Interesting if true: fuel from air

[james_davis_nicoll]

A British firm based on Teeside says it's designed revolutionary new technology that can produce petrol using air and water.

Seriously, BBC? "It's" for possessive it? Never snark before coffee.

Presumably there's some kind of energy source, assuming they have not gone the heart of a forsaken child route. Also

Air Fuel Synthesis in Stockton-on-Tees has produced 5 litres of petrol since August, but hopes to be in production by 2015 making synthetic fuel targeted at the motor sports sector.

it's not quite ready for prime time.

This is a way of moving energy from energy rich regions to energy poor ones.

(usual bbc & technology disclaimer: they still do puff pieces on Moller)

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

And neither approach works well for cars or trains or lawnmowers or portable generators or indeed most things we currently use fossil carbon and internal combustion engines for, but the simple expedient of being too stonking big.

-- Graydon

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

I want to hear about this spacetime thing.

[eub.livejournal.com]

Interested to hear which work Graydon is referring to. The Casimir effect might fill the bill; Dr. Casimir did chemistry but rather on the p-chem and q-chem end of things, like (Casimir and Polder (1948). To get more towards reaction chemistry, Sheehan (2009) gets into using the effect to shift the energy of reaction states.

So for example you might lower the energy of a transition complex, like a catalyst would. You should be able to shift energies of starting and ending states to change the reaction equilibrium within your reactor vessel, but of course you won't get any energetic free lunch in the end.

Or there was Hutchison and crew (2012), which as I understood it used Rabi splitting to shift energies, for similar reaction-twiddling.