Here's a machine that turns water into synthetic gasoline

Stan Meyer supposedly used water as fuel and even got patents on the process.

Stanley Meyer thread on ATS

a reply to: N3k9Ni

That's a great idea and great to see that they've had some success with it but the way the world looks right now I don't think this machine could end up replacing fossil fuels. It would be relegated to the sidelines like sun panels and windmills and fuel cell driven mini automobiles. On a worldwide scale this wouldn't be a practical machine and I'm sure it wouldn't be conceivable to make the shift in the airplane industry to this sort of fuel source.

I wonder how stable this synthetic chemical is. Does the fuel re-separate or does the chemical change reverse following a period of time? Can it be stored for more than a brief amount of time?

Even if this isn't a ready technology or if it isn't practical enough for mainstream use perhaps this technology or the research that created it could be applied to another science or technology for other innovations.

originally posted by: Bedlam

originally posted by: signalfire

You can take a fresnel lens and burn a hole through a hunk of metal; take that heat and boil water and there's your electricity; solar and the accompanying technologies like wind and wave action could supply all our energy needs. Trouble is, hard to send someone a bill for that and Exxon rules the world.

Heat and temperature are not the same thing.

Oddly enough.

Yes temperature is used to measure heat, but whats your point?

a reply to: toastyr

Not just Stan Meyer, I might add many others too. The fact is oil is big business, it literally fuels the worlds economy and
if people were to use cheap or practically free alternatives on a big scale, the world economy would go bust and they can't let that happen.
Though of course it must go bust sooner or later...

originally posted by: surfer_soul

Yes temperature is used to measure heat, but whats your point?

Actually, temperature is not used to measure heat. Heat is energy. You can calculate heat from temperature, if you know some information about the thing you're measuring the temperature of.

The point is, people are confused by temperature, like you were just then. If something is hot, they mentally conflate that with heat. If you ask - "Which contains more heat, a bathtub full of tepid water or a white hot needle?" they will invariably state that the needle contains more heat energy. It doesn't. "Hot" is related to "heat" but is not the same.

Thus, in the post where I stated this, the poster had said "Take a fresnel lens, and at the focus you can boil water, therefore you can make electricity with it and have all the free fossil fuel EVAR" (more or less), he's making the same mistake, and it's one you see on ATS a lot in solar threads.

Yes, you can concentrate the heat you get from a certain area of sunlight, and at the focus you'll have a higher temperature. Maybe you can even do something faux dramatic like melt tin foil. But all the heat you're going to have is limited by that collection area. It doesn't matter that you can boil a tiny bit of water at the focus. If you want to have enough energy to produce enough Fischer-Tropsch fuel from water and CO2, it's going to take a lot of area. Like most of the deserts in the US, covered with solar thermal towers, or plated over with PV cells.

originally posted by: jtrenthacker
Even if this is successful, I'm not sure it will help much. Fresh water is increasingly becoming more scarce. Not sure what sense it would make to process fuel out of it. The water wars are coming. This would just exacerbate the problem.

I think that desalinization and water purification in general will get a major jump in productivity and implementation if something like this breaks. If we can invest trillions into war for oil; we can surely invest billions into infrastructure for water purification - IF ( and that's a silly if ) we can justify doing so... I present to you - Gasoline!

I think this is a good move; I'd be pretty interested in the schematics myself. I'm already hypothesizing; if they claim they can get this to work I'm sure reverse engineering the process can't be all that difficult. Gas station from my driveway anyway? $2.00 / Gallon anyone?

I'm optimistic.

S&F

This takes electricity. Their goal is to reach 70% efficiency. That means this will never be a good source of fuel.

When such an alternative can be produced, transported and sold at the pump for less $/litre than conventional refined fuel, it will take over or, at least, create a price war with the current producers of oil based products. To be successful it will need to be indistinguishable from existing fuels and require no special modifications to the engines it's to be used in plus deliver the same level of economy in terms of km per tankful (better economy would totally seal the deal). Then there's the issue of emissions.

originally posted by: Pilgrum
When such an alternative can be produced, transported and sold at the pump for less $/litre than conventional refined fuel, it will take over or, at least, create a price war with the current producers of oil based products. To be successful it will need to be indistinguishable from existing fuels and require no special modifications to the engines it's to be used in plus deliver the same level of economy in terms of km per tankful (better economy would totally seal the deal). Then there's the issue of emissions.

It requires 10 gallons of fuel to make 7 gallons of this fuel. It will not be an alternative any time soon.

Fusion power on the other hand will be here sooner than you might think.

a reply to: OccamsRazor04

That was my point
Since there are no environmental advantages to it, it's only chance of success is lower cost to consumers and that looks extremely unlikely. Wasn't Richard Branson talking about making his own biofuel for his planes a while back? - seems to have gone quiet too but I never did look into the proposed process.

Awesome, now we can run out of water even faster than oil, woohoo!. Man its awesome times to be a white guy living in a first world country.

There are currently many machines on the market that can produce Hgas, through electrolysis. The small units cost about $300, and here is a typical one.



They still use an order of magnitude more of electrical energy than the equivalent energy that could be obtained from the Hgas they produce and store.

The real breakthrough in independence from hydrocarbons, will be solar energy and Graphene.
We are on the verge of being able to produce incredible batteries (actually, superCapacitors), made from Graphene that can be charged with solar energy. Once this happens, there will be little interest in electrolysis as a main stream energy alternative.

originally posted by: Dabrazzo
Awesome, now we can run out of water even faster than oil, woohoo!. Man its awesome times to be a white guy living in a first world country.

You'd get the water back when you burned the fuel, so it's got that going for it.

Interesting article and engineering premise!

If I might be so bold as to offer a suggestion?

If we remove the fresh water component in favor of polluted waters distilled in a manner that left the proper amount of residual carbon components within the solution, perhaps we could kill two proverbial birds with one stone?

The residual pollution not used within the fuel source might be able to serve as a fuel source in itself to help offset and balance the energy required to create the desired result.

I hope I don't sound like an ass but I thought some water treatment plants already had similar preexisting elements to this methodology already in operation within their respective installations.

Maybe we could clean up that floating trash island out in the Pacific Ocean in the process.

Sadly, the finer points of developing and implementing an endeavor of this magnitude elude me. I know it's far more complicated than it sounds, given the amount of fossil fuels required to transport that much waste.

Just a thought....sorry it's not fully developed...I'm still rather new to operations of this magnitude and still on the first cuppa coffee.

originally posted by: GetHyped

originally posted by: signalfire

originally posted by: GetHyped
Cool tech but probably won't get legs while oil is cheap to drill and clean energy sources are expensive and less reliable.

Oil isn't 'cheap to drill' anymore

Yes it is. Considerably cheaper for the energy density than alternative sources.

Actually we're getting frightfully close to a ration of 1:1 - one barrel of oil energy for one barrel of oil produced. Again, why go to all the obvious trouble of the tar sands and 5 mile deep off shore drilling rigs if oil is easy to find and pump? Back in the old Texas oil boom days, the ratio was 1:100. The massive Ghawar field now needs a ton of seawater added to push out the remaining dregs and the Saudis have been lying about the size of their reserves for decades now.

Won't be long now...

Thus, in the post where I stated this, the poster had said "Take a fresnel lens, and at the focus you can boil water, therefore you can make electricity with it and have all the free fossil fuel EVAR" (more or less), he's making the same mistake, and it's one you see on ATS a lot in solar threads.

Yes, you can concentrate the heat you get from a certain area of sunlight, and at the focus you'll have a higher temperature. Maybe you can even do something faux dramatic like melt tin foil. But all the heat you're going to have is limited by that collection area. It doesn't matter that you can boil a tiny bit of water at the focus. If you want to have enough energy to produce enough Fischer-Tropsch fuel from water and CO2, it's going to take a lot of area. Like most of the deserts in the US, covered with solar thermal towers, or plated over with PV cells.

There's more ENERGY hitting the planet in a day from the sun than the planet uses in a year. Solar collectors of all kinds would make far more sense than burning polluting fossil fuels pulled up out of the ground. Melting 'tin foil' isn't 'faux dramatic' and I've seen 4 ft square collectors burn holes in iron bars. The amount of energy in small amounts of sunlight is massive. Perhaps you've never heard of steam generating electricity?

a reply to: signalfire

There are lenses, and not really Fresnel (but it uses a ring structure) , that can focus concentric rings of high temperature
producing light, but they are huge. I never found any article on this technique being brought down in size, if it can.


Saying that, found this rather cool video that does use a Fresnel.
Freznel Power Mount

originally posted by: signalfire

There's more ENERGY hitting the planet in a day from the sun than the planet uses in a year.

Yes, and it's scattered out over the surface of the planet, thinly. Thus, as I said -

"If you want to have enough energy to produce enough Fischer-Tropsch fuel from water and CO2, it's going to take a lot of area. Like most of the deserts in the US, covered with solar thermal towers, or plated over with PV cells."

The amount of energy in small amounts of sunlight is massive. Perhaps you've never heard of steam generating electricity?

The amount of energy in small amounts of sunlight is small. You're still conflating temperature with energy. Hot isn't heat. Yes, if you take a big fresnel, you can do dramatically hot things in a tiny focus. You still have four square feet of insolation, and that's all the energy you've got. For four square feet at noon in the desert, you get about 400W. And no matter how you concentrate it, you've got about 400W. And if you turn it to steam with no losses, and put it through a perfectly efficient turbine, you get less than 400W out.

That doesn't equate to a lot of F-T fuel production.

The world uses a LOT of petroleum products. And once more, to run the US's fuel needs from that -

... it's going to take a lot of area. Like most of the deserts in the US, covered with solar thermal towers, or plated over with PV cells.

a reply to: Bedlam

Interesting; so 400 watts per what? Second, minute, hour? I'll admit to being utterly clueless with regards to electricity, etc.

But I also think trying to tech our way out of a petroleum based economy is in its infancy and a lot of technology already discovered has been kept out of the market.

originally posted by: signalfire
a reply to: Bedlam

Interesting; so 400 watts per what? Second, minute, hour? I'll admit to being utterly clueless with regards to electricity, etc.

400 Watts, period. That's a power number. You want an energy number, you have to collect power over time.

Where I'm at, you have about 450 Wh per day per square foot. Then you have to start whittling away from that with losses. You can't collect all of that, for example. And making steam isn't 100% efficient, the turbine's not either, and on you go, losing some at each step.

F-T itself isn't particularly efficient, either. You'll lose half your energy there.