The hydrocarbon fuels in use today are extracted from the Earth. “It’s putting the steps together that’s hard.” The heat produced by the synthesis reaction, for example, is repurposed to optimize the temperature for electrolysis. “Fischer-Tropsch has been known for 100 years,” says Klumpp. The science behind each step has been understood for decades what’s new is the fusion of the processes into a compact, efficient system. In the third module, built by a Swiss tech company, a reaction called Fischer-Tropsch Synthesis fuses the carbon and hydrogen to produce hydrocarbons, the same carbon chains that make up gasoline, kerosene, coal, and natural gas. An adjacent unit, built by a Dresden-based firm, produces hydrogen by splitting water molecules through high-temperature electrolysis.
The device blows air over a filter that absorbs CO2 and then releases the gas in concentrated form when heated. The process begins with a module, built by Climeworks of Switzerland, that extracts carbon dioxide from the ambient air. The $40 million demonstration phase was supported by 18 research institutions and 27 industrial firms, including Siemens, Volkswagen, Shell, and ThyssenKrupp. The project, called P2X, is part of the Copernicus Project, an initiative to prepare Germany for a carbon-neutral economy by 2050. While the machine that I watched produce that energy-dense liquid in the forest clearing is just the first stage of a pilot program, the underlying technology could help reshape the battle against climate change. “It’s the same thing that plants do with photosynthesis,” says Roland Dittmeyer, leader of the project and director of the Institute for Micro Process Engineering at KIT. The idea of turning air into liquid fuel may sound fantastical, but the underlying principle is as mundane as a head of lettuce. On a mass scale, it could be used to fly airplanes or power heavy machinery, replacing petroleum in some situations. Though it resembles oils derived from plants or petroleum, it does not come from any familiar source, but has literally been pulled from the thin air, transubstantiated from gas to liquid with the help of renewably generated electricity. The substance smells faintly of warm wax. Michael Klumpp, a postdoc at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, turns a spigot and a clear liquid flows into a glass flask. Everything is motionless and silent, except for a soft whirring and humming. Inside, ducts wrapped in insulating foil elbow between racks filled with cabinet tanks.
In a clearing on the edge of the Black Forest in southern Germany, a modified shipping container painted an immaculate white sits near a field of solar panels.
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