The most significant and innovative energy solution in decades.
Completely changing the global energy and climate debates.

Use off-peak wind energy for power to recycle waste CO₂ into transportation fuels.
This could cut CO₂ emissions In half by mid-century.

At $10/MWhr for off-peak wind energy, the cost of the energy needed (at practical efficiencies) to make gasoline or jet fuel from CO2 and water will be less than $0.75/gal – and only $0.50/gal for ethanol.

Dr. Doty will be presenting three talks at the ASME conference in San Francisco, California on July 19-23, 2009. The abstracts can be viewed by clicking the links below. Energy Sustainability ASME-Abstract-WindFuels - "Securing our Transportation Future by Using Off-peak Wind to Recycle CO2 into Fuels" ASME-Abstract-DORC - "A Dual-source Organic Rankine Cycle (DORC) for Improved Efficiency in Conversion of Low- and Mid-grade Heat Sources" Heat Transfer ASME-Abstract-Recuperator - "Compact, High-effectiveness, Gas-to-gas Compound Recuperator with Liquid Intermediary (CRLI)"

Fact check: Storing very large amounts of energy in compressed air is 5,000 times more expensive than in liquid fuels. Read more.

A Tale of Two Crises: We are facing an energy crisis that could potentially devastate the world’s economy as global oil supply peaks. We are also facing the unparalleled threat of global warming. These crises are greater than any society has ever faced before, and they are entwined… The energy crisis could be postponed (at great cost) by relying on shale oil, tar sands and coal-to-liquids, but that will dramatically worsen the environmental crisis. There are certain avenues that can be followed that might help reduce global warming but would dramatically worsen the energy crisis (ban the use of coal and natural gas power plants).

We present WindFuels, offering a completely new direction for solving both crises simultaneously. Using off-peak wind energy (wind in the middle of the night, when the grid doesn’t need it, so it’s very cheap), we can efficiently and competitively recycle the exhausted CO₂ from coal and natural gas power plants into fuels that work with today’s transportation infrastructure. These competitive fuels will eventually provide enough supply to lower fuel prices and end the energy crisis, while eliminating the consumption of fossil oil, tar sands, shale oil, and coal-to-liquids; dramatically reducing greenhouse gas emissions while improving both the local and global economy. When the WindFuels are burned, no new carbon will be released. WindFuels are carbon-neutral.

No experienced chemist has doubted that it is possible to convert CO₂ into standard fuels (like gasoline and ethanol), or that the theoretical limit to the efficiency of doing this is probably between 75% and 90%. The problem has been that prior proposals for doing this conversion have had efficiencies of only 25% to 35%. In other words, the chemical energy in the liquid fuels produced would be only 30% of the input energy required, and that input energy would be mostly electrical, which is expensive – except for a few hours in the middle of the night.

The combination of the eight major technical advances we have made over the past two years will now permit this conversion to be done at 60% efficiency. That’s high enough efficiency for carbon-neutral fuels made from waste CO₂ to easily compete with petroleum (the fact that the cost of petroleum has increased 3-4 fold since we started working on this has helped as well), especially when the input energy is from wind. These processes have been simulated in great detail, and are absolutely sound. Hundreds of distinguished scientists and engineers have reviewed the materials on this website, and no significant technical problems have yet been identified.

Our breakthroughs permit production of carbon-neutral ethanol, gasoline, and many chemicals from waste CO₂ and off-peak (cheap) wind energy that will be competitive in the open market.

An average acre of land in the Dakotas, Kansas, or Wyoming will produce at least five times as much alcohols from wind, water, and waste CO₂ as an average acre of land in fertile farming areas devoted to biofuels.

It is likely that not everyone reading this page is a scientist or engineer. So we wrote a page for you. You may want to read the page "The WindFuels™ Primer - Basic Explanation for the Non-scientist" before looking at the more technical pages.

Serious about Sustainability. Successful civilizations have always planned carefully for the future – not just of their children or grandchildren, but for their great-great-grandchildren. Today, we are “fiddling..., and arranging chairs on the deck”, while an energy catastrophe looms that will dwarf the financial meltdown and depression of 2008 if we don’t begin taking it seriously. This impending catastrophe is not just for our children, or our grandchildren, but even for us.

Everyone has heard a lot over the past six years about (global) peak oil, and within the past year the DOE has finally accepted that peak oil is coming decades sooner than they were saying just a few years ago. We expect peak oil in 2013. That doesn’t mean global oil production will drop sharply after 2013, but even a very slow decline rate will send prices soaring. The $147/bbl we saw in mid-2008 will look cheap by 2012. It’s true that Canada theoretically has enough tar sands to forestall peak oil for several more decades and the U.S. has lots of oil shale, but these resources won’t be developed fast enough – partly for environmental reasons.

On those occasions over the past 5 years when natural gas prices spiked, we heard some prophets warning that North America would see peak gas within 10 to 20 years; but then the price would drop and the need to think about peak gas would be forgotten. Analysis of official IEA data now indicates global peak gas is likely around 2025. As we approach peak gas, its price too will go through the ceiling and force us to adjust our usage to meet the declining production.

Almost no one has heard of peak coal or peak uranium – because the DOE continues to say we won’t run out for more than a century. However, the recent research by Prof. David Rutledge (Caltech) shows that global coal resources have been greatly overstated, and others have shown the same is true of economically recoverable uranium reserves.

It’s true, we have enough coal in the U.S. to last us at least 80 years at our current usage rate (1.1 Gt/yr). However, the combined coal production of China, Europe, India, and Japan was 75% of their coal consumption in 2006, and it will be less than half of their consumption in 2013. They will then be importing over twice as much coal as they are today. By 2020, they will all happily pay 20 times what they were paying a few years ago to keep their lights on. (The exporters will charge that much because the impending peak gas and peak coal will be undeniable.) If the importers will pay that much, we won’t pay much less in the U.S. Global peak coal can be expected around 2035, and peak uranium will come before 2045.

We may take some comfort in knowing that because of peak oil (2013), peak gas (2025), and peak coal (2035), total carbon emissions over the next five decades will be much less than even the low-emissions scenarios of the IPCC reports. But this is small comfort, as 2 trillion tons of land ice have been lost since 2003, and the 2008 Greenland summer ice melt tripled the 2007 record. If we do not start seriously working hard to avoid a cataclysmic energy crisis, the impact will be additional calamity to the planet and its people.

We saw in mid-2008 what can happen when oil demand comes within 2% of oil supply capacity. Imagine what would happen if oil, gas, and coal demand were all within 1% of supply capacity! Billions of people would be starving. The world would be in complete chaos.

This doomsday scenario is not necessary, but the current efforts toward sustainability are not nearly sufficient to avoid it. Changing the global energy infrastructure will take decades of major commitments.

We’ve taken some hard looks at the serious limitations of the current efforts toward sustainable alternatives on this website, and we have explained why WindFuels offers our best hope for a transition toward a sustainable, prosperous future. WindFuels will be over 90% carbon neutral, and they are completely sustainable. When the last coal power plants are shut down in 2070, the needed CO₂ will come from biofuels refineries, cement factories, steel mills, and the atmosphere.

We hope you’ll begin by spending a few hours studying the research we’ve presented on this website. Then let your Senators and Representatives know that what is currently being done toward sustainability is not nearly enough to avoid oil price shock by 2013 and a global catastrophe by 2018, but Doty Energy has a plan that will work.

The sooner we begin directing resources toward WindFuels plants, the sooner we can rest assured that our transportation fuel, agriculture, civilization, and climate are secure for future generations. F. David Doty