LONDON: A small British company
has developed a way to create
petrol from air and water,
technology it hopes may one day
contribute to large-scale
production of green fuels.
Engineers at Air Fuel Synthesis (AFS)
in Teeside, northern England, say
they have produced 5 liters of
synthetic petrol over a period of
three months.
The technique involves extracting
carbon dioxide from air and
hydrogen from water, and
combining them in a reactor with a
catalyst to make methanol. The
methanol is then converted into
petrol.
By using renewable energy to
power the process, it is possible to
create carbon-neutral fuel that can
be used in an identical way to
standard petrol, scientists behind
the technology say.
"It's actually cleaner because it's
synthetic," Peter Harrison, chief
executive officer of AFS, said in an
interview.
"You justmake what you need to
make in terms of the contents of it,
so it doesn't contain what might be
seen as pollutants, like sulphur," he
said.
The work is part of a two-year
project that has so far cost around
1 million pounds ($1.6 million).
The green petrol will not appear on
forecourts any time soon, though.
"We can't make (the petrol) at
pump prices, but we will do
eventually," Harrison said. "All we
need is renewable energy to make
it, and so when oil becomes a
problem we will be able to make a
contribution to keep cars moving
or to keep aeroplanes moving."
AFS said it was confident the
technology could be scaled up to
refinery size in the future. Each of
the processes that go into making
the fuel already take place
separately on an industrial scale.
For now, however, AFS plans to
build a commercial plant in the
next two years that will produce
around 1,200 liters a day of
specialist fuels for the motorsports
sector, Harrison said. Source
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