The world’s fuel crisis could be eased thanks to UK space scientists who have found a way to get petrol out of sand. Experts at Imperial College London made the breakthrough when developing an alien-seeking experiment that will be carried on a NASA mission to Mars.
Until now, fuel has only been able to be produced from tar sands using vast supplies of water which then remain heavily contaminated for years.
The UK scientists, led by Professor Mark Sephton from Imperial’s Department of Earth Science and Engineering, found that methods used by instruments to be flown to Mars in 2018 can be adapted to extract fuel cheaply.
The research, funded by the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council, looks set to help solve the global problem of energy supply. There are deposits of tar sands in many countries including the USA, Russia and Africa, but they are found in extremely large quantities in Canada and Venezuela.
Professor Sephton told Skymania News: “We were asked to provide a single solvent to wash out any organisms on Mars. We discovered that if we added an agent that is also found in ice cream to water, it acts as an emulsifier and separates the organic material from the water.
“We realised that the same process could be adapted to on a much larger scale to blast hot water at the tar sands. The emulsifier quickly separates out the petrol – a process that used to take years.”
Last year, a European probe, Mars Express, identified regions of Mars that could have been home to life. And in January, NASA revealed that plumes of methane had been detected that might have a biological origin.
Picture: A photo of Mars taken by the Hubble Space Telescope (NASA/ESA).
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