A small British company has developed a process that produces gasoline from water vapor and carbon dioxide. The only thing it needs to make this incredible transformation is air.
The company hopes that within two years it will build a larger, commercial-scale plant that can produce a ton of biofuel a day. It also plans to produce green jet fuel to make airline travel more carbon-neutral.
In the October 19th edition of the Independent, Steve Connor quotes Peter Harrison, CEO of Air-Fuel Synthesis, as sawying, "We’ve taken carbon dioxide from air and hydrogen from water and turned these elements into petrol."
He quotes environmentalist Tim Fox as saying, "It sounds too good to be true, but it is true. They are doing it and I’ve been up there myself and seen it. The innovation is that they have made it happen as a process. It’s a small pilot plant capturing air and extracting CO2 from it based on well known principles. It uses well-known and well-established components but what is exciting is that they have put the whole thing together and shown that it can work."
The company needs investment funds, but its founder and principal investor, Tony Marmont, says that he and his business colleagues would not want the oil industry to buy them out (because they would probably bury the process).
Right now the process is too expensive to be commercially viable, but Connor quotes historian Klaus Lackner as saying that won’t always be the case: "I bought my first CD in the 1980s and it cost $20 but now you can make one for less than 10 cents. The cost of a light bulb has fallen 7,000-fold during the past century."
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