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Science

Scientists Turn CO2 Into Jet Fuel (wired.com) 144

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Researchers may have found a way to reduce the environmental impact of air travel in situations when electric aircraft and alternative fuels aren't practical. Wired reports that Oxford University scientists have successfully turned CO2 into jet fuel, raising the possibility of conventionally-powered aircraft with net zero emissions. From a report: The technique effectively reverses the process of burning fuel by relying on the organic combustion method. The team heated a mix of citric acid, hydrogen and an iron-manganese-potassium catalyst to turn CO2 into a liquid fuel capable of powering jet aircraft. The approach is inexpensive, uncomplicated and uses commonplace materials. It's cheaper than processes used to turn hydrogen and water into fuel. There are numerous challenges to bringing this to aircraft. The lab method only produced a few grams of fuel -- you'd clearly need much more to support even a single flight, let alone an entire fleet. You'd need much more widespread use of carbon capture. And if you want effectively zero emissions, the capture and conversion systems would have to run on clean energy.
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Scientists Turn CO2 Into Jet Fuel More

Scientists Turn CO2 Into Jet Fuel

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  • Oxfordâ(TM)s Xiao believes the new CO2 fuel has a fighting chance to compete with [...] alternatives. [...] He says he is discussing the new carbon dioxide conversion method with several large industrial partners. âoeThere are no big challenges,â he says, âoebut we need to optimize the process and make it more efficient.â

    There are no big challenges except for making it usefully efficient? So how efficient is it now, and how efficient does he think he can make it? These all-importan

    • How does it scale. That's more important than efficiency. These technological solutions look like little more than bookkeeping tricks to me, but they sure attract money.

      • Good news! Neither of you is wrong!
      • Oh, that's a good way to phrase it! And there were as many loopholes and write-offs in physical laws as there are in the tax code, creative bookkeeping might help. But since there aren't....

        They don't know if it will scale. Still, no matter what it is going to take more energy to un-burn carbon then they could get back, so there really isn't much point.

        • I know it won't scale. machines to extract CO2 from the air are useless. Plants may not be efficient but these you can scale - Of course there is still a major difference between really putting it back in the ground and of piling tons of oil-derived fertilizer on it after which you just burn it up again.

    • What does it matter, when it's solar-powered? Do it right next to the solar power tower. We're not gonna run out of sun, anytime soon. And if we do, we will have bigger problems.

      It certainly will be more efficient than plants, by the way.

      • You are right. Our modern form of solar power is technically more efficient than the chlorophyl => photosynthesis model currently used by plants. In fact, plants only use a small spectrum of the available solar energy in comparison. But plants also have the benefit of being self-replicating and self-sustaining, and with a modicum of assistance from us, it can take over a space in a freakishly-fast amount of time. Our solar capture technology isn't nearly this advanced. But, if we can get our intellects a

        • You are right. Our modern form of solar power is technically more efficient than the chlorophyl => photosynthesis model currently used by plants.

          Depends on how you define "efficient", We can generate electricity very efficiently, but how do you compare that with plants? Plants don't generate electricity at all.

          Plants do photo synthesis , so the comparison would be, how well does our form of solar power compare in efficiency to synthesizing sugar from carbon dioxide, water, and sunlight? The answer there is, terrible. Plants are much better.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by catprog ( 849688 )

            And our oil comes from ancient plants.

            So how effecient is the solar > plant > oil compared to solar > electricity > oil

        • Most anti GMO people are very scientific.
          Just saying.

      • Re:"Efficiency" is a red herring (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Junta ( 36770 ) on Monday December 28, 2020 @11:05AM (#60872546)

        While we won't run out of sun, we don't have limitless solar energy capacity, nor can we wait an infinite amount of time to gather sufficient energy to do this process.

        On an extremely favorable day (clear sky, temperature not needing heating or AC by and large, midday), excluding vehicle energy, South Australia managed 1 whole hour on solar power. This is great and all, but the fact that it is newsworthy in spite of the caveats, exclusions, and the very limited circumstances shows that we don't exactly have free energy to skip worrying about efficiency yet. We haven't proven that it is feasible to have enough solar collection and storage to drive all our energy needs, despite the promising fact that so much energy is theoretically there for the harnessing.

        This is an avenue worth being in the race, but it's hard to say that this would be practical before, say, breakthrough energy density in batteries that suddenly make jet fuel and battery technology equivalent.

        • While we won't run out of sun, we don't have limitless solar energy capacity, nor can we wait an infinite amount of time to gather sufficient energy to do this process.

          Also, the people that most want us on solar power will also most want us to use as little space, and as little of an environmental impact, as technologically possible.

          This idea that efficiency doesnt really matter once you go solar is comical, and is clearly not being offered up by a true environmentalist, yet the person saying it clearly wants us to believe that they are in fact someone of significant climate virtue. There are the zealots, and then there are the posers. Fake. Phony.

      • It matters even if solar power because you need to decide whether your solar power is best fed directly into the grid or into some fuel making process. Efficiency always matters. Something about survival of the fittest.

      • Because it wastes considerable energy that could be used directly to avoid the problem entirely.

        Look at it this way - you burn carbon to get energy, which produces CO2. You reclaim as much CO2 as possible, stick it in a converter and pump energy in so that you get something out that you can burn again, but the end product of the converter is fuel that contains less chemical energy than you pumped into the converter. So, why bother? Why waste your solar power unburning carbon so you can burn it again at

  • Regarding cars: How much of the energy generated from gasoline with good fuel cells would have to be used, to compress all the resulting CO2 from a full tank in another tank of the same size as the gasoine tank? Can it be condensed as quickl as it is made? And how easily can the also resulting water be separated, or would it have to go in the CO2 tank too?

    • Re:Any engineer/chemist here? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Junta ( 36770 ) on Monday December 28, 2020 @11:14AM (#60872562)

      In terms of mass, CO2 portion of the exhaust has about 3x the mass of the gasoline combusted, so it would not be viable even if you could ditch the H2O.

      The combusted hydrocarbons lose a bit of their mass in hydrogen, but most of the mass is in carbon (atomic weight 12). Each carbon picks up two oxygen (each atomic weight 16) from the atmosphere, and oxygen atoms are a bit more massive than carbon atoms, such that *roughly* they make up the difference of expelling the hydrogen if you could (technically, more than make up, but 3x is a nice round factor and good enough for a rough discussion).

      • Then call it 4x and you are basically at the correct value :P
        Because for every C you have 2Hs and another O ... plus 2 extra H's at the ends of the chain, which take another O.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Junta ( 36770 )

          Right, 4X if you have to store the water (which practically speaking you would, but the question broached 'what if we could eject only the water', which even theoretically wouldn't be great).

          Which is a fun thing to note, that a vehicle exhausts roughly as much water as gasoline was put in.

  • > The technique effectively reverses the process of burning fuel

    ...than planes now fly backwards, but this can be fixed with some hardware modifications.

  • "science reporting" (Score:4, Insightful)

    by PuddleBoy ( 544111 ) on Monday December 28, 2020 @10:43AM (#60872482)

    It does get tiring when you read one more article where the author takes one very isolated accomplishment (creating a few *grams* of fuel) and extrapolates that to an article about how this new breakthrough converts undesirable matter (CO2) and creates jet fuel to power our fleets.

    I applaud all basic research - there is so much more we need to know about the world around us. Reporting on what's going on in research labs around the world is a service to the public. But...

    This sort of lazy journalism (sensationalizing a small, beginning step) is part of what gives "The Media" a bad name. We are nowhere near being on the verge of a new way to use all that pesky CO2 and converting it to fuel, so that people can fly guilt-free. Stay closer to the facts.

    • That is not lazy. It is market driven.

      • So can we therefor conclude markets are lazy?

        • Markets hollow out value through efficiency but I was thinking that comes only afterwards. The main thing is the product being 'interest'. They're not selling truth, they're selling interesting bits of information.

    • Taking a process from the lab to industrial scale can take decades using the traditional research and capitalization techniques. But we also have to take into account that our technology is changing too. We are on the advent of truly science fiction level stuff. What took so long in the process was developing the specialized equipment that took base product through the various reaction steps, then refined product and by-product and staged for the next step. Now we have technologies like 3d printers to build

    • It does get tiring when you read one more article where the author takes one very isolated accomplishment (creating a few *grams* of fuel) and extrapolates that to an article about how this new breakthrough converts undesirable matter (CO2) and creates jet fuel to power our fleets.

      Yeah I forgot. We all one day woke up next to a network of Standard Oil refineries and petrol stations and thought hmmm we could power cars with this. There's never a case where someone demonstrates something like catalytic cracking in a lab for a few grams and then within 7 years we had built massive thermal cracking units on the side of refineries. There's no way any of this started up with someone heating oil on a bunsen burner, it was always 20kbbl/day pipestills. /sarcasm

      If it sounds like I'm mocking y

      • You paint a nice, shallow, story.

        Gasoline is a waste product of oil refining. In that scenario, its "hey maybe we can sell this stuff we are already producing."

        But this future energy thing you are talking about is not something already being produced, and while stuff like CO2 is produced in many many ways across many many industries, what you need to show is that of all the ways to turn this CO2 into a product, that this future energy one is going to be the most profitable among them, as otherwise peopl

        • Nope, Gasoline is one of the reasons we refine oil, not only is it not a waste product, but a good 2/3rds of a refinery is designed specifically to convert waste products into more gasoline blending components.

          I'm amazed that you got as far as realising that refineries produce multiple things but then proceeded to throw away that thought in "future energy thing you are talking about is not something already being produced". You see your proposed mythical future gasoline would truly be a waste product. Now w

  • Posting primarily to undo moderation but though solar planes would be nice, it could help reduce environmental impact

  • They found an endo-thermic chemical reaction that produces a liquid that burns. I dont mean to minimize or shrug off the hard work behind this, but it is just an endothermic reduction reaction that is the opposite of an exothermic oxidation reaction. Nothing too unusual about the reaction or getting a combustible product in liquid form.

    Why call it jet fuel?

    Because piston engine fuel is a lot more demanding. Lower self ignition temperature, drop let combustion and leaner air/fuel mixture is needed for die

    • Re:Why call it jet fuel? (Score:5, Informative)

      by algaeman ( 600564 ) on Monday December 28, 2020 @11:27AM (#60872610)
      As great as an electric airplane would be, the energy density of the very best batteries are still less than 5% of jet fuel. This is going to take a lot of your 7 year doublings to get into the same league. In addition, fuels have the advantage of reducing the weight of the plane as they are consumed, so batteries will need a significant advantage in energy density to be equivalent to jet fuel pound for pound.

    • Re:Why call it jet fuel? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Geoffrey.landis ( 926948 ) on Monday December 28, 2020 @11:54AM (#60872716) Homepage

      Because piston engine fuel is a lot more demanding.

      Right. Piston engines are an odd niche technology; they aren't optimized for efficiency; they are optimized for being reasonably efficient, while producing high torque over a range of RPM in a package with good power/weight.

      If we were inventing cars from scratch today, we wouldn't invent the weirdly complicated Otto cycle engine and the complicated transmisaions and clutches that are needed to make it propel a vehicle. We'd invent a high efficiency constant-power engine, buffer the output into a battery, and use high-torque electric motors for starting.

      ...Also with the advent of batteries on a 7 year Moore's Law, most piston engines will be gone in 10 years, the time it would take to bring this chemistry to market. Looks like that is why this team is drumming it up as jet fuel to get investments.

      Interesting speculation.

      • That's pretty much what Honda does now in their hybrids.

        They use an Atikinson-style cycle engine that's got a pretty crappy power band in their hybrids, but the efficiency is very good.

        The only difference is that it has a lockup clutch to the single speed gearset for the gasoline engine to directly power the car at highway speeds, shortening the
        engine -> generator -> motor -> gearset -> wheels
        to
        engine -> gearset -> wheels
        for highway driving in the efficient powerband. The electric motor ca

      • Conventional gasoline and diesel engines are actually very simple and efficient compared to all alternatives and they deliver good power to weight ratio. There is a good reason why we don't use Stirling (it is "Stirling" not "Sterling"!) engines for everything. Turbine engines work efficiently for a narrow range of loads - which is fine for aircraft, but not fine for cars or even ships, as we see a return from gas turbine (do not confuse with steam turbine) powered warships to diesel power, at least for sma

        • OMG! The marine diesels! Cylinders so big it is bigger than the technician servicing it. And they want long stroke but small crank raidus. The piston rod hits the side of the cylinder in a conventional piston. Their pistons have a long rod sticking out to keep the piston rod short. Weird designs.

        • The engine is "technically" a Diesel. But the fuel is not. Because of the cheap fuel, commercial ships usually have no gas turbines, that is all.

      • Which is exactly what diesel-electric locomotives have been doing for decades. Run the diesel generator at a constant RPM that efficiently produces the electrical voltage and amperage you need, buffer it, and drive electric motors with it.

        • They dont use a battery to buffer it. Its straight engine-> generator -> wheels. They do have dynamic braking (their term for regen braking) but the power drawn from the wheels is so high there is no affordable power electronics that can absorb that much juice. So that goes straight to a bank of resistors. The 4000 lb Tesla cars brake at 76 kW. The train regen braking would have a surge power in tens of megawatts .

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by c-A-d ( 77980 )

          I believe that this is what the Mitsubishi PHEV does when the gasoline engine is running. It's basically just a generator to either recharge the batteries, provide the power needed for freeway driving, or both.

      • Chevy Volt did this (constant power IC engine + battery + motor) and as usual just when the technology is reaching maturity, market reach, GM pulled it. They have a knack for picking a winning horse and canceling their bet after the race starts but before their horse wins....

        Lotus actually designed a three cylinder engine with the generator integrated into the engine block, [greencarreports.com] .... back in 2010!!! A decade ago.

        The 15 kW is exactly the power used by a Tesla model 3 in cruise. Design a car with about 15 kWh

    • > Because piston engine fuel is a lot more demanding.

      Aviation fuel is a lot more demanding that automotive fuel. The tolerances on the chemical and physical properties are much tighter, and the overall purity is higher.

      Aircraft engines need to be ultra-reliable and consistent, and they require high performance fuel for that purpose.
      =Smidge=

      • Its for safety, and to keep it from forming too much ice at -50 degrees. To make sure the fuel has been tested thoroughly etc.

        But designing a new gas turbine to use a new fuel is easier than getting a piston engine to consume a new fuel. Piston engine combustion is intermittent, needs to start and stop, need finish at exacting time frames. Gas turbine burns the fuel continuously. So it would be easier for a new liquid fuel to target gas turbines than piston engines.

  • I think most of the comments say the same thing. I haven't read them all. The bottom line is that all such articles as this one are bull. Thermodynamics says so.

    It's like my rule on articles touting the wonders of resveratrol. Note the authors names and never read anything from them again. Life is too short.

  • Cow farts (Score:3)

    by Random361 ( 6742804 ) on Monday December 28, 2020 @11:29AM (#60872618)
    This seems sketchy, and I doubt it would be economically feasible. We'd be better off adding seaweed to cow feed to reduce methane emissions. https://www.wired.co.uk/articl... [wired.co.uk]

  • After all, biofuels do exactly the same thing: convert ambient CO2 to a fossil fuel substitute. The hard part of making this particular process work is going to be economic. CO2, despite its enormous environmental impact, is a trace gas, and recovering it from the atmosphere is going to be very expensive. You'd have to focus on emission *sources*, and big ones at that, like coal power plants, and those are barely economically viable even without adding more bells and whistles.

    This may be like plastic rec

    • I'd flip that around and say this process do the same thing as biofuels, but with extra cost. The process seems to be something like artificial old-school photosynthesis. As in pre-cyanobacteria, using an acid as the electron source but swapping heat for the direct use of light (heat which would presumably be provided by solar energy in the finished product).

      I can't see how this would be economical given how much energy is going to be lost in trying to unburn something so you can burn it again. Plus,

  • The Navy has been investigating this as a way to make aircraft carriers produce jet fuel from their nuclear generator. During wartime this might extend the duration that the carrier can defend itself. Adding energy weapons would also help too.

  • I guess the energy comes from the hydrogen and the heating then? Kinda important to mention the conversion ratio then. How much J of energy do i need to put in to store 1 J of energy in this new magic jet fuel...

  • good research, poor reporting (Score:5, Informative)

    by Goldsmith ( 561202 ) on Monday December 28, 2020 @12:10PM (#60872762)

    This is an open access paper, you can read it here:
    https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]

    The core process they're using to convert CO2 into fuel is just about 100 years old. What they've done is develop a better catalyst for that process (a "traditional" Iron-Manganese-Potassium catalyst, but synthesized a new way). That is important!

    There's a big error in the summary here: this process combines CO2 and hydrogen. This IS turning hydrogen into fuel.

    This process is what the government people meant by "clean coal" 20 years ago. I'm a scientist, I wrote proposals back then to work on this exact process for "clean coal" programs. The core idea came from Nate Lewis, a chemist at Caltech who was the driving scientist behind "An Inconvenient Truth." In some alternate universe, when scientists and politicians made a push to fund and scale this technology in 2001, they would not have called it "clean coal" but some marketing term more palatable to environmentalists. In that case, we may have weaned ourselves off of fossil fuels by now. It's a shame we, as a species, have not worked harder on this.

    Well, here's hoping we do better in the next 20 years!

    • Nah, you're not a scientist. Otherwise you'd know about the conservation of energy. It makes absolutely no sense to burn carbon (coal) to get CO2 and then reduce it back to form hydrocarbons. You can just as well take coal and hydrogenate it (like Germans did during the WWII).

      And it will still introduce as much emissions of fossil fuels into the atmosphere as simply burning coal.
    • A part of the problem with aviation and climate change is the emissions on high altitude. The 'stripes' in the sky actually make the greenhouse effect 3-5 times worse, beside the co2 emissions. So, while this is good news it does not solve the climate change effect of flying, only for about 1/3th

    • Thanks for the link to the article, that has some actual chemistry in it. I hasten to add that I am not a qualified chemist, but I have had occasion to study some chemistry as part of electronic and mechanical engineering work.

      There is some similarity to the well-known Fischer-Tropsch synthesis of long chain hydrocarbons from carbon monoxide and hydrogen. I am not sure of the overall efficiency, including hydrogen production, and energy input for synthesis, followed by combustion of the synthesized hydrocar

    • Well if it had been covered correctly it wouldn't have been big news. The reason it gets covered is because of the "CO2 to fuel part" and as impressive as that may sound, that part is over 100 years old and well understood.
    • Wait. "Clean coal" was supposed to be the environmentalist's term to market the idea to fossil fuel proponents, not the other way around. So, what you're really saying there is that environmentalists are crazy and/or stupid people who insist on treating the good as the enemy of the perfect, and reject success when they achieve it! I remember when "Clean coal" became a topic of conversation. Environmentalists succeeded in convincing fossil fuel guys like G.W. Bush that it was a good and feasible idea, bu

  • This looks familiar...

    https://www.washingtontimes.co... [washingtontimes.com]

    While that article is six years old there's even older ones if I were to take the time to look. The US Navy has been begging Congress for funds to develop this technology. Maybe they'd get more funding if the Navy claimed they would run it from solar power instead of nuclear power.

    It's the same process that the US Navy has been looking at for a very long time. Anyone trying it in the last decade either got the idea from the Navy or is working with th

  • It ways the process is more efficient than the process to turn water into hydrogen, however the process itself requires hydrogen. Can someone smarter possibly clarify this?

    • Hydrogen is not a good fuel in many ways. Its energy density, compared to hydrocarbons, is very poor. Hydrogen gas needs to be stored under immense pressure to get a usable energy density. Hydrogen storage vessels tend to leak badly, as the tiny gas molecules get through pores in the walls.

      If you can turn hydrogen into a more easily stored fuel, then it has potential for use in combustion engines. Making hydrocarbons using waste CO2 is a way of doing this, and could be carbon-neutral.

      • Hydrogen storage vessels tend to leak badly
        They leak. But definitely not badly. That is a myth.
        And in a situation where you are going to burn all the hydrogen anyway, as e.g. on a ship or in a plane: the little leakage does not matter at all.

        • Presuming that hydrogen leakage causing fuel loss is not a major practical problem, there is still the difficulty of handling hydrogen at very high pressure. This is not like a convenient liquid fuel. Commercial supplies of hydrogen are typically in cylinders at 300 to 750 bar. As far as I can find out, commercial supplies of LPG are typically in cylinders at 2 to 20 bar, depending on the gas composition. LPG tanks can be refilled a bit like petrol tanks, at a filling station, while you wait. Can you do tha

          • I do not know what the pressure is for hydrogen powered cars.
            But they get refilled at "ordinary" gasoline stations here in Germany.

      • That's a lot of energy being used to turn waste back into fuel. Wouldn't it make more sense to use that energy to move electric cars around so less CO2 is produced instead of using it to maintain the same amount of CO2? Or to convert the CO2 into something other than fuel? If you're making hydrocarbons, why not make them into plastics, or booze (granted, that gets turned into CO2 as well, but is more fun), or plain old Vaseline?
    • "Cheaper", not more efficient. But since, as you point out, they have to make it anyhow then it really doesn't matter if it's cheaper. Who cares if A > B, if the final equation includes A+B?

      This really only makes sense if A+B is less than the cost of extracting and refining traditional jet fuel and can be done at the same scale. Otherwise, you're just using up tons of energy to unburn CO2 so that you can burn it again, for energy. Oh, it might also be worth while if the end product wasn't the same

  • perpetual motion nonsense (Score:3)

    by sdinfoserv ( 1793266 ) on Monday December 28, 2020 @12:37PM (#60872866)
    How is this environmentally friendly? “ heated a mix of ” heating means burning something to create jet fuel which gets burned again. The article suggests burning fuel, capturing, converting then reburning in a “zero emission process”. Sure a closed loop that doesn’t require energy input might work – if you toss out the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
    The article doesn’t mention amount energy input anywhere, but does say it recaptured “a few grams” .If the energy input of the conversion process exceeds the energy of recaptured material, you’re better off not doing it at all both from a raw cost and environmental perspective.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by flink ( 18449 )

      You can heat things other ways besides burning things. A resistive electrical heating element comes to mind. The problem with renewables for aviation is that batteries aren't energy dense enough compared to jet fuel. So make the jet fuel on the ground, perhaps inefficiently, but with a renewable energy source, such a solar. Then you have carbon-neutral aviation (at least for the fuel cycle).

      • I knew someone would bite. Where do you think the electricity for a heating element comes from? Over 62 % of the US electcity production is from burning fossil fuels. Another 20 % is nuclear and a paltry 17 % is renewable.

    • They don't say it runs without energy input. Even at the end of the summary it says:

      "And if you want effectively zero emissions, the capture and conversion systems would have to run on clean energy."

      This is just about dealing with emissions where renewables currently fail: aircraft. Batteries are just too heavy, so instead use captured carbon like a [low efficiency] battery. Makes perfect sense to me... if they can make it practical.

      • maybe. my only point is that likely the energy requirements of capture and conversion then reburn exceed just flying the plane with old jet fuel.
        We've been feed nonsense for decades. The entire 70's & 80's recycle plastic compaign was funded by the oil industry.
        https://www.rollingstone.com/c... [rollingstone.com]
        Look at the other “renewable” fuel, ethanol. Ethanol requires more energy to make than it produces. It’s a tax boondoggle. It’s fermented with lower energy propane, it’s s

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by MobyDisk ( 75490 )

          Ethanol requires more energy to make than it produces.

          Ethanol can be produced very efficiently, especially from sugar cane. [wikipedia.org] The problem the USA had is that the government tried to subsidize ethanol production from corn, which really wasn't viable.

          • Couldn't this process be modified to produce ethanol? We don't have to burn it afterwards, it has many uses that don't involve CO2 production. Though obviously it's best use is partying.
          • The US has many times more cars than countries who use sugar cane. The US also lacks growing conditions required for the mass production of sugar cane. So you can point to sugar cane, but it is not a practical or logistical option.
        • Well, you need to compare the energy cost of capturing and converting CO2 against the cost of extracting petroleum and refining it into jet fuel. Either way, it probably makes more sense to turn the CO2 into something other than fuel you're just going to have to run back through the process. Or drop the whole idea and use the power that would go to reprocessing CO2 to replace power from sources that produce CO2 - cars and the like.
  • I think instead of building a synthetic fuel infrastructure you will get more returns from grid upgrades and solar/wind. After you've done that or while truly committing the resources to the grid and renewable investments THEN you should invest in carbon sequestration, but not this small scale stuff. They only reason they like this model is because it generates a product they can sell. Beside that it's a very energy intense and slow way to remove CO2 and we need the scalable and fast ways to remove CO2. W
  • Completely unsurprising and well-known and well understood and done many times before. Just someone getting into the news for carrying out an experiment that was well known, just because it "sounds good". Hell all they produced was a few grams of fuel.
  • We were looking at reclaiming waste carbon monoxide from a smelting process to use as raw material for fuel or plastics production. In 1990. CO2 isn't much different. When these people build something at least pilot size and show how it will scale can they say it is more or less efficient than other processes.
  • Massive investments in nuclear energy and fuel reprocessing. Nothing else is going to provide a reliable baseload
    • Sadly, convincing environmentalists that the perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the good doesn't seem to work. That most politicians that claim to care about the environment are really just interested in having something to criticize their opponents for doesn't help either.

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