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Boffins ready air-to-fuel converter
Author: Gareth HalfacreePublished: 8th January 2008
Lead boffin Rich Diver poses next to the nearly-finished CR5 sunlight-to-fuel converter prototype.
Dubbed the Counter Rotating Ring Receiver Reactor (or CR5) the device is designed to break the carbon-oxygen bond within carbon dioxide to form oxygen and carbon monoxide using concentrated solar energy. Okay, so it doesn't exactly make petrol from 'thin air', but bear with me on this one.
The original idea, as described by the brains behind the scheme Rich Diver, was to break down water into hydrogen and oxygen. The team soon realised that the same system could be used to break down carbon dioxide instead. Carbon dioxide and water are both by-products of the combustion process, so the scheme to take the waste products and turn them back into fuel has eco-warriors delighted.
The hydrogen and carbon monoxide the system recovers can be used as the starting block for synthesised versions of various fossil fuels which can then be used again and again in much the same way as we purify waste water for drinking. The system isn't lossless, of course, but anything which gives us a bit more bang per gallon of crude has to be a good thing.
The fuels created using the system would be carbon-neutral and, wonder of wonders, work in existing engines (including generators and vehicles) without the need for any modification.
The team is currently putting the finishing touches to the prototype, having already proven the science works well enough to be practical. Sadly for anyone who fancies telling people they run their car on 'sunlight and air', the technology is probably about ten to fifteen years away from commercialisation: by which time we'll certainly need it.
A more likely way to turn sunlight into energy than solar cells, or are you going to rely on old-fashioned pedal-power to keep the lights on when we run out of oil? Give us the skinny over in the forums.
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Comments (39)Stats: 0.128 seconds
No, but I *am* from the UK. According to my copy of the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary:
boffin
noun [C] MAINLY UK INFORMAL
a scientist who is considered to know a lot about science and not to be interested in other things:
a technical/computer boffin
I'd say that Mr. Diver fits that description pretty well, no?
Plenty of co2 in the air, will be for generations. We need this tech now true, but we will still need it later, perhaps more so than now.
Anyone here know the Greg Mandell novels by Peter F. Hamilton?
In one of the books, can't remember which one at the moment, he tells about a no-exhaust solution put on vehicles with internal combustion engines. These devices take all the exhaust gases and store them in pressure tanks to be converted back to liquid hydrocarbons at a later date. It sounded like an incredible system, fully plausible, and now I read this. Oh it's a brave new world alright.
I've always said that the boundaries between science-fiction and science-fact is just a matter of time and imagination.
Excellent.
If you read the article properly you've have read that they were going to take the CO and turn it into new petrol chemicals. Vegetable oil is not carbon neutral it fact there a growing research that shows that it could worse for than the planet than fossil fuels.
/toddles off to buy a few coal power stations.
Damn right - boffin is exactly the right word to use in this context!
Very cool, interesting the news story to by the way; keep it up Gareth!
I guess I wasn't so crazy... I had no idea that this technology existed. :o
True enough. You could probably also say that he fits the definition of "dude", but you wouldn't write "dude readies...". Boffins is very The Sun in style. It doesn't really tell us anything, and it does it in an (imo) slightly faux-prole and colloquial manner. Fair enough I guess, if that's the direction Bit wants to head. But communicating info with as little bias, editorial implication, and simplification as possible would be my preferred direction.
As for the story, this is a fairly interested progression, but one without any end as of yet. All they've really managed to do is make CO so far, which although admittedly an important step, is hardly useful in that state given it's intense toxicity to humans. Whether they can find ways of turning CO into actual fuel without using more energy than they recieve from the finished product will be the important point, I think.
So that's China's CO2 problem solved then - since they're heading for champion of the world at having dirty coal-fired power plants.
My faith still lies in nuclear. A nuclear and hydrogen economy may not be in action, but it's certainly so far the most promising replacement for our massively fossil fuel based economies. I think if more people were aware how much oil prices are going to be increasing in the next 20-50 years, and how totaly our entire civilisation is dependant on oil for it's existance - they'd be complaining about governments not building nuclear power plants.
Then stop wasting time and get to work on my Star Trek Transporters!:D
Assuming you mean CO2 to O2 (oxygen), there are already billions of those generators all over the world.
Hehehe!
Indeed. And as soon as people realise that cutting down forest land to grow biofuels is counter productive the better.
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/01/S2P
The Fisher Tropsch method is only going to create problems when water is taken from underground resovoirs though, and that's just accellerating an already worldwide issue that needs solving. So long as there are suitable basin's and suchlike that are surface based, capturing sufficient rainfall to water a population shouldn't be too much of a problem. Overall though, if you use water to make hydrocarbons, when you burn those hydrocarbons you get your water back. Just like a hydrogen economy, the water part is essentially renewable.
As for going over to coal, I think you're nuts tbh dude. We can switch to coal, and along with the rest of the world use the stuff up within 200-300 years, but why not save the coal for transformation into oil like substances that we require and havn't yet got substitutes for, and use nuclear energy for power. It's cleaner, it's a long term solution, and it's going to be the eventual solution whether we move to coal now or not. The way I figure it, the sooner the world moves to a nuclear power economy, with the resultant heavy research into the industry and more satisfactory solutions to waste thereof - the better.
What does KW/SQM stand for, out of interest?
I see what you mean about saving coal for better uses. However the water thing would be problem i'll try and find some links tomorrow at work but basically china has suspended any new projects on both bio ethanol and CTO (coal to oil) in large parts of the country. Parts of the country become net exporters of water and many of them can't afford to be.
Personally i think tech like this is generally a good thing to supplement our energy sources not replace them. If we have to build new power plants best to maximize the energy released from the fuel source, using the co2 for extending the life of oil fields is also something which we could do more of here.
As you say, water is a big problem, but it's going to be a big problem in 30 years time anyway. We humey's have been relying on vast underground repositories of water which have taken thousands (or much more in some cases) of years to build up. We're exhausting them in decades. I believe something ridiculous like 90% of all of our water comes from underground resovoirs. Now some of these will be being refilled, but many aren't. Once they all run out, we're stuck using surface water or desalinated water (which requires tonnes of power...another reason for my hearty endorsement of nukes). Water is gonna be a big problem whether we use lots now or not. Because just like oil, we're using what are in a way finite supplies much much faster than they're being replenished.
Seriously though, this is a great idea. Even though solar is becoming more and more efficient, especially in less than 100% perpendicular sunlight, as well as more durable, we definitely need something to counteract the massive quantities of CO2 we're pumping out. Since the US government is so far in the pocket of the oil companies, all we can do is alleviate the symptoms, not reform the causes.
B)
There are already people working on that, however there is the small issue of the Heisenberg stabiliser. Maybe the combined genius here at bit-tech can come up with something. Of course, we'd need a dilithium core and a matter/anti-matter reaction chamber, but those are small fish I wager.
On a more serious note though; I read somewhere, might have been scientific american, that they have now reached the point where they are able to teleport molecules over distances of a few feet. I'll do some research on this - been a while since I read up on teleportation.
If you mean trees, thats ok, But a lot of industrial powerplants exhaust co2 by the milions. In my country they are storing the exhaust into the ground where natural gasses used to be (the gas is used to power the powerplants). A better way should be to redirect this enormous underground co2 fields into a co2>oxygen generator. We are then wasting natural sources still. But at least we puting back fresh air into the skys.
And how do you propose we power said CO2 > O2 generator? With more CO2 producing power? Underground storage in depleted natural gas resoviors is a good way of storing CO2 imo, the idea that we should somehow attempt to turn all the CO2 back into O2 may chime nicely with lots of people, but I very much doubt it'll happen in the near future.
Well The c02 is forced into the ground, its sits there under presure. So opening a release valve would force the co2 out of it. So not much energy is needed to get it out the ground again, and how do you know it would take 3 times the energy to exchange co2 to O2. I dont even know if it is posible to do this, and what kind of technology is needed to make it work. So i dont know how much energy it takes.
Cracking molecules like CO2 back to their constituent parts again is even less efficient - for instance from memory electrolysis of water is only about 60% efficient, and that's a relatively simple job. Put the two efficiencies together and you're only recovering about 30% of the energy that went in in the first place. Solar furnaces can manage about 60% energy efficiency right off the bat.