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

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

The company believes the technique could help solve energy supply problems and curb global warming by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

It can be used in existing cars without converting the engines.

Air Fuel Synthesis has already made five litres at a small refinery — proving the new technology works. The firm plans to make five tons a day if it can build a commercial-scale plant.

The article is misleading. Energy is not generated from the air, it uses electricity we already have to make petrol from CO2+water. Then the car burns the petrol to make CO2+water again. No net CO2 is removed from the atmosphere and no energy is gained, it's just that petrol is a convenient high-density fuel for transport (electric cars have expensive and low-capacity batteries).

Finally this isn't revolutionary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process

If they burn fossil fuels to make the petrol then it's worse than useless. Every time you convert energy from one form to another you lose some of that energy as waste heat. To make 1 joule of petrol energy from air and water you need to use >1 joule of energy. So if it's fossil fuel energy you're using then it'sincreasing the amount of C0s in the atmosphere.

If they use nuclear, solar, wind or hydro then it's a closed, carbon neutral cycle.

they should use geothermal energy

Joule Unlimited has a cheap method available, using microbes and sunlight. Their website claims that they can make diesel at $1.40 a gallon, which would be a hug part of our economic problem.  They've won awards from the World Economic Forum, Wall Street Journal, and MIT for innovation, but if they can make diesel with the cost effieciency that they claim, then they will make a killing in the marketplace, and wean us off mideast oil.

Here's a link giving their overview

http://www.jouleunlimited.com/why-solar-fuel/overview

Wether its revolutionary or not i dont care.

What i do care is that it works and drops the prices of fuel already. Its a freaking wallet rape, at the moment.

£1.44 a liter is shocking... remember when it was 90p like 4-5 years back

Beware those assassins that kill everyone that threatens the oil industry!!!

Btw people in spain let algae water and sun produce fuel. And the best part is that algae "eats" co2 to produce that fuel.

Theoretically you could hook that algae reactor to a cole power plant and let the algae eat the shitty  smoke to create even more power.

There is no conspiracy to keep the oil industry in control, most alternatives are simply not cost effective.

If people were willing to spend $5/liter or $20/gallon for gas there are countless alternatives to petroleum, but if you want to continue to buy gas at current rates about the only cost effective source is oil.

The guys in the video are not creating clean energy, what they want to do, is to create PETROL using clean energy sources to power the conversion. So all this is doing is allowing us to use renewables to make fuel to power our cars, which seems a little silly when we barely make any electricity through renewables before worrying about how to stop cars using fuel