US airforce looks to buy Californian garbage jet fuel

RE: My previous comment

Oops, was still thinking about the 'Woman stuck to toilet' story and read this article as though they were converting our *ahem* personal garbage to fuel.

That's no good is it?

What good is it flying to Australia, but then only halfway back? I mean it's big and wet out there.

The lifejacket, please.

The words...

"Science" and

"Fiction"

spring to mind here.

There's a saying somewhere;

"If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is!"

Just HOW MUCH garbage IS required to produce a total of 1800BPD, whilst at the same time generating enough energy to support the plasma furnaces AND the gas liquefaction/refining process.

Please no.

Please, please don't make this a commercial reality. Taking 3 of the worse and most inefficient producers of CO2 and combining them into 1 system is not progress - it's just pure evil.

Plasma arc if you must, but forget the GTL and forget the "food mile" jumbo's..as a sheep rearing nation (UK) we can live without fresh lamb from New Zealand, surely.

Yes, ultimately it's CO2 going back where it came from, but the normal way takes decades in a more sustainable "drip drip" fashion. The bath is already full, the bathroom is already flooding, so to speak. The last thing we need to is start turning more taps on.

Speaking of which, does anyone else's stomach turn whenever that Shell GTL advert comes on? Don't look for new solutions to energy...just find different ways to make the old crap work. Preferably with less efficiency. Then call it "green".

And since internal combustion is still the best we have, why can't we just use the G, and forget the inefficient TL processing part?

I'm a "realistic eco-nazi", but really, there must be better ways than this.

Self Powering?

"Solena claims that the energy value of the syngas output is four times that required to run the plasma furnaces, making the process self-powering."

It's been a while since A-Level Physics, but isn't that kind of thing usually considered impossible without resorting to nuclear fission?

No dobut someone can explain.

new invention?!?!

This is written as though this is some new discovery. Dr Santilli invented magnegas a long time ago. Even funded by the US military briefly, and Harvard, both of which quickly cut funding after oil companies/government/god intervened.

The US government new about such technologies and supressed them. Santilli was labelled eccentric at best. Now some other company has "reinvented" it and they're willing to listen? sounds like rubbish. Where's his credit?

When will the actual scientists who push technology forward be recognised rather than supressed for spin.

dead dodo, cos all us scientist may as well be!

@ Simon Ball

...to add to my previous comments, methane is a fantastic fuel in raw form (and we have considerable natural and self-made supplies of it), and as you say - burning methane to CO2 (a lesser green house gas) is definitely the lesser of two evils.

<non-scientist alert>

Can't we just run the methane without having to convert to hydrocarbon?

</non-scientist alert>

Skull and crossbones, because we're all doomed.

Re: Self Powering

I think the concept the 'perpetual motion engine' is that it requires no fuel [energy, extra push every half hour, etc] once you start it - that would be truly self perpetuating.

This idea would still require fuel in terms of suitable garbage to be converted to gas - it just means that the generator uses 25% of it's own output [when supplied with fuel] to power itself.

I'm thinking of it in the same way as car engine can provide enough energy to turn an alternator to provide it's own electricity to give itself a spark - but it still requires petrol to be connected to it to run the alternator itself that provides that spark, etc.

that's the way it works in my head anyway, but I'm not especially smart :-)

Steven R

Useable energy input into system > useable energy output from system

@Jezza, Ishkandar, see the title - the total useable energy of the output is less than the total useable energy of the input (obviously total energy of all kinds is the same - in this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!), but rather than being spread over 4 million tonnes of slowly-decomposing-to-methane rubbish, its quickly converted into (a lot less) high-energy-density fuel, which you could in theory burn to power the furnaces. There would be further efficiency losses in the burning process, but there is nothing theoretically wrong with the idea it could be a self powering process (or more accurately, a rubbish-powered process).

We need more ideas like this, and like the previous story about cow-pat based fuel - rather than becoming tofu-eating cave-dwellers, lets make more efficient use of resources we have available.

Flames, because plasma torches sound pretty toasty to me.

Magnegas?!?

The Prevaricator did sed:

> Is this the same Dr Santilli who came up with the wonder that is "HHO gas"?

Yes, yes he is.

HIlariously, the contact page on the fairly slick-looking website of the Magnegas Corporation lists the company president(?!?) as having a Los Angeles phone number, while the CFO's number is in central Florida... at least their quoted email addresses have something in common... they end in "@gmail.com".

Scratching a bit deeper at the Solena technology, it seems to be pretty much the same crock of fuel-from-shite as what Santilli's, Brown and other crank-handles have been peddling since day dot... take random organic materials, blast with sufficient heat in sufficent absence of oxygen to dissociate the complex hydrocarbons into atomic carbon and hydrogen (plus trace elements), draw products away so the hydrogen recombines into molecular hydrogen gas, which is then quickly relabelled as a miracle new never-before-seen wonder-fuel and burned even quicker, before anybody, hopefully, notices how much of a crackhead you're being in making your claims.

If this was serious, the article in Flight International would've carried statements from USAF spokespeople rather than just the head of a hole-in-the-wall outfit which has been going for (according to its own website) over a decade and has nothing to show for it.

Penguin, because global warming threatens their ice-floe habitats, and because they're cute.

Easy!

"The USAF wants to be getting at least 150 kilobarrels a day from non-petroleum sources by 2010"

Easy! Make the barrels smaller, and thus require less product. If they make them small enough, I could probably supply them with Hydrogen made in my shed.

Has someone been watching Back to the Future?

This sounds awfully like what they had in the film Back to the Future.

i.e. use common household rubbish to propel a flying machine by way of a Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactor.

Perhaps some of the ideas that the writers in Hollywood come up with in films aren't as crazy as first seems.