A small British company has developed a way to create petrol from air and water.
 

The technique involves extracting carbon dioxide from air and hydrogen from water, and combining them in a reactor with a catalyst to make methanol. The methanol is then converted into petrol.

By using renewable energy to power the process, it is possible to create carbon-neutral fuel that can be used in an identical way to standard petrol.

"It's actually cleaner because it's synthetic," Peter Harrison, chief executive officer of AFS, said in an interview.

"You just make what you need to make in terms of the contents of it, so it doesn't contain what might be seen as pollutants, like sulphur," he said.

The work is part of a two-year project that has so far cost around 1 million pounds ($1.6 million).

The green petrol will not appear on forecourts any time soon, though.

"We can't make (the petrol) at pump prices, but we will do eventually," Harrison said. "All we need is renewable energy to make it, and so when oil becomes a problem we will be able to make a contribution to keep cars moving or to keep aeroplanes moving."

AFS said it was confident the technology could be scaled up to refinery size in the future. Each of the processes that go into making the fuel already take place separately on an industrial scale.

For now, however, AFS plans to build a commercial plant in the next two years that will produce around 1,200 liters a day of specialist fuels for the motorsports sector, Harrison said.

(Reporting by Alice Baghdjian; Editing by Chris Wickham and Jane Baird).

Petrol is one of the most useful products in the world. Cars, scooters, airplanes and various other automobiles- all consume it as their fuel. It is also the source of light and other forms of energies. 

Millions of years ago, plants and animals got buried in earth's interior due to geological upheavals. Intense pressure and heat inside the earth converted the decomposed plants and animals into petroleum. Man discovered its massive stocks in the sea-bed too.

The crude oil is drawn out of petroleum wells. This consists of petrol. naptha, kerosene, diesel, pitch etc. it is brought to refineries for purification and extraction of these products. The crude oil is heated in very big cylindrical vessels. The various constituents of the oil are separated as different fraction at different temperatures and taken out through separate pipes. The process is known as fractional distillation. The various other products obtained from petroleum include plastics, paints, drugs, explosives, cleaning fluids and detergents. Scientists have succeeded in synthesizing petrol by some artificial techniques also but petrol prepared in this way is costlier. It is found in many countries but mainly in Gulf countries, USA and Russia.