A team of British scientists from renewable energy company, Air Fuel Synthesis (AFS), have manufactured the first ‘petrol from air’ after producing five litres of petrol from thin air at a small refinery in Stockton-on-Tees, Deeside.

The £1.1 million project, funded by unnamed philanthropists, uses a refinery that captures carbon dioxide and hydrogen from water to produce petrol. AFS has said that it hopes the technology will break the transport industry’s reliance on polluting fossil fuels and help reduce global warming by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Peter Harrison, the company's Chief Executive revealed the breakthrough at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers conference in London this week.

Harrison explained that the refinery enabled the company to "use renewable energy to take carbon dioxide from the air and hydrogen from water to make methanol. The methanol is then converted to petrol".

Harrison further explained to the Independent: “We are converting renewable electricity into a more versatile, usable and storable form of energy, namely liquid transport fuels.

“We think that by the end of 2014, provided we can get the funding going, we can be producing petrol using renewable energy and doing it on a commercial basis.”

According to AFS, the technology electrolyses water from the air to make hydrogen and ‘reacts’ the carbon dioxide and hydrogen together to make hydrocarbon fuels. As such, the fuel is ‘unrestricted by availability or price of raw materials, local or geo-politics and is unaffected by issues of land use or food availability’.

Clegg: I really have glimpsed the future

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg visited the demonstrator plant in Teeside earlier today (19 October) after visiting specialist product manufacturer, Tinsley, who successfully bid for money from the Government's £2.4 billion Regional Growth Fund.

"When I was told that there was a project making petrol out of thin air right next door, I couldn't turn down the invitation to have a quick look. What's really fantastic is that I saw they are using kit that’s manufactured in a company that I know very well in Sheffield.... Maybe I really have glimpsed the future through this short visit", said Clegg.

Clegg’s visit to the carbon-neutral plant comes just two days after the ‘green quad’, comprised of Clegg, Prime Minister David Cameron, Chancellor George Osborne and Lib Dem Chief Financial Secretary Danny Alexander met with Energy Secretary Edward Davey for crisis talks about the future of the UK energy industry. The talks followed ‘growing concern’ about the rising costs of energy bills and mounting pressure from environmental groups over the need to decarbonise the energy industry.

Concerns over energy input

Mike Childs, Head of Science, Policy and Research at Friends of the Earth told Resource that these sorts of technological advances are exactly what government should be looking to in order to decarbonise the economy.

“The government absolutely ought to be backing this kind of research to deliver some of the technologies we need in the future. At the same time, they should be looking at how to currently deploy the technologies we have now to decarbonise our economy. It’s important that this isn’t an alternative to building offshore windfarms or putting solar panels on people’s homes, and insulating them, this is an additional thing the government should be doing that will solve some of the tougher nuts to crack.

“This techonology is important and it will be definitely part of the future of synthetic fuel… At the moment aviation fuel is incredibly cheap and the aviation industry is mostly looking towards biofuels as a way of producing its fuels for the future. But of course, those have lots of impacts like land use, competition with food crops, competition with bio-diversity etc, so [AFS] have potentially quite a large niche market if they can drive the cost down considerably.

"This research and development is critical, especially for hard-to-decarbonise setors, like the aviation sector. But it is at the moment just that, research and development, and it’s a long way from being commercialised.”

Childs also expressed concern at the amount of energy the process currently uses, however, according to a statement running on AFS’s website, the process has better power efficiency than coal-fired power stations. ‘As with any technology there is always a loss in any energy conversion. For example coal-fired power stations are only 30 per cent efficient. However, at AFS our energy efficiency is better than that and will continue to improve as we build larger plants, and, of course we do not contribute to carbon-induced global warming.’

The demonstration plant currently runs on electricity from the national grid but it is hoped that it will eventually be able to run on power from renewable sources such as wind power.

‘The AFS technology allows us to capture surplus electrical energy, storing it in a way that is better and more useful than batteries. We intend to work with wind farms to capture excess energy that is not able to be used by the grid.’

Commercially viable

Though the company acknowledges that ‘for some people… the process seems just too good to be true’, it maintains that the company has a ‘solid business proposition’ and is now ready to build commercial plants capable of producing one tonne of specialist fuels a day.

The specialist fuel will initially be used in top-end motorsport applications and the aviation industry. If suitable funding is found, it is hoped that these commercial plants could be up and running by 2015.

According to AFS: ‘independent engineering analysis conducted for AFS shows that a one-tonne a day production plant taking carbon from a point source such as a brewery, distillery or aerobic digestor… can be competitive with equivalent specialist fossil fuels and commercially viable.

‘What's more an AFS plant will be non-polluting and provide a secure supply of fuel from a containerised unit located wherever required.’

Read more about Air Fuel Synthesis.