is simply drumming up new business for his chums. In his state of the union address last week, he spoke of "the serious challenge of global climate change" and announced that he was raising the government's mandatory target for alternative transport fuels fivefold. This is wonderful news for the grain barons of the red states, who will grow the maize and rapeseed that will be turned into biofuel. It's a catastrophe for everyone else.
An analysis published last year by the Sarasin Bank found that until a new generation of vegetable fuels, made from straw or wood, is developed, "the present limit for the environmentally and socially responsible use of biofuels [is] roughly 5% of current petrol and diesel consumption in the EU and US". Bush now proposes to raise the proportion to 24% by 2017. Already, though the rich world has replaced just a fraction of 1% of its transport fuels, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation reports that using crops to feed cars has raised world food prices, with serious consequences for the poor. Biofuels fall into the same category as atmospheric smoke and mirrors - a means of avoiding difficult decisions.
But at least, or so we are told, the argument over whether or not manmade climate change is happening is now over. On Friday the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change publishes the first installment of its vast report, which collates the findings of the world's climate scientists. Though conservative in its assumptions, it shows that if you persist in believing that there is no cause for concern, you must have buried your head till only your toes are showing. If even Bush now grudgingly acknowledges that there's a problem, surely we've seen the last of the cranks and charlatans who had managed to grab so much attention with their claims that global warming wasn't happening?
Some chance. A company called Wag TV is currently completing a 90-minute documentary for Channel 4 called The Great Global Warming Swindle. Manmade climate change, the channel tells us, is "a lie ... the biggest scam of modern times. The truth is that global warming is a multibillion-dollar worldwide industry: created by fanatically anti-industrial environmentalists; supported by scientists peddling scare stories to chase funding; and propped up by complicit politicians and the media ... The fact is that CO2 has no proven link to global temperatures ... solar activity is far more likely to be the culprit."
So it's the same old conspiracy theory we've been hearing from the denial industry for 10 years, and it carries as much scientific weight as the contention that the twin towers were brought down by missiles. The programme's thesis revolves around the deniers' favourite canard: that the "hockey-stick graph" showing rising global temperatures is based on a statistical mistake made in a paper by the scientists Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes. What it will not be showing is that their results have been repeated several times by other scientists using different statistical methods; that the paper claiming to have exposed the mistake has been comprehensively debunked; and that the lines of evidence used by Mann, Bradley and Hughes are just a few among hundreds demonstrating that 20th-century temperatures were anomalous.
The decision to commission this programme seems even odder when you discover who is making it. In 1997 the director, Martin Durkin, produced a similar series for Channel 4 called Against Nature, which also maintained that global warming was a scam dreamed up by environmentalists. It was riddled with hilarious scientific howlers. More damagingly, the only way in which Durkin could sustain his thesis was to deceive the people he interviewed and edit their answers to change their meaning. After complaints by his interviewees, the Independent Television Commission found that "the views of the four complainants, as made clear to the interviewer, had been distorted by selective editing" and that they had been "misled as to the content and purpose of the programmes when they agreed to take part". Channel 4 was obliged to broadcast one of the most humiliating primetime apologies it has made. Are institutional memories really so short?
So the whole weary business of pointing out that the evidence against man-made climate change is sparse and unable to withstand critical scrutiny, while the evidence in favour is overwhelming and repeatedly confirmed, must begin all over again. How often must scientists remind the media that a handful of cherry-picked studies does not amount to the refutation of an entire discipline?
But with Bush's defection, the band of quacks making these claims is diminishing fast. Now the oil and coal companies that support such people have changed their target. Instead of trying to persuade us that man-made global warming is a myth, they are seeking to divert us into doing everything except the one thing that has to happen: reducing our consumption of fuel. It is another species of denial.
George Bush's purpose - to insulate these companies from the need to cut production - is unchanged. He has simply found a new way of framing the argument.

---