A team led by researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign figured out a novel way to efficiently convert CO2 into useful hydrocarbon products.
Their discovery has the potential to produce synthetic fuels that are a cleaner alternative to petrochemical-derived fuels.
The researchers learned that combining visible light lasers with common electrochemical methods for breaking apart CO2 molecules enhances chemical selectivity. According to a university report posted by SciTechDaily, "chemical selectivity is the ability of a chemical reaction to favor or target one type of pathway or molecule over another." The researchers found they could use light to encourage CO2's conversion into substances like hydrogen and carbon monoxide, as opposed to other molecules CO2 can produce when it's teased apart.
Normally, converting CO2 into those hydrocarbons is a time-consuming process that requires using specialized electrodes made with gold and copper, per the report. So it's both slow and expensive to perform. Both of those inefficiencies have inhibited synthetic fuels from scaling up in any meaningful way.
Which is a shame. This type of synthetic hydrocarbon-based fuel does produce similar carbon emissions to conventional dirty fuels when burned, so it certainly isn't perfect. But synthetic fuel takes CO2 that's already in the atmosphere and converts it to usable fuel, so it doesn't require extraction from the earth, and it doesn't create new carbon emissions. That could be a huge benefit. Some alternative fuels can also be used in vehicles right now that burn fossil fuels, so, in theory, it's a very attractive alternative to petrochemical-based fuels.
A 2012 Princeton University study, in fact, found that by converting to non-food-crop synthetic fuels, the U.S. could reduce the planet-warming gas pollution of its vehicle fleet by 50 percent.
Using visible light as part of the conversion, however, speeds up the process of converting CO2, per the report.
The paper from the scientists, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, shows that when chemists put electrodes covered with nanoparticles of gold and copper alloy into an electrified water and electrolyte solution and then shine visible light at it, a chemical reaction starts working to break down the CO2.
"We were very excited to see the boost in productivity when visible light was used," University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign chemistry professor Prashant Jain, who was part of the research, per the SciTechDaily post. "However, we were not expecting to find that using visible light would have a major impact on chemical selectivity, which is the important advance here."
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This is an advance that has the potential to produce an entirely new, overall less polluting fuel that can be an important part of an energy matrix that is moving away from dirty fuels altogether.
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