this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
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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%.
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.
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%.
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For planes there's a catalytic process that can turn ethanol into jet fuel.
Battery electric aeroplanes aren't as far off as you might think, but you're technically correct that they don't currently exist.
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Finally a way to turn clean solar into something I can burn.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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...
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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
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Aircela is targeting >50% end to end power efficiency. Since there is about 37kWh of energy in a gallon of gasoline we will require about 75kWh to make it. When we power our machines with standalone, off-grid, photovoltaic panels this will correspond to less than $1.50/gallon in energy cost.
Meanwhile, an electric vehicle could go hundreds of miles on the same amount of energy input...
Gasoline is a very high energy material. You can put it into anything (that works with gas) in seconds and store it for months.
Is this a perfect solution? No. But it’s technically possible to achieve carbon neutrality on an ICE vehicle with zero modification, you’ve just got ~50% loss on the solar you collected.
Triggered by “ICE” rn
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remember plastoline? that method of relatively easily transforming plastic waste into gasoline.
good or not, worthwhile or not, i don't think tech like this will take off when the oil industry makes so much money from drilling and fracking for that same gas.
Plastic is already made from the residues of gasoline production.
Sure we can extract a bit more gasoline from it but it's not going to replace drilling oil.
Another device of the type that Thunderf00t used to 'bust.'
Thunderf00t
Love his YT channel... he destroys Elon reputation (if he ever had one...) and calls his 90% BS . lol
The "Why 'Feminism' is poisoning atheism", "Feminism Vs FACTS" chud?
I'm surprised he still has an audience tbh. Well, sadly not that surprised.
“Why ‘Feminism’ is poisoning atheism”
What? How are these two topics related at all?
Oh, they're not but I guess you'd have to ask him for the answer. Those videos are both still up if you want to watch a long stream of misogyny and logical fallacies dressed up as an 'owning'.
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This machine uses 75kWh per day to make 1 gallon of gasoline. Using the cheapest electricity in the country, that's $9.29 per gallon (+ the machine itself is $20k).
It's useful if you can rig it to solar or wind, but that's about it. Hydrocarbon fuel is convenient because it's compact and energy dense compared to must other fuel sources. If the world ran on nuclear and renewable energy entirely, it would be extremely useful to create a circular carbon economy without digging up new fossil fuels. In our shitty reality though, it's only marginally useful.
Could also be useful for logistics reasons, say remote communities capable of making electricity but fuel may be a bit of an issue. Plus if these catch on at any capacity it could eventually lead to smaller cheaper models popping up which do have a tonne of uses.
Come run it in Finland during the summer months, we have too much solar and wind generation then and electricity is often free or even goes negative every once in a while.
insert Adam Something's "shitting in the living room" metaphor here
Kind of pretty important and relevant:
The main reason why this process isn't "something for nothing" is that it takes twice as much electrical energy to produce energy in the form of gasoline. As Aircela told The Autopian:
Aircela is targeting >50% end to end power efficiency. Since there is about 37kWh of energy in a gallon of gasoline we will require about 75kWh to make it. When we power our machines with standalone, off-grid, photovoltaic panels this will correspond to less than $1.50/gallon in energy cost.
So basically juat imagine a gas powered generator hooked up to this to power the process of pulling gasoline out of the air.
Ok, see how that's silly?
Right, now, if you do run it off solar power, then sure! That makes more sense.
Hate hyrdocarbon fuels all you want, they are very good at being dense, portable, and exist in the vast majority of pre-existing logistics infrastructure.
But the thing isn't magic, it takes energy to convert air into basically a form of liquid energy.
And... you'd probably have to refine it or chemically treat it at least somewhat.
I'm not a chemist, but I am guessing this is the case, if you want gasoline that is just equivalent to what your car would expect.
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.
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.
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.
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This would actually provide me enough gas each week with my hybrid in office schedule.
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Sell these to the "but mah vroom vroom noise" crowd and switch everything to electric.
Hmm, 75kwh to make a gallon of gasoline at even a low estimate of 15 cents per kWh is $11.25/gallon. That's if they meet their full efficiency targets. I'm sure there will be a few who are willing to pay but it's pretty expensive fun.
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All the catches
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