Drill, baby, drill... the atmosphere

While we sweat over what gas prices are going to do, gambling on when to fill up in the ups and downs of prices, always wondering how much the price will go up because of some pinch in supply, there are people who have been working on the problem. Instead of putting holes in the ground, though, or dumping tons of stuff into cookers that churn out oil, they're tapping the most ubiquitous resource on the planet: the air we breathe.

Okay, I can see how theoretically that might be a possibility, but it still seems like science fiction. OTOH...

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The company, Air Fuel Synthesis, explains it as follows:

Air Fuel Synthesis uses renewable energy to do what nature does with photosynthesis and time, converting carbon dioxide into oil. Put simply, Air Fuel Synthesis converts carbon dioxide and water into synthetic hydrocarbon liquids from which sustainable fuels or other oil based products can be made. ...Oil is basically made from carbon and hydrogen. Carbon is in the air in the form of carbon dioxide and hydrogen can be found in water.

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Wasn't that enlightening?

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Don't expect to buy any soon -- but when it comes out on the market, expect it to drive prices down.

And wouldn't it be nice to know that the carbon you're putting our in vapors isn't changing the balance in the atmosphere?

Wouldn't things like biofuels be much more efficient? I can't imagine that the process of taking raw carbon and hydrogen and making a synthetic fuel-grade oil out of it is anything but energy intensive, if not energy inefficient for what you'll get out of the final product.

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Originally Posted by xbuzzerx

Wouldn't things like biofuels be much more efficient? I can't imagine that the process of taking raw carbon and hydrogen and making a synthetic fuel-grade oil out of it is anything but energy intensive, if not energy inefficient for what you'll get out of the final product.

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Obviously they don't think so.

i'm a bit out of touch in the chem department but its souds like it wont be that far from the original solar powered conversion of chemical energy that we are now using

Currently, commercial production of hydrogen is achieved almost exclusively by extraction from fossil fuels. It seems to me that the key to success in the Air Fuel Synthesis (AFS) concept is finding a way to produce enough electricity at a reasonable cost to separate hydrogen from water via electrolysis. There may be alternatives to that part of the puzzle, such as a method recently demonstrated by Caltech that employs the same basic principle as the catalytic converter currently installed in most automobiles. [Link]

Other than perfecting the science involved, the main challenge in the AFS concept is probably its capital cost.