Despite progress in renewable energy development, our present trajectory seems聽unlikely to prevent the 2°C rise in temperature that most experts say would have a disastrous impact on all life on聽Earth.
That’s prompting a growing number of people to聽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聽(normally deep underground in depleted oil or gas reservoirs),聽preventing it from reaching the atmosphere.
But new analysis from researchers at the University of Toronto suggests this method聽could be a waste of a valuable resource.聽A聽new paper in聽the聽journal聽Joule 聽argues聽that聽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聽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,聽said in a statement.
Turning captured聽CO2 back into fuels and chemicals rather than burying it underground聽doesn’t just聽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聽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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