It sounds a bit absurd, but the Liverpool John Lennon Airport will be installing a new system that captures airport visitors CO2 emissions, and converts it to bio fuel. Were not talking about a few ounces or gallons, either. The first trial test with a smaller model, could create up to 250 litres (66 gallons) a day. If the trial goes well, they will install a full version, which could create up to 3,000 litres (800 gallons) of fuel a day. A DAY!! That seems crazy to me, but if this trial run is successful, it made me think about the future. The question I started asking myself is why couldn't I create bio fuel from my own CO2 output to fuel my car and/or heat my house?

I'm not going to repost the article here, but if you are interested in more of the details of how this works, you should read the article at http://www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk/liverpool-news/regional-news/2009/01/31/liverpool-john-lennon-airport-pioneers-new-biofuel-technology-64375-22823635/ . You may need to read it if you want to prove/disprove whether this could work on a smaller scale, as I'm suggesting below.

Granted, I don't have as many daily visitors in my house like an airport would have (usually 0 visitors), but I also don't need 800 gallons of fuel a day. I calculate that I probably use 15 gallons of gasoline a week to power my car(s). Now I had to figure out how many people it takes to create 800 gallons a day. A very large ballpark figure is 10,000 people a day, derived from an article last Easter stating a record number (65,000) people were expected to come through this airport between Good Friday and Easter Monday. 65,000 divided over four days is 16,250 a day passing through. If these are record numbers, I will roughly estimate 10,000 visitors a day, give or take a few thousand people. That means each person is creating .8 gallons of bio fuel a day. Now I know that airport visitors do not stay in the airport as long as we stay in our home (minimum 8 hours while sleeping), so could a person potentially create more than .8 gallons in their home? Put into the factor that multiple people usually live in the home (including pets who also output C02), and we could be talking a few gallons of bio fuel a day. You could even push the output considerably higher if you exercise in your home.

Now that I just got excited and wrote all that, I found an error in my thinking. To create 800 gallons of fuel a day, the system installed creating this bio fuel is probably bigger than my house. I don't know the size of the initial trial run models, but if we substitute the smaller 66 gallons being produced, that equals .007 gallons. You would be lucky enough to produce a half gallon with 6 people at home for most of the day, that is if the size of the apparatus is feasible. It definitely sounds like it is a cheap system, since it would pay for itself in it's first year.

So it seems that I would have a problem fueling my car completely by this method, but what about heating your home with this method? You could store the biofuel created in the summer time, and use it for heating the house in the winter. Or in my case, I could save it for a month or two and then pump it into my car, saving on a fuel up at the gas station?

I believe we need to "think outside the box" on the future of energy creation, and begin to get "off the grid" from electrical and oil companies, and be our own independent creators of energy. This definitely sounds like a great way to start, but I think it's WAY too early to predict the future on bio fuel creation from CO2 emissions. We need to see how this trial run at the airport turns out first. But I am VERY intrigued.

I posted the above story without doing much research into the production of biofuel.  After researching how bio fuel is produced, I can tell you that it is definitely not something that a typical person could do.  It can be dangerous, and takes some considerable time and effort.  This CO2 collector does not actually convert it into fuel.  It feeds algae which produces a carbon based slime, which is then fermented into fuel outside of the box.

Even though this is impractical for a typical house, I am excited to see this test program work.  I could see shopping malls and office buildings collecting this, and selling it to an outside company to produce their heating fuel or such.