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New York Startup Builds Fridge-Sized Machine That Can Turn Air Into Gasoline
(www.jalopnik.com)
It’s not worse. It’s carbon neutral (as long as the energy source is renewable like the sun). Any carbon it takes in will be released exactly back to where it was. It’s a much much better option than digging up oil.
On top of that, there are currently no likely possibilities of replacing gasoline for things like planes. So replacing their gas with carbon neutral gas will improve the situation by 100%.
For planes there's a catalytic process that can turn ethanol into jet fuel.
Any carbon it takes in will be released exactly back to where it was.
Except it won't be. Combustion is not a perfect CxHy O2 > CO2 + H2O reaction. Theres a bunch of other side reactions happening, NOx, unburned hydrocarbons, particulate matter, carbon monoxide. There are lots of challenges to continuing to utilize hydrocarbon fuels, especially in mobile/small scale applications where you can't clean the exhaust stream.
The particulate matter won’t occur in a hydrocarbon that is generated, that comes from imperfect processing of crude. If you pull the carbon directly out of the air there are no particulates.
But yes it will still be carbon neutral. No additional carbon will be released back into the atmosphere.
Battery electric aeroplanes aren't as far off as you might think, but you're technically correct that they don't currently exist.
No they do exist! But most scientists agree that we are unlikely to ever see commercial airliners using it, nor will freight liners use it. We would have to see ENORMOUS scientific improvements and many many many things that seem incredibly far fetched invented to get to that point.
You overstate your case, several firms are already at various stages. Wright Electric is working on a >500km range passenger craft for easyJet right now. That won't be able to fill every role, but a worthwhile number of them to be sure.
If you could link that it would be great. As far as I understand it, a commercial passenger plane (which holds several hundred people) is no where close to being possible. If you are talking about small planes that hold maximum ten-15 people then sure.
There is no such thing as "carbon neutral". Nor is there a problem with carbon. You're talking about carbon dioxide which is as close to carbon as table salt is to chlorine.
Yes it is. And nowhere is stayed how efficient it is (only their "target" which is worth less than toilet paper because it isn't true).
The efficiency doesn’t matter (to a point of manufacturing solar cells, or wind turbines, or whatever your equipment is for your renewable energy source). If all of the gasoline is generated from the air using renewable energy, it could take 100x the energy and still be completely carbon neutral. Carbon neutrality is based on the amount of excess carbon added to the air. If no carbon is added then by definition it’s carbon neutral.
Porsche already has a factory in Chile that is doing this exact same thing at a much larger scale.
Aircela is targeting >50% end to end power efficiency. Since there is about 37kWh of energy in a gallon of gasoline we will require about 75kWh to make it. When we power our machines with standalone, off-grid, photovoltaic panels this will correspond to less than $1.50/gallon in energy cost.
Meanwhile, an electric vehicle could go hundreds of miles on the same amount of energy input...
Gasoline is a very high energy material. You can put it into anything (that works with gas) in seconds and store it for months.
Is this a perfect solution? No. But it’s technically possible to achieve carbon neutrality on an ICE vehicle with zero modification, you’ve just got ~50% loss on the solar you collected.
Triggered by “ICE” rn
Another device of the type that Thunderf00t used to 'bust.'
Thunderf00t
Love his YT channel... he destroys Elon reputation (if he ever had one...) and calls his 90% BS . lol
The "Why 'Feminism' is poisoning atheism", "Feminism Vs FACTS" chud?
I'm surprised he still has an audience tbh. Well, sadly not that surprised.
“Why ‘Feminism’ is poisoning atheism”
What? How are these two topics related at all?
Oh, they're not but I guess you'd have to ask him for the answer. Those videos are both still up if you want to watch a long stream of misogyny and logical fallacies dressed up as an 'owning'.
Finally a way to turn clean solar into something I can burn.
This machine uses 75kWh per day to make 1 gallon of gasoline. Using the cheapest electricity in the country, that's $9.29 per gallon (+ the machine itself is $20k).
It's useful if you can rig it to solar or wind, but that's about it. Hydrocarbon fuel is convenient because it's compact and energy dense compared to must other fuel sources. If the world ran on nuclear and renewable energy entirely, it would be extremely useful to create a circular carbon economy without digging up new fossil fuels. In our shitty reality though, it's only marginally useful.
Could also be useful for logistics reasons, say remote communities capable of making electricity but fuel may be a bit of an issue. Plus if these catch on at any capacity it could eventually lead to smaller cheaper models popping up which do have a tonne of uses.
All the catches
So power to x, basically
But smaller
Reusing the co2 in the air. Its a good idea.
No it's not a good idea.
It's extremely inefficent compared to just using elecricity directly for whatever you're planning to do with it.
The extension cord won't reach my Airbus
Still a good idea for specific cases though. An example from current news close to me: We have line ships on lake Zürich that can't be electrified because either they are too old to sustain a major internal rework or, for some, they can't carry the battery weight.
For a case like that I'd prefer if they put some CO2 capture stations up to keep running the ships rather than scrapping them prematurely.
... if the capture stations work, that is. Can't trust the word of a startup too much.
insert Adam Something's "shitting in the living room" metaphor here
remember plastoline? that method of relatively easily transforming plastic waste into gasoline.
good or not, worthwhile or not, i don't think tech like this will take off when the oil industry makes so much money from drilling and fracking for that same gas.
It takes twice as much electrical energy to produce energy in the form of gasoline.
We lose money on every sale, but make it up on volume!
Eh, not quite.
Sometimes electricity is so cheap that we could be giving it away for free. This and other techniques could be used to store excess energy for when we need it later.
Sustainable energy is the key to making the Aircela machine practical and cost-effective. Running it on the grid from coal or natural gas power plants defeats the purpose of removing carbon from the air, and the electricity will cost more, too.
The company themselves even state that this is supposed to be driven by solar/wind, otherwise it makes no sense. This is regular PtX but in SFF for modular small scale deployment.
Yeah, put these in Iceland, Scotland or the Sahara where there's virtually unlimited zero-carbon power available and they make a world of sense.
I didn't know the machine needed no maintenance and that its own life cycle was carbon neutral. TIL/s
I wonder is a scaled up version of this could work for grid-scale medium length storage. Smoothing out weeks of dunkleflaute is the main blocker to going to a primarily renewable grid. Gasoline is a lot easier to store than hydrogen and large scale gasoline generators should get close to the efficiency of natural gas peaker plants.
this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
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