Diesel Fuel From Air and Water

Always telling to me for tech folks as to where they are in vision or ability to
think outside their box...A key component interviewing summer interns
for our research labs...

Desalination was coveted and unattainable till both the sizing and power availability
were affordable 'enough'. Mostly military...but that is outside of
your box size (vision)

Call this 'wide vision', both literal and figurative...and must have
lots of free associative skills...to make a good designer in my
companies or groups


Maybe within your box...is that having fuel mixed at a national level would have
corn based components. Common as in the majority of the pumps throughout the
nation


Do I dare get into Flux Fields on our road ways? Or Flux Fields for your
security badges....heck, even credit cards is starting to come out
with them....that flux fields out on our roads are now passe...but
they are still needed for the RFID's that the new 'reader' require...


Or that they can now manufacture robots small enough to go into your body and
roto-rooter parts of your plumbing?


Or that they now know HOW2 and embryonic business changing the color of your
eyes? Permanently...without lens/etc

That gluing you back together is an option and no longer need to stitch you up?


Just a few years ago...just stuff from Sci-Fi movies/novels...

To get hydrogen in any useful quantities, it must be extracted from natural gas, water or biomass, and all of these result in a net loss of energy. It is more efficient to use these fuels in their original forms.

What part of this sentence don't some of you understand?

Hydrogen is more like a battery, an energy storage medium. Unfortunately, (for practical purposes) it is a very impractical battery, with an extremely low energy-to-volume ratio.

Or this? ^^^^

Some of you really need to read this. It's real easy reading and easy to understand.

I heard some German guy is trying a damnphool engine that don't got spark plugs. Ignites the fuel all by itself. It'll never catch on... cost of oil changes you know...

Well, if we insist on releasing carbon that took hundreds of millions of years to store, into the atmosphere in only a few decades, the issue of peak oil will be a minor one.

That may have been true if you believed in the 'peak oil' moonbeam theory of years past. But petroleum supplies are multiplying not decreasing. And if someone can make something for a dollar that costs you ten dollars to make. Then you would be a fool to make it yourself. The same applies to these synfuel schemes. The US spent billions trying to make these schemes work back when Carter was president.

synfuels

They never worked. And now that Carter's replacement is in office they are spending more billions to show the same thing. At least Carter's bunch were trying to make the synfuel out of coal which is a very concentrated form of carbon, maybe 98% carbon, rather than out of Carbon Dioxide which exists at less 0.01% in the air. And then is only 28% carbon.

Ductape wrote:
There's some oversight in much of the commentary on this thread. There is no energy or matter being created with any of these processes, just stored, converted, and moved.

All those dead dinosaurs that seem to be so popular are nothing other than stored solar energy. Somehow I doubt the conversion efficiency was 100%. It just looks good because we can burn up in a day what took many years to store, but we weren't around during the storage process.

If PV cells capture energy during the day, and convert that to stored liquid fuel at a higher energy density than batteries, it's a gain. AS PV prices come down and oil prices rise, those lines will intersect and cross someday.

OTOH, I suppose we should have really stayed with coal and steam engines. After all, what was wrong with that???

This is exactly the point. I see technology that can "create" diesel as one possible answer to the "oil is going to run out someday" problem. If the energy source is inexpensive enough or sitting idle some of the time, using it to make a fuel we already distribute and consume world wide is awfully convenient.

For Turtle n Peeps, a couple of interesting recent technologies that have come out of racing.


Williams F1 and Refrigeration

Worlds fastest Armoured Vehicle

agesilaus wrote:
OK first Wilbur1:

This may be a dead end but how far does has throwing up their hands and saying nothing new is possible got anyone.
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There are many thousands of engineers and scientists that are working to come up with 'new ideas'. But they prefer to devote their time and money to ideas that can work not to perpetual motion machines.

And for jus2shy:

Fueling at sea and maintaining a fleet of boats that are floating gas tanks is a pain. Being able to produce fuel on demand and cut down on the fleet size....
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Huh, you've lost me. Do you expect the Navy to build the infrastructure to make this material which will cost them 3 to 6 times as much as fuel costs delivered to their tanks? Why buy a cow when all you want is a glass of milk? Especially when there are plenty of private businesses which will be happy to sell you that drink.

And let me clue you in, Naval aux tankers are needed for at sea refueling not for use in port.

Do you think VW got to be one of the big three in the world wasting its time trying to build perpetual motion machines?

The success of technologies like this will depend on the energy sources available to produce the fuel and those sources will vary widely. There will be no magic bullet or one size fits all replacement for oil and other fossil fuels.

BenK wrote:
Another is the desalination systems...in years past...Thought to be too big and consumes too much energy for shipboard...

Huh? Now I know you've never been in the engineering spaces. All naval vessels have desal systems and have had them for maybe a 100 years. The are called flash evaporators. I suppose that the navy may have gone to RO units since I got out since evaporators are a notorious pain in the rear when it comes to maintenance.

Another is the desalination systems...in years past...Thought to be too big and consumes too much energy for shipboard...


Or that my laptop is X times more powerful than a super computer of just a few decades ago...


Or that today's 10 year old would be considered a high scientist a hundred years ago...


Or that my watch has more computing power and memory than Voyger...