Synthetic gasoline | Hacker News Reader

Synthetic gasoline

iere.org

26 pointsalexandrehtrb57 comments

Apparently atmospheric carbon capture + Fischer-Tropsch process currently produces gasoline that costs 100x the market price. So probably a long way to go before it's commercially viable.

VS, drive down the right back road in arizona* and get a tank full of all natural drip gas for a lot less than the market price, with the one caviet that drip gas is hydroscopic and it has to be used promptly

* wherever there are wells with condensate that isn't too nasty

The focus for these kind of alternatives should be on aviation—with the most difficult fuel to replace. Maybe we'd need this for classic cars, emergency generators and a few other smaller things, but even classic cars can get electric refits. Cars, motorbikes, trucks etc should be electric; shipping needs to embrace sail-electric hybrids; and bio-fuels/synthetic fuel should be aimed at aviation (and maybe as a stop-gap for shipping). My 10¢.

Obviously you're not a car guy if you earnestly believe classic cars should almost always be refitted with an electric engine rather than using a more environmentally friendly fuel replacement. We shouldn't just toss the old functional engine & ECU & other components into the landfill. You're seeing it from a tech perspective. No, Sam, the Porsche 964 is not comparable to the latest shiny MacBook where you can just throw it away after you've had your 2 years of fun and the non-replaceable battery looks like a pillow and Apple refuses to update your OS. My 10c is I'm all for the synthetic gasoline instead of completely gutting classics and just turning them into almost-sleeper "classic body & suspension with a Tesla motor thrown into it". That being said I don't mind the electric conversions but to imply they should be done rather than just switching fuels is silly at best. I see it in the same category of project as an engine swap, it's something that's done for fun or more power, not something that ought to happen to every classic.

It depends on the car.

My first car (in 1986) was a barn find 1964 Triumph TR4a. If I had that car today, I'd EV swap it in a heartbeat because

- The car is not super rare

- The inline 6 it came with is under-powered, un-reliable, and I've never seen a triumph engine that went more than a few years without a leak (have had 5 between myself and my parents)

- it would massively increase the likelyhood that I'd daily drive it, if I knew it would start and run reliably & wouldn't leave me stranded.

- engine parts are not easy to find.

But I'd never EV-swap something super rare, or something that has a better, more common, more reliable engine

gestures broadly at all the people driving 20 miles each way to work every day getting 20 mpg in not a classic car

You should be thankful to EV drivers for making the only fuel classic cars take last longer.

Classic cars being refit to be electric is like using strawberry flavoured candy to replace fruit, or GPU shaders to replace a Trinitron.

Modern cars already exist, you can just use those. There aren’t enough proper classics in existence to matter from a carbon perspective.

I think there is space for both. While I like preserving the technology, there are cases where the EV conversion adds some charm to the original vehicle. The period-incorrectness is captivating in many instances.

Pre safety body designs had a lot more design flexibility.

Plus, there are designs where the internal combustion engine is not a goal, but the best tech available at the time - those designs can only be fully realized with technology that wasn't available when the original design came out.

Thinking of the Bizzarrini Manta, the Ferrari Modulo, the Maserati Boomerang, or the Citroen Karin.

Cars can be art. You dont have to justify it technologically.

And iterating on art is also art.

Classic cars are a tiny fraction of miles driven by cars and cars is only a fraction of fuel used.

The EPA and carb need to be a lot more concerned with 90% use cases and much less concerned with 100% cases. Lower emission standards for PHEVs.

> The focus for these kind of alternatives should be on aviation—with the most difficult fuel to replace.

Why is aviation fuel the most difficult to replace?

An aircraft burns fuel and gets lighter as it flies its route. Batteries are always heavy.

The difference in energy density is much more important.

The specific energy of gasoline is 46.4 MJ/kg, while that of a Samsung inr18650 Li-Ion cell is 958.1 kJ/kg. Even accounting for the much lower efficiency of a turbofan engine the difference is quite significant.

Because weight matters a lot in an airplane, and hydrocarbons are the densest form of fuel. Adding 20% to the weight of a car isn't really a big deal; adding that to a plane makes the entire enterprise fail.

If they can find a way to transform carbon-neutral electricity into a hydrocarbon, then they can keep airplanes going without having to burn fossil fuels. But it's hard to make that efficient enough to be economically viable.

> Adding 20% to the weight of a car isn't really a big deal

And typically the car can't go as far on a single charge as a tank of gas. I can usually go about 200 miles on a typical charge in my (cough) "300" mile EVs, but my last gas car could go about 400 miles between visits to the gas station. (But I don't care because I just plug in when I get home.)

That being said, I once rented an Infiniti that could barely do 200 miles on a single tank of gas.

To get back to the point: Batteries are just too heavy for airplanes, so unless there is a major breakthrough, synthetic gasoline is currently the most promising way to make airplanes carbon neutral.

I view classic cars as a "preservation" exercise, and the kind of thing where paying extra for synthetic gasoline is "worth it" for a historical demonstration.

That being said: For hobbyists who use a classic car as a base for something custom, I have no problem with whatever method of propulsion they use.

You fight with the army you have. There are hundreds of millions of gas burning vehicles that are going to be on the road for years. Synthetic fuel allows you to transparently replace the source with a carbon neutral equivalent without any new hardware requirements. As you build out additional synthesis capacity, you can hit more markets.

  >You fight with the army you have.

You craft the analogy to suit your conclusion.

Building an "army" of E-Gas synthesis capacity (and worse, an "army" of the 300+% increase in wind and solar to cover inefficiency) is harder than replacing that "army" of cars with EVs.

E-Gas greenwashes fossil fuel stranded assets, but it's not a serious attempt at an energy source.

> It’s essentially a manufactured replica of gasoline, designed to power internal combustion engines while potentially offering a more sustainable alternative to fossil fuels.

Key word: "potentially". Because it is less accurate than the word "currently" - as in, "currently, the cost of production is a significant barrier" - I would argue the word "potentially" at the outset frames the whole description of benefits as an unsubstantiated faith.

When all processes for deriving synthetic gasoline require more input energy than available energy from the output, you're not describing processes that "potentially offering a more sustainable alternative to fossil fuels."

The unsubstantiated faith critique swings both ways: the amount of biofuel hate that came out of that one time agricultural land use adjustment is truly diabolical.

Like, "ok, you win, but if I drop this gigantic adjustment onto your math, then I win," and an honest conversation would then move to whether or not the adjustment was justified but that's not what happened, the conversation turned into yelling at anyone who didn't want to take the outcome-determinative adjustment on faith. Lol. Being a crusader doesn't make you wrong, but it does make the whole accusation of unsubstantiated faith / appeal to reason quite hypocritical.

No doubt, it's a double-edged sword.

And to be clear, I wouldn't have a problem if only the facts were put down: current methods, advantages (probably compared to other methods) and drawbacks. But to say this is "potentially offering a more sustainable alternative to fossil fuels" is like saying: "I can use a 74GW data center and a prompt to get the answer to 2+2, it potentially offers a more sustainable alternative to calculators."

You say that, but is it true?

The science keeps walking away from the Searchinger 2008 result (100g GHG/MJ iLUC for corn ethanol) and towards the biofuels industry claims that this was absurdly high, yet green rhetoric still behaves like the argument was 100% settled in 2008 and anyone who thinks otherwise is a shill.

If the energy source to make the fuel is renewable (hydro, solar, wind), then it is effectively carbon neutral, and that’s the best you can do. Someday I think we’ll get there, but I don’t know enough to guess how far off that is.

Great point.

  >and that’s the best you can do

Even if the e-Gas production process is 100% efficient (and it very much is not), you're still throwing away 40-70% of the energy depending on the type of engine. This compares very poorly to a battery drivetrain which achieves 90+% round-trip efficiency.

For cars and trucks at least, scaling battery manufacturing is simply a much easier challenge vs more-than-tripling the required size of the entire fleet's renewable energy supply.

E-Gas can't compete on land, even assuming e-Gas converters were free and 100% efficient. This isn't a matter of waiting for the tech to get better and become The Sustainable Future, it's already been made obsoleted by electric cars.

"E-gas cars vs electric cars" is settled, "e-gas planes vs electric planes" is very much not. You were careful to say "on land," but I wanted to highlight it for anyone who isn't familiar enough with the argument to spot the hedging. Energy storage density is extremely important for aviation and the best batteries still make for very poor planes.

Emergency generation is another application where density is important. It's extremely difficult to beat the a gas turbine + tanker truck on cost and flexibility, it's the energy equivalent of "don't underestimate the bandwidth of tapes in a station wagon."

  >You were careful to say "on land," but I wanted to highlight it for anyone who isn't familiar enough with the argument to spot the hedging.

I didn't know saying what I meant is such a heinous crime. :) But to make things fun here's a nice strong claim:

E-Gas won't work for airplanes either.

That's because A) E-Gas converters are not free and not 100% efficient, so it's more like 5x the cost in best-case-scenario (vs 10x today), and B) the aviation industry is well aware that corruption is simply cheaper.

E-Gas will not happen. What will actually happen is more of the same:

1) aviation will continue to use E-Gas (and some costly demo flights) as a greenwashing tactic while behind-the-scenes working to soften climate goals,

2) eventually the intermediate technical-economic-policy compromise will be to only use fossil fuels for aviation, and

3) in the long-long term aviation will go electric too, only with slightly different routing and network design to accommodate the reduced range (this has a cost, but by then fossil fuels will be costlier).

E-Gas is good for nothing except greenwashing fossil fuel assets, hence the big push on HN. Gotta fool your talent pool that they're not 'really' part of the problem. This both lowers labor cost and delays effective regulation, since engineers tend to be thought-leaders in crafting future policy.

> When all processes for deriving synthetic gasoline require more input energy than available energy from the output, you're not describing processes that "potentially offering a more sustainable alternative to fossil fuels."

Sorry, what? Even charging a battery "require more input energy than available energy from the output". Obviously it's not a source of energy, it's a way to store energy.

And given the notorious low efficiency of ICE motors it's likely that traditional gasoline takes more energy to refine etc. than actually drives the car forwards.

Good point. I agree, framing it as a way to store and move energy from another source (especially a more sustainable source) makes a lot more sense.

I think, in comparing the energy input and output of the fuel, you might be omitting its storage density and role in off-grid energy availability. For example, consider aviation: you can't hook up a plane to a solar farm or nuke plant, but you have to take energy with you onboard. In order to fly and lift passengers or cargo, you need to minimize the mass of energy supply, which means maximizing energy density. It's really hard to beat hydrocarbons for that, and they're available at a convenient range of temperatures and pressures. So, the idea behind synthetic fuels is to make artificial hydrocarbon fuel as a means of storing green energy. The energy input-output inefficiency is just the price of storing that energy for off-grid use.

The concept is very old. Germany had synthetic Gasonline starting in 1927: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leuna-Benzin

Honest question: how do you all sense when a page is AI-written? To me, the many headings, lists, and frequent use of bold stand out stylistically. Additionally: the multilevel numbered table of contents; the parenthetical acronyms (to the point of silliness, as in "Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)" stand out.

Non-stylistically, the non-answers to questions or misinterpreted questions (read the bolded final sentence under "What is the octane rating of synthetic gasoline?") are a tell.

Homepage looks AI-written to me. The defined sections, use of banal emojis like globe and brain, use of bolding.

The oddly diverse (this isn't the right word but can't think of the right one) list of articles created by the vaguely named author seems to point in this direction too:

https://iere.org/author/iere-team/

This style of news writing (headings in the form of a question followed by a paragraph of answer) had already started before widespread use of LLMs to write news stories. Particularly in papers targeted at mass audiences such as USA Today (also seen in their the many local papers that Gannett has assimilated).

Yes and even in the New York Times[†], but somehow it's still different in some way I can't articulate.

[†] Q&A format: https://archive.is/20250828121105/https://www.nytimes.com/20... ;

Bulleted list with bold format: https://archive.is/g8K5w#live-feed-items

Just wait until you find an AI-generated page [1] made from one of your own forum posts [2]... it's an odd sensation of flattery that evolves into disgust as you realize that an LLM has no taste so you can't even derive satisfaction from another person finding you good enough to rip off.

[1] https://bikermtb.com/kilo-bicycles-2/

[2] https://www.bikeforums.net/general-cycling-discussion/129598...

Wow, that's...something.

I write like that as my wife is an SEO specialist and showed me the impact of those elements in SEO.

Interesting, good to know, though I wish it weren't so. I wonder how long until the pendulum (of SEO) swings the other way, and then following it, AI websites' style.

ctrl+f "furthermore"

I heard about Aircela- a modular gasoline from thin air generator company- from a comment in here earlier this week. It was never discussed in any posts so I looked into it because it sounded fascinating. The details are it costs about $20k for a unit, and one unit can produce about 1 gallon of pure 90 octane gasoline using water and a replaceable catalyst cartridge in a day. And that requires 75 KWh of electricity! On my grid that’s like $15 of power at carbon neutral rates. So it sounds like an amazingly impressive and economical impractical technology.

Chile has a synthetic gasoline plant that started operating in 2022:

https://en.clickpetroleoegas.com.br/haru-oni-plant-starts-pr...

https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/home/stories/haru-o...

I think FT is passe, a lot of projects are using MTG

https://www.exxonmobilchemical.com/en/catalysts-and-technolo...

but still making methanol from syngas. Two attractive routes though are just using methanol or blending methanol into gas and turning the methanol to dimethyl ether.

I dunno if it is really practical but I like this image of this personal fuel synthesizer

https://www.carsauce.com/car-news/start-up-invents-home-petr...

which makes about a gallon a day which is about what my Honda Fit uses.

& relatively cheap abundant catalysts

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S24688...

Methanol is pretty good on its own in gasoline-capable engines if the firmware was right and there were no components in the fuel system sensitive to "pure" alcohol.

It just physically gives the lowest mileage per gallon compared to other alcohols, which still all give shorter range per tank compared to plain hydrocarbons. This is not really that big a deal on the road but for aviation it can make all the difference, so that would have to be where it makes sense to process all the way to a synthetic hydrocarbon fuel. Or if there was actually surplus energy, more energy could be stored by processing the alcohols into lower-oxygen-content higher-energy-density liquids. On a per-tank storage basis too.

Regardless of less energy per gallon, methanol and ethanol do burn with higher octane ratings than most premium gasolines.

Plus in case of fire, alcohols burn with a blue flame too faint to see in sunlight so 15% hydrocarbons are added which would result in a yellow flame instead. That's why the M85 and E85 are only 85% alcohol.

I have seen some renewable naphtha that smelled pretty sweet but like ordinary petroleum naphtha, is not a drop-in replacement for finished gasoline since the antiknock rating is way too low. But naphtha of some kind still makes up the bulk of gasoline blendstocks which are then enhanced with more costly higher-octane hydrocarbons and often 10% ethanol too to barely meet specifications for consumer gasoline. After running it through the analytical lab this renewable stuff was clean clean and I would have to estimate as a liquid it was way less toxic than the natural organic virgin straight-run naphtha obtained from crude oil. And the virgin sweet petroleum naphtha is concentrated from "sweet" crude by distillation without depending on any chemical reactions, and it gags you a lot less than the catalytic naphtha which has been chemically or physically "cracked" into different nasty-smelling hydrocarbons that did not exist naturally within the crude oil to begin with.

It is truly remarkable how ‘dirty’ fractionated hydrocarbons are from crude, but it makes sense considering the absolute chaotic chemical soup that is crude oil.

On the plus side, I read your comment like a sommelier critiquing the latest wine - my mental imagine was you lightly sniffing and then sipping the latest syngas.

‘A strong note of toluene, with a remarkably clean and sharp benzene aftertaste, with an earthy finish reminiscent of the best Texas light crude.’

A+

Dumb question, and I might not understand the difference. Don't we already have synthetic gasoline in the form of trufuel and the ilk? I can buy that at walmart; expensive, sure, but is indoor-safe and lasts forever. Smells good when it burns as a bonus!

Trufuel is just normal fuel, premixed with other stuff.

No. Trufuel is fossil fuel derived. It's just distilled and mixed to a much tighter tolerance than typical gasoline. Synthetic gasoline is derived from atmospheric CO2 and water, effectively reversing combustion via the Fischer-Tropsch process or Methanol-to-Gasoline.

I can never figure out how to do this in my garrage, these overviews are too high level. Sure it would lively cost me $50 per gallon, but just once I want to mow my lawn on fuel I made myself.

You don’t need to. The gas retailers have already chosen the options for you. You actually need fewer options, as you have better things to do with your time.

Outside of working in existing vehicles without modification, what is the benefit of this over a methanol or ammonia electric fuel cell or an ammonia-burning ICE?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com