British company produces petrol from air

A small British company has produced the first "petrol from air" using a revolutionary technology that promises to solve the energy crisis even as it helps curb global warming with the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Air Fuel Synthesis (AFS) in Stockton-on-Tees in The UK has produced five litres of petrol since August when it switched on a small refinery manufacturing petrol from carbon dioxide and water vapour.

According to the company it would build a larger, commercial-scale plant with an output of a ton a day of petrol. It also has plans to set up facilities for the production of green aviation fuel to make airline travel more carbon-neutral.

Tim Fox, head of energy and the environment at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in London, said it sounded too good to be true but it was true. He added, AFS was doing it and he had seen it himself.

He said, the innovation was that AFS had made it happen as a process. He added, it was a small pilot plant capturing air and extracting CO2 from it based on well known principles and it used well-known and well-established components but what was exciting was that they had put the whole thing together and shown that it could work.

Although the process was still in the early developmental stages and needed to draw electricity from the national grid to work, the company believed it would eventually be possible to use power from renewable sources such as wind farms or tidal barrages.