Petrol in, water out and no CO2

One of the top posts on Greenbang over the past few months has been Ian Houston’s carbon capture for cars which is capable of reducing a Land Rover’s emissions below the free road tax level of 99g CO2 per km.

It seems he may have a fight on his hands however.  CNET has today reported that a team of US scientists led by Professor Andrei Fedorov at the  Georgia Institute of Technology (yes, that does have the acronym GIT, someone was obviously asleep when they thought up the name) has come up with something that gives the same result but using a very different technology.

According to CNET:

“The system… removes the carbon from hydrocarbon fuels before it enters the engine. This means the engine does not emit any CO2 as the vehicle travels.”

“The conventional internal combustion engine is a good candidate for this,” Fedorov told Automotive News Europe. “We simply decarbonize the fuel in a reformer before it reaches the engine. This separates the carbon from the hydrogen.

This, surely, has to reduce the engine’s efficiency as much of the energy released is from the oxidisation of the carbon.  As such she still thinks Ian Houston may win this fight.