This would actually provide me enough gas each week with my hybrid in office schedule.
this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
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insert Adam Something's "shitting in the living room" metaphor here
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!
And that's just their target, not actual.
What's the alternative? Turning down production when demand is lower than supply or try to out it into batteries.
So you can either do nothing, or use the capacity you'd otherwise waste. Then it comes down to which is a better / cheaper storage method: building batteries, or something that turns that extra power I to some that can be easily stored/used later.
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.
Also it's a carbon sink if you barrel it up and bury it
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.
Even then, the value prop is questionable.
It treats sustainable energy dedicated to this purpose as "free", ignoring the opportunity cost of using that energy directly.
For example, let's say I dedicated my solar exclusively to making gasoline. I could get about 14 gallons a month of "free" gasoline... Except my home power bill would go up about 150 dollars a month.. opportunity cost would be over 10 dollars a gallon...
Sure, for a homeowner it doesn't make sense. But what about at grid scale when there isn't enough demand for that electricity?
What opportunity cost is there to NOT do it when the power would otherwise be wasted or generation capacity reduced? If anything, I'd say the opportunity cost is of not doing this with over generation on the grid/plant
How much do we have an over generation problem in general though? I suppose the argument would be that solar is curtailed because they don't want to deal with the potential for overgeneration, but we already have a number of approaches for energy storage. Their pricing for generating at most a gallon a day is a price exceeding a battery system of LFP that could do a lot more than a gallon of gas. This is ignoring the rather significant potential of Sodium batteries.
So this doesn't look to be cheaper than battery systems, it looks to be way less efficient than battery systems. The biggest use case as energy storage in general seems to be if you want it to spend a few months (but not too many months, fuel degrades in the tank after all). The more narrow use case is to cater to scenarios where you absolutely need the energy density of gasoline, so boats and airplanes critically so, maybe some heavy equipment. I'll grant that, but if particularly sodium batteries will be an acceptable approach, it'll be better than this solution in that very wide variety of circumstances.
Over generation is very big. I agree batteries are better, though.
We need to be able to support peak winter heating and peak summer cooling and we need to do that with excess margin.
Everything in between we have excess power, unless it's something like hydro dams which are easy to control and aren't a big extra cost and part of how they naturally operate.
We generally use gas peaker plants to help which we can turn off or on, but it's more efficient to not do that, and those are expensive.
It would also make it easier to build big nuclear plants if we could manage the off peak load into batteries for the day.
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
Carbon dioxide needs to be captured were there is a lot of carbon dioxide in the air. So especially around cities with lots of car traffic, or around fossil fuel power plants...
So... It would be better to stop car traffic and fossil fuel power plants first, before doing carbon capture. And the purpose of that should be, making the air cleaner. And putting that carbon back into a less environmental damaging state.
They could route emissions through a system like this directly from smoke stacks, capturing the carbon before it even reaches the atmosphere
CO2 doesn't vary much in concentration by how close you are to an emission source unless you are literally sucking air out of a tailpipe. You might get a 10-20% increase in the centre of a city instead of the countryside, hardly enough to make up for being somewhere with so much energy coming in that they frequently have to curtail it (which could then be used for this instead).
This isnt CCS which cheaply turns CO2 into an inert form of carbon, its an expensive process for turning CO2 into a very useful form.
Sort of. Wind is very good at stirring things up, but you can still see differences in places where there are a lot of plants (1-2%). This things needs CO2 to function and that means it needs concentration so the more CO2 to start with the better.
Fortunately this is small and electric is something we already move to cities in large quantities. Putting it in a city makes sense - assuming it works and is safe of course.
Finally a way to turn clean solar into something I can burn.
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.
Grid scale storage doesn't strike me as an area of application where high energy density is important, so wouldn't batteries with less conversion loss do an overall better job? I think grid scale Lithium-ion battery stores have become somewhat common.
I'd see gasoline from CO2 capture of interest more for airplanes, drones, ships, maybe even certain modes of long haul terrestrial transport where weight and volume is important.
I could see this being useful in places where day/night cycle is skewed to prolonged periods of each. Or perhaps holding excess power from summer into winter since days are so much shorter.
But yeah, this doesn’t really seem like the best way to store grid power.
Problem is that the efficiency is on the ground here.
The same energy that might get an EV 200 miles instead produces a single gallon of gasoline, to get a sense for the relative value of the efficiency.
Liquid fuels have a couple advantages in certain scenarios. Aircraft, for example. The energy density of liquid fuels is considerably higher than batteries. Aircraft only take on as much fuel as they need to safely reach their destination. They takeoff with more weight than they can safely land, burning off fuel weight throughout their flight until they are light enough to land. Dumping fuel overboard to get down to landing weight in an emergency.
Switch these aircraft over to batteries, and their landing weight is the same as their takeoff weight. They carry the same "fuel" weight for a regional flight as they do for a maxinum-range flight.
Well, I don't know if the reason given is that significant, they'd just plan around the fixed weight. The issue being the energy per unit volume/weight being so far behind hydrocarbons that some applications do demand it.
So while stationary/grid applications may lean battery since size/weight hardly matters, and EVs are debatable good enough for many scenarios, I will grant that for aircraft, boats, and some heavy equipment it's hard to beat hydrocarbons.
Unfortunately, on that front it has to compete with extracted hydrocarbons and doesn't seem like it can compete as yet. It however may give hope for a more resource constrained future that the battery-hostile scenarios may still be fulfilled in a sustainable way, just at higher relative expense than today. Or they iterate on their processes to have cheaper equipment and/or increased efficiency to come closer to competitive with extracted hydrocarbons. Or a viable thing to reference for some governments mandating sustainably sourced hydrocarbons when they are really needed.
Sure, but you cant store that electricity as electricity. IMO this is most interesting as a energy storage technology, so the comparison isnt what that gasoline would do in an ICE car compared to an EV, its to what it would cost compared to battery storage (or compressed air or whatever other technology) to store a few weeks of output on the order of months. The big advantage I see here is that unlike those other technologies capacity is dirt cheap to build, its just a metal tank. So whenever a renewable plant would curtail its output it can instead redirect to creating gasoline to burn when the renewables arent producing much electricity.
Honestly, I would have expected worse than that
At least taking their figures at face value, about 75kwh to generate a gallon of gas, and let's say 67 kwh to get a an EV 200 miles (assuming some losses between the generation and the actual battery capacity, and 3 miles/kwh which is on the low-ish end of EVs, but realistically close). The most aggressive hybrids getting 50 mpg so we end up with it being about 4x worse than charging an EV with that energy source.
At least at residential rates where I live, that's about $10, so it would only really make sense when gas gets to $10/gallon, otherwise, go to the pump for the fossil fuel. That's ignoring the cost of the station itself.
So maybe nearer than one might imagine, but still highly impractical. Maybe if they doubled the efficiency and gas eeks up without residential electricity rates going up...
But all this is assuming it will work exactly as well as they say it is, and I've learned to have a healthy dose of skepticism... Here though I can be as optimistic as they like and it's still a tough sell..
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%.
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).
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.
Except it won’t be.
None of the things you've described increase the carbon output.
What chemical reaction gets more carbon out than it puts in?
(Where do these new carbon atoms come from, fusion?)
If anything, those other products include non-gaseous compounds which sequester the carbon from the fuel into a solid resulting in a net-negative amount of carbon being released into the atmosphere.
Those side-products are not good, I'm not saying otherwise, but they are not additional carbon.
It’s not worse. It’s carbon neutral
So replacing their gas with carbon neutral gas will improve the situation by 100%.
Referring to things as carbon neutral is typically shorthand for net neutral CO₂e (or net-zero) CO₂e.
You're pedantically right that the machine is not creating or destroying carbon atoms, but the things it does create have massive "carbon dioxide equivalence". Or, phrased differently: the emissions of this equipment are equivalent to emitting significant amounts of carbon dioxide.
They also reek havoc on people's lungs.
This is worse than air, but better than doing nothing I suppose. The situation is not "improved by 100%". It's marginally better, but definitely not 100%.
Eh?
You take excess green power and use it to generate gasoline. You use that gasoline in a combustion engine. Where is the extra carbon coming from which makes this non neutral?
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