Making Good Use of CO2.

Can We Recycle CO2 Emissions to Make Carbon-Neutral Fuel?

Our failure to curb our carbon emissions is threatening to cause catastrophic climate change within our lifetimes. But what if we could recycle CO2 emitted by power stations and turn it into fuels and valuable chemicals? A new analysis suggests this may be possible within a decade.

From article, (Our failure to curb our carbon emissions is threatening to cause catastrophic climate change within our lifetimes. But what if we could recycle CO2 emitted by power stations and turn it into fuels and valuable chemicals? A new analysis suggests this may be possible within a decade.

Despite progress in renewable energy development, our present trajectory seems unlikely to prevent the 2°C rise in temperature that most experts say would have a disastrous impact on all life on Earth.

That’s prompting a growing number of people to look for alternatives, and one of the leading candidates is carbon capture and storage technology. Chemicals are used to extract CO2 from the exhaust of power stations, and the gas is then piped to a storage location (normally deep underground in depleted oil or gas reservoirs), preventing it from reaching the atmosphere.

But new analysis from researchers at the University of Toronto suggests this method could be a waste of a valuable resource. A new paper in the journal Joule argues that technology that uses electricity and water to reduce CO2 into simple hydrocarbon fuels or small molecules that can act as feedstock for more valuable chemicals could be economically viable in the next five to ten years.

There’s an obvious precedent for using atmospheric CO2 to make fuels and other useful chemicals—the very process that created fossil fuels in the first place.

“Similar to how a plant takes carbon dioxide, sunlight, and water to make sugars for itself, we are interested in using technology to take energy from the sun or other renewable sources to convert CO2 into small building block molecules which can then be upgraded using traditional means of chemistry for commercial use,” Phil De Luna, a PhD candidate and one of the paper’s lead authors, said in a statement.

Turning captured CO2 back into fuels and chemicals rather than burying it underground doesn’t just present a way to monetize what is currently being treated as a waste product. The researchers point out that it could actually help solve the energy storage problem caused by increasing reliance on intermittent renewable sources like solar and wind.

If renewable energy sources are used to power the conversion of CO2 into fuels, the result is effectively carbon-neutral hydrocarbon fuels. These can be stored for use when renewables alone aren’t able to meet demand or used to power vehicles, and importantly, they can take advantage of our preexisting infrastructure of pipes and storage tanks designed for fossil fuels.)

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