In 2022, transportation was responsible for an estimated 28 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. The majority of those emissions came from everyday gas-powered cars. And while electric vehicles have been heralded as a greener alternative, decades of advocacy and hundreds of billions of dollars in investment have yielded meager results. 

Today, electric cars make up just around 8 percent of all vehicles on U.S. roads. (Roughly 90 person of vehicles globally still run on fossil fuels.) Most EVs remain prohibitively expensive for the majority of Americans, and they require enormous amounts of critical minerals—resources that, when extracted at scale, pose their own environmental dilemmas. Most Americans also still just aren't interested in ditching their gas guzzlers to save the planet. 

But what if they didn't have to? 

That's the alluring—if wildly ambitious—vision being presented by New York–based fuels startup Aircela. Earlier this month, the company announced it had created the world's first functional machine capable of generating real, usable car gasoline "directly from the air." Aircela's new device, roughly the size of a commercial refrigerator, combines direct air capture (DAC) with on-site fuel synthesis to create gasoline using just air, water, and renewable energy. No fossil fuels, they say, are required. 

The product their device produces can be poured directly into the tank of any standard gas-powered car. Aircela demonstrated the process, making gasoline directly from air, in front of a live audience in New York. Though most would describe this proof of concept as a "prototype," company co-founder and CEO Eric Dahlgren takes some umbrage with that label.

"We didn't build a prototype. We built a working machine," Dahlgren said in a statement. "We want people to walk away knowing this isn't too good to be true—it actually works."

How an at-home carbon capture facility would work 

Aircela's device essentially functions as a compact, portable direct carbon capture facility (DAC) unit. Carbon capture generally refers to the practice of removing carbon dioxide from sources like smokestacks or fossil fuel power plants. Direct air capture, the approach used by Aircela, pulls CO? directly from the atmosphere. Europe currently has more than a dozen DAC facilities in operation, and the U.S. federal government is also investing in the technology. Some facilities, such as those run by Climeworks, use large fan-like machines to filter carbon dioxide from the air. Others, like those developed by Carbon Engineering, use chemical mists that bind with CO? to extract it. Some researchers are even exploring methods to capture carbon dioxide from the oceans. In most of these cases, the aim is to capture and store the harmful greenhouse gas. Aircela wants to recycle it into cars.