The air around you weighs about 1.3 kilos per cubic metre of air. The air in a typical living room weighs around 100 kilos.
The methane in the air makes up about 1 ppm (part per million), which means that one cubic metre of air contains 0.0000013 kilos of methane. This means that it takes 770,000 cubic metres of air to obtain 1 kg of methane from normal air (1.8 litres of gas). Methane has an energy content of 10 kWh per kilo.
Hydrogen in the air makes up about 40 ppb (parts per billion), which means that one cubic metre of air contains 0.000000052 kilos of hydrogen. This means that it takes 19,000,000 cubic metres of air to obtain 1 kg of hydrogen from normal air (13.9 litres of gas). Hydrogen has an energy content of 33 kWh per kilo.
The Nano Tower described under the heading “A Nano Tower – what would one look like and how would it work?” receives 70,000 billion cubic metres of air during one year. 70,000,000,000,000 : 770,000 cubic metres, which contain 1 kg of methane, this means that the tower described, at 100% efficiency, produces 91 million kilos of methane with an energy content of 10 kWh per kg x 91 million kilos, which means that the tower produces almost 910 million kWh of methane per year.
70,000,000,000,000 : 19,000,000 cubic metres, which contain 1 kg of hydrogen, this means that the tower described, at 100% efficiency, produces 3,640,000 million kilos of hydrogen with an energy content of 33 kWh per kg x 3.64 million kilos, which means that the tower produces 120 million kWh of hydrogen per year.
In total, a tower could therefore be able to filter and produce methane and hydrogen with an energy content of 1,030,000,000 kWh per year = 1 TWh per year.
Let us, however, reduce the efficiency from 100% by half, to only 50%, which gives us 0.5 TWh/year. This corresponds to the output of 100 Swedish wind turbines during 2015. One single gas tower = 100 wind turbines. To be on the safe side, let’s go down even more and say that the efficiency is only 33%.
Despite this low efficiency of 33%, one single Nano Tower produces just as much energy as 60 wind turbines, and this is environment-friendly energy that can be stored.