No joke: New tech turns air into petrol
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LONDON: A small British firm claimed to have developed a revolutionary
new technology that can produce petrol using just air and electricity.
A company in the north of England has developed the 'air capture' technology to create synthetic petrol which experts have hailed 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, works by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, The Telegraph reported. 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.
The company, Air Fuel Syndication, uses the carbon dioxide and hydrogen to produce methanol which in turn is passed through a gasoline fuel reactor, creating petrol.
Company officials claimed to have produced five litres of petrol in less than three months from a small refinery in Stockton-on-Tees, Teesside. The fuel 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 company hopes 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.
Institution of Mechanical Engineers officials said that while the technology is "too good to be true but it is true", and said that 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 was quoted as saying by the paper.
A company in the north of England has developed the 'air capture' technology to create synthetic petrol which experts have hailed 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, works by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, The Telegraph reported. 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.
The company, Air Fuel Syndication, uses the carbon dioxide and hydrogen to produce methanol which in turn is passed through a gasoline fuel reactor, creating petrol.
Company officials claimed to have produced five litres of petrol in less than three months from a small refinery in Stockton-on-Tees, Teesside. The fuel 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 company hopes 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.
Institution of Mechanical Engineers officials said that while the technology is "too good to be true but it is true", and said that 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 was quoted as saying by the paper.
Planet with four suns discovered by volunteers
The new planet - a gas giant - is about six times the size of Earth
Astronomers have found a planet whose skies are illuminated by four different suns - the first known of its type.
The distant world orbits one pair of stars which have a second stellar pair revolving around them.The discovery was made by volunteers using the Planethunters.org website along with a team from UK and US institutes; follow-up observations were made with the Keck Observatory.
A report on the Arxiv server has been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal.
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“Start Quote
Dr Chris Lintott Oxford UniversityComputerised attempts to find things [in the data] missed this system entirely. That tells you there are probably more of these that are slipping through our fingers”
The planet, located just under 5,000 light-years away, has been named PH1 after the Planet Hunters site.
It is thought to be a "gas giant" slightly larger than Neptune - more than six times the radius of the Earth."You don't have to go back too far before you would have got really good odds against one of these systems existing," Dr Chris Lintott, from the University of Oxford, told BBC News.
"All four stars pulling on it creates a very complicated environment. Yet there it sits in an apparently stable orbit.
"That's really confusing, which is one of the things which makes this discovery so fun. It's absolutely not what we would have expected."
Binary stars - systems with pairs of stars - are not uncommon. But only a handful of known exoplanets (planets that circle other stars) have been found to orbit such binaries. And none of these binary systems are known to have another pair of stars circling them.
Follow-up observations were made with the Keck facility on Mauna Kea
"So I think what this is telling us is planets can form in the inner parts of protoplanetary discs (the torus of dense gas that gives rise to planetary systems).
"The planets are forming close in and are able to cling to a stable orbit there. That probably has implications for how planets form elsewhere."
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Kepler Space Telescope
- Stares fixedly at a patch corresponding to 1/400th of the sky
- Looks at more than 155,000 stars
- Has so far found 2,321 candidate planets
- Among them are 207 Earth-sized planets, 10 of which are in the "habitable zone" where liquid water can exist
PH1 was discovered by two US
volunteers using the Planethunters.org website: Kian Jek of San
Francisco and Robert Gagliano from Cottonwood, Arizona.
They spotted faint dips in light caused by the planet passing
in front of its parent stars. The team of professional astronomers then
confirmed the discovery using the Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.Founded in 2010, Planethunters.org aims to harness human pattern recognition to identify transits in publicly available data gathered by Nasa's Kepler Space Telescope.
Kepler was launched in March 2009 to search for Earth-like planets orbiting other stars.
Visitors to the Planet Hunters website have access to randomly selected data from one of Kepler's target stars.
Volunteers are asked to draw boxes to mark the locations of visible transits - when a planet passes in front of its parent star.
Dr Lintott points out: "Computerised attempts to find things [in the data] missed this system entirely. That tells you there are probably more of these that are slipping through our fingers. We've just stuck a load of new data up on Planethunters.org to help people find the next one."
Searching for such systems, he said, was "a complicated test to hand a computer", adding: "We're using human pattern recognition, which can disentangle that reasonably well to see the important stuff."
Since December 2010, more than 170,000 members of the public have participated in the project.
Paul.Rincon-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk
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