Waste into power

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I don’t normally blog about this sort of thing, but I do maintain an active interest in it, but I was pretty excited to read that Audi has built a plant (a small one so far, but they have plans to expand) that creates diesel fuel out of water, atmospheric carbon dioxide, and renewable energy sources like solar or wind.

I’ve been waiting for this sort of thing to become feasible. Sure, people all over the world have been working on better forms of power generation using natural forces (like the people who are trying to drive turbines with artificial tornadoes, which seems like a cool idea but might work better in a story than in real life) but storing that energy for use in a mobile vehicle is still a huge issue. Better battery technology would be great, but 100% clean diesel would be preferable.

Then again, I’m still waiting for large scale versions of this guy’s machine that turns old plastic back into oil (video), except powered by wind or solar so some entrepreneur could start “drilling” the Pacific trash vortex.

Technology to turn waste products into power is pretty exciting, (says the guy who, many years ago, nearly bought a device that purportedly turned urine into household electricity).