Scientists Turn Carbon Dioxide Back Into Fuel

Scientists have accidentally discovered a way to reverse the combustion process turning carbon dioxide (CO₂) dissolved in water was turned into ethanol with a yield of 63 to 70%. That means that of all the CO₂ and electricity going into it, you don’t waste much of it. The majority of it ends up converted into ethanol. The researchers are now working to improve the efficiency of the process and find out more about the catalyst’s properties. A process like this would allow us to consume extra electricity when it’s available to make and store as ethanol. This could help to balance a grid supplied by intermittent renewable sources back into a fuel. Researchers used complex nanotechnology techniques to turn the dissolved gas into ethanol. Because the material used is relatively cheap, they believe the process could be used in industrial processes, for example to store excess electricity generated by wind and solar power. The researchers had hoped the techniques would turn carbon dioxide into methanol, but ethanol came out instead. Researchers taking carbon dioxide, a waste product of combustion, and they pushing that combustion reaction backwards with very high selectivity to a useful fuel. We can use ethanol in the current vehicle fleet, right now, with no modifications. Carbon dioxide is a problem right now. If we can use it, then we’re preventing it from going into the atmosphere. The team made a catalyst made from carbon, copper and nitrogen and an electric current was then used to trigger a reaction. They had expected the process to be much more complicated. Researcher discovered somewhat by accident that this material worked. Researchers are trying to study the first step of a proposed reaction when they realized that the catalyst was doing the entire reaction on its own. Ethanol is extremely difficult to go straight from carbon dioxide to ethanol with a single catalyst. The solution of CO