Today, electric cars make up just around 8 percent of all vehicles on U.S. roads. (Roughly 90 person of vehicles globally still run on fossil fuels.) Most EVs remain prohibitively expensive for the majority of Americans, and they require enormous amounts of critical minerals—resources that, when extracted at scale, pose their own environmental dilemmas. Most Americans also still just aren’t interested in ditching their gas guzzlers to save the planet.
But what if they didn’t have to?
That’s the alluring—if wildly ambitious—vision being presented by New York–based fuels startup Aircela. Earlier this month, the company announced it had created the world’s first functional machine capable of generating real, usable car gasoline “directly from the air.” Aircela’s new device, roughly the size of a commercial refrigerator, combines direct air capture (DAC) with on-site fuel synthesis to create gasoline using just air, water, and renewable energy. No fossil fuels, they say, are required.
The product their device produces can be poured directly into the tank of any standard gas-powered car. Aircela demonstrated the process, making gasoline directly from air, in front of a live audience in New York. Though most would describe this proof of concept as a “prototype,” company co-founder and CEO Eric Dahlgren takes some umbrage with that label.
“When I first spoke with Eric, I told him, ‘I wish you all the success in the world, but I can’t believe this is going to work.’ Fortunately, I was wrong. Aircela has earned my full respect, and I’m thrilled to celebrate this historic moment. I’m convinced this marks the beginning of a long and important journey — one whose impact is still vastly underestimated today.”
— Karl Dums, Former Senior Project Lead of eFuels, Porsche AG
The machine was successfully demonstrated in front of a live audience, with guests including New York City Councilmember Erik Bottcher, New York State Energy Chairman Richard Kauffman, and several early investors. The event showcased Aircela’s working machine, designed to produce real, usable gasoline—on-site and in real time.
Strategic investor Maersk Growth—the venture arm of shipping company A.P. Moller – Maersk—sees Aircela’s technology as a meaningful step toward global decarbonization efforts.
“We invested in Aircela because of their innovative approach to production of low-emission fuels based on direct air capture. With the first prototype working, we have seen an important step towards that goal. We now look forward to seeing Aircela scale and reduce cost, paving the way for what will hopefully become the transition of Maersk from investor to customer.”
— Morten Bo Christiansen, Senior Vice President, Head of Energy Transition, A.P. Moller Maersk
Sorry, not buying it.
Shall immediately sell my perpetual motion stock.
The only significant carbon in air is CO2 at about 430 ppm. The energy required to turn that into hydrocarbon fuel is huge, and you won’t get 100% back when you burn it, which is okay if that energy is sunlight, but why not just make electricity and store it in a battery? — far more efficient. This is a scam.
Why is it a scam? It’s wildly inefficient to be sure, end-to-end you’re going to lose 90% or so, but it apparently does work.
The real problem: these 90% mean that the whole process is economically unviable until gasoline gets five to ten times more expensive. That’s not going to happen any time soon.
Next problem: you now need ten times as many windmills and solar arrays to power your cars than if you’d use EVs.
NB: dear author: Lithium is not a Rare Earth element! It’s very far from critical, and batteries that use Na instead, which is even more abundant, aren’t *that* far off.
The real problem: these 90% mean that the whole process is economically unviable until gasoline gets five to ten times more expensive. That’s not going to happen any time soon.
Yep. The company spokesman says that the design is modular and so can be easily scaled up; but scaling up something this wasteful isn’t going to improve the economics, not one bit.
Got off bum and did some * research * and it appears real. Short on details, especially costings. Expect my perpetual motion stock will probably give better returns, but what the hell, there are plenty of worse things to spend money on.