Audi to make diesel from water

Countries like Australia have everything they need to become diesel and ethanol self-sufficient, according to the boffins charged with growing the synthetic fuels that will make future Audi models CO2-neutral.

Audi is about to employ billions and billions of new workers as it launches a multi-million-dollar trial plant in New Mexico to turn water into diesel and ethanol.

Where current diesels run on the remains of billion-year old plankton and where bio-diesels run on processed rapeseed, future diesels could run cleanly on the photosynthesized discharges of billions of tiny, genetically modified bacteria.

Audi’s trial plant, built with US biofuel experts, Joule Unlimited, is already producing bio-ethanol and will produce its first bio-diesel early next year - and it will do so without using food cereals, biomass, arable land or essential water supplies.

Importantly - like a similar trial by GM and US company Coskata, which turns household garbage into ethanol – Audi’s pilot program will also do it without drilling a hole, refining a goopy fluid or fracking rocks.

“With the system we are using, all you need is a lot of sunlight, CO2 and water – any old waste or brackish water will do – and we can produce ethanol or diesel,” Audi’s Head of Sustainable Product Development, Reiner Mangold told motoring.com.au.

“Continents like Australia and Africa and even North America have enough of all three.

“In the deserts of the Middle East and North Africa alone, the sun shines with 30 times more energy than the amount of electricity generated worldwide every year.”

The system involves a “farm” with a series of 100-metre-long hoses, into which Audi and Joule simply pump in waste or salty water, the genetically modified bacteria and CO2.

“We use micro-organisms, three-1000ths of a millimetre long and with a single cell, then use any waste water,” Mr Mangold said.

“Billions of the organisms produce the fuel simply through photosynthesis and, with the diesel they produce, it just floats to the top and we constantly fed it away from the site and into tanks,” he said.

While the system sounds stupidly simple, the complications come with the genetic modification of the simple bacteria.

“We want to split part of the gene and insert something else into the gene of the bacteria.

“It’s just modifying the genetic DNA. With medical science and even any washing detergent with enzymes in it, it’s roughly the same sort of technology.

“There are some people frightened by it, but without the genetic modification it would not support the fuel. The bacteria would just eat the CO2 and multiply.”

The base bacteria are nothing special – in fact they can be found all over your body any time you climb out of a river or a swimming pool – but have to be tweaked.

They spend three weeks eating CO2, photosynthesizing diesel and ethanol, before they become less effective. They are then filtered off and replaced.

“Just like plants, these organisms run on oxygen photosynthesis. They use sunlight and CO2 from exhaust gases, for example, to form carbohydrates and to grow,” Mr Mangold explained.

“And the waste byproduct of oxygen photosynthesis is oxygen.

“We alter the micro organisms to produce ethanol or long-chain alkanes – important constituents of diesel fuel. This is discharged by the organisms, the fuels are separated from the water and purified.”

The organisms send the fuel out through their cell walls into the water, which makes the ethanol collection slightly more difficult than diesel collection.

“The long-chain alkenes for diesel simply float to the top and we kind of scoop it off. The ethanol blends with the water and has to be cooked off, so it’s more difficult, even though both processes can be done at the same place. We just put in different bacteria, depending on the fuel we need.”

One of the major criticisms of traditional bio-fuels has been their competition with foodstuffs for water, technology and even arable land. It has been portrayed as a struggle between the First World’s desire for fuel and the Third World’s demands for survival.

“We are not in competition to food production,” Mr Mangold insisted.

“The land we use, it doesn’t have to be farmland. It’s better if it’s not because it’s cheaper, which makes the fuel cheaper. Just any land where it’s sunny and there’s some kind of waste water. We don’t need fresh water. Brackish water is fine, salt water.”

Another key is its phenomenal production possibilities compared to traditional bio-fuels.

“You get around 3500 litres of ethanol per hectare of corn,” Mr Mangold explained. “You get 7000 litres from sugar cane but you get 75,000 litres of ethanol from this system per hectare.

“It’s the same with diesel. You get 1100 litres of bio-diesel from a hectare of rapeseed, 5000 litres from a hectare of palm oil production, but 50,000 litres from a hectare of bacteria.

“The key to that is that it’s an 80 per cent well-to-wheel saving, and that makes our diesels comparable with battery-electric vehicles for CO2 emissions.”

But doctoring high-tech, genetically modified microscopic critters isn’t the only way Audi is exploring to try to neutralise its CO2 footprint.

A year ago, Audi announced it was planning to use excess energy from its own offshore wind farms to produce its own synthetic natural gas. A year later, it has announced it will have a CNG-powered A3 in production early in 2013.

“The e-gas facility in northern Germany will produce a fuel that is chemically identical to fossil-fuel methane, the primary constituent of natural gas, and it is ideal for powering internal-combustion engines,” Mr Mangold insisted.

“The facility in Werlte will produce 1000 tonnes of methane a year, which means it will bind 2800 tonnes of CO2. Effectively, it takes the CO2 from the air and reuses it to make the same fuel over and over.

“That is sufficient to make 1500 A3 TCNGs CO2 neutral for 15,000km a year and we have more TCNG models coming in the A4.”

The e-gas facility will use spillover electricity from the wind farm to create hydrogen via electrolysis. While hydrogen is planned to be the fuel of Audi’s future fuel-cell models, those cars are not yet ready (and neither is the infrastructure for storing hydrogen).

Instead, it is being combined with CO2 to produce synthetic natural gas, or CH4.

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