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Science

Researchers Develop New Material That Converts CO2 into Methanol Using Sunlight (scitechdaily.com) 56

"Researchers have successfully transformed CO2 into methanol," reports SciTechDaily, "by shining sunlight on single atoms of copper deposited on a light-activated material, a discovery that paves the way for creating new green fuels." Tara LeMercier, a PhD student who carried out the experimental work at the University of Nottingham, School of Chemistry, said: "We measured the current generated by light and used it as a criterion to judge the quality of the catalyst. Even without copper, the new form of carbon nitride is 44 times more active than traditional carbon nitride. However, to our surprise, the addition of only 1 mg of copper per 1 g of carbon nitride quadrupled this efficiency. Most importantly the selectivity changed from methane, another greenhouse gas, to methanol, a valuable green fuel."

Professor Andrei Khlobystov, School of Chemistry, University of Nottingham, said: "Carbon dioxide valorization holds the key for achieving the net-zero ambition of the UK. It is vitally important to ensure the sustainability of our catalyst materials for this important reaction. A big advantage of the new catalyst is that it consists of sustainable elements — carbon, nitrogen, and copper — all highly abundant on our planet." This invention represents a significant step towards a deep understanding of photocatalytic materials in CO2 conversion. It opens a pathway for creating highly selective and tuneable catalysts where the desired product could be dialed up by controlling the catalyst at the nanoscale.

"The research has been published in the Sustainable Energy & Fuels journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Baron_Yam for sharing the article.
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Researchers Develop New Material That Converts CO2 into Methanol Using Sunlight

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  • "Most importantly the selectivity changed from methane, another greenhouse gas, to methanol, a valuable green fuel."

    Speaks to who they are letting into PhD programs and the quality of their critical thinking skills.

    Suppose, after many years and intense work and expenditure of money, this were to be a way to convert sunlight and CO2 into methane at industrial scale.

    Methane is a clean burning fuel, and this process for generating it from CO2 would make it net zero, but we can't have any of that, can we

    • by dskoll ( 99328 )

      Yes, true, but methanol has some advantages. It's a liquid, which is much easier to store and transport than a gas. And if some of it spills, it doesn't escape into the atmosphere (at least, not immediately) unlike a methane leak that injects a greenhouse gas right into the atmosphere.

      • Pump the methanol back down old oil wells for carbon capture.

      • Yes, true, but methanol has some advantages. It's a liquid, which is much easier to store and transport than a gas. And if some of it spills, it doesn't escape into the atmosphere (at least, not immediately) unlike a methane leak that injects a greenhouse gas right into the atmosphere.

        Maybe I'll be able to burn it is one of my future cars. Time will tell how this process competes with e-fuels.

        • Most modern cars can run on a methanol/gasoline blend.

          It's not as energy dense so you get less range. There can also be an impact on engine oil life and pure methanol doesn't start well in the cold. The big reason you don't see it is today methanol is costlier than ethanol.

    • Methanol is a very useful ingredient in plastics and dyes, and is also widely used as a disinfectant.

      We can also just store it.

  • Lest We Forget (Score:5, Interesting)

    by walkerp1 ( 523460 ) on Saturday March 30, 2024 @01:12PM (#64356836)
    All, before we get too enmeshed with "Science, why?", let's not forget "Science!"

    "This invention represents a significant step towards a deep understanding of photocatalytic materials in CO2 conversion. It opens a pathway for creating highly selective and tuneable catalysts where the desired product could be dialed up by controlling the catalyst at the nanoscale."

    This sounds like pretty exciting chemistry to me, no matter the reason for researching it or the possible uses for this exact case.
    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      I think you're being over-enthusiastic. Yes, this could be a worthwhile creation, but I'd need to know lots more before I got that enthusiastic. (E.g. does it only work on pure CO2...the summary didn't say. What about standard temperature and pressure (i.e. STP)? How susceptible is the catalyst to poisoning (and by what)? Etc.

      As stated this could be a zero-cost (well, ongoing cost) method to produce fuel-stock out of air and sunlight, so the claims are substantial. But in such cases one always needs t

    • Am I surprised? Turns out every silver bullet is neither silver nor a bullet.

    • by jonadab ( 583620 )
      It could potentially also be directly useful if it can be made affordable at any kind of reasonable scale. Methanol is much easier to store than electricity, and entirely straightforward to use as a fuel. It's already somewhat commonly used as fuel for a few things (mostly recreational stuff, rather than anything industrial, but still, the fact that we're already using it this way means we already have significant experience doing so; methanol as fuel is a known quantity, and that's a useful property for
  • by godrik ( 1287354 ) on Saturday March 30, 2024 @01:36PM (#64356924)

    Asking for a friend!

    • by Anonymous Coward
      They'll have lots of friends if they can.
  • When will we see this tried on the ISS?

    I'm sure the spacefarers would prefer ethanol, but methanol is almost as good.

    I was also thinking that it could be useful on submarines, but there is not quite as much sunlight under the sea.

  • Thin film PV has a lot of room to get material consumption per m2 down. Panels which you have to pump water and gasses through though, not so much.

    Just keep the synthesis centralised and the light collection distributed through PV if you want to use solar.

  • by zeeky boogy doog ( 8381659 ) on Saturday March 30, 2024 @02:16PM (#64357052)
    The key central number is buried in an inconspicuous sentence most of the way down: Average quantum yield, i.e. efficiency of conversion, is .06%.

    Not the paper's fault, but it is so very tiresome the way writers compulsively and breathtakingly wank about how every little research achievement is some sort of world-changing revolution. The reality is that this is a neat discovery and a possible hint of which way to go, but it's about as useful as a copper oxide solar cell.
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Cool. So essentially irrelevant in practice. Still, fundamental research is valuable. I do agree the way how anything is hyped these days is quite repulsive.

      • Basic chemistry would tell you that converting CO2 to something else is going to be very expensive and energy intensive. Copper as a catalyst would not be feasible at scale (esp. since copper is already necessary and supply falling short for even the current demand of electrification) That is why carbon sequestration is always a bad idea as you put more carbon in the air than you take out. Much better to use the energy somewhere else unless you have an excess of low cost energy that must be used (eg nuclear

      • Why hype the zero-sum idea that the low efficiency is a hard limit that can never be exceeded, so everyone should just give up now and if not I'll cut your funding till you give up, because obviously this type of thing is just hype and no, I'm not hyping anti-hype at all, because wouldn't that be self-unaware, and am I not the Captain of this rational, super-consistent story I'm telling here?

    • by dskoll ( 99328 )

      But what does "quantum yield" mean? The only number that really matters is energy in vs energy out. If it takes 1J of energy to produce fuel that yields 2J, then great. If it takes 2J to produce 1J, then not so great.

      • by gTsiros ( 205624 ) on Saturday March 30, 2024 @11:33PM (#64357956)

        Heavily depends where that 2J is coming from. If it was not going to be used elsewhere, then neat.

      • You cannot make 2J of anything with 1J of anything, that would violate conservation of energy. What you can do is use something that already has some usable energy stored in it and inject a bit more to make it even more useful to you.

        If you could have a panel that needed sunlight and a barrel of water to produce a barrel of methanol and so long as the cost of the initial setup was less than the lifetime output of the device, would it really matter if it's horribly inefficient?

        Obviously the answer is 'yes' b

  • So, how does the cost and yield of this method compare with traditional methods of converting CO2 and sunlight into useful fuels? E.g. a field of grass or forrest of trees?
  • by PinkyGigglebrain ( 730753 ) on Saturday March 30, 2024 @04:41PM (#64357404)

    Now if they can just get this process to make Butanol we're set for Carbon neutral, green, alternatives to gasoline that doesn't require a complete replacement of the current fuel distribution infrastructure. With an "at pump" Octane of 87 Butanol can be used as a drop in replacement for Gasoline in any ratio mix unlike methanol and doesn't require modification to the engine beyond replacing any natural rubber fuel hoses with a synthetic rubber that won't degrade from the drying effects of alcohols.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/... [energy.gov]

  • A big advantage of the new catalyst is that it consists of sustainable elements — carbon, nitrogen, and copper — all highly abundant on our planet.

    Cooper is not that abundant [wikimedia.org], but perhaps if you need a small quantity...

    • Doesn't that chart show it in the middle, so pretty abundant? Why are there so many abandoned copper mines (e.g. in Ajo, Arizona) that become uneconomical because prices crashed, not because the copper ran out?

      • Note that the scale is logarithmic, the middle is thousand time less abundant than the top.

        But you are right, there is copper left to be mined or recycled, and using it as a is causes a demand much smaller than copper need for conductors.

  • Now go one more step and modify it so that it produces Ethanol and you just might win the Nobel.
  • When it can make ethanol from moonlight.

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