Team discovers how to convert CO2 gas into usable fuel

Researchers from the University of Toronto believe that they have discovered a long sought-after method of converting carbon dioxide into a usable fuel – a breakthrough that might help limit the release of the greenhouse gas and reduce the warming effects of global climate change.

According to the university, humans are adding approximately 30 billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere annually, and experts have long been searching for a substance that could convert sunlight, CO2 and water or hydrogen into something capable of producing heat or energy.

Now, UT professor Geoffrey Ozin, head of the university’s Solar Fuels Research Cluster, and his colleagues reported that they have found a way to convert these emissions into an energy-rich fuel in a carbon-neutral cycle using silicon, the second most abundant element in the Earth’s crust.

As Ozin’s team explained in a study published this week in the journal Nature Communications, silicon represents more than one-fourth of the planet’s mass, is not toxic and inexpensive to work with, and possesses electrical and optical properties which make it an ideal semiconductor to use when converting sunlight into electricity.

Low cost, non-toxic, abundant silicon the key to the procedure

Carbon dioxide’s chemical stability has made it difficult to find a material capable of converting it into fuel, and as Ozin explained in a statement, such a catalyst would have to be “highly active and selective” and “made of elements that are low cost, non-toxic and readily available.”

Since silicon ticks all of those boxes, his team used hydride-terminated silicon nanocrystals (also known as nanostructured hydrides), which had an average diameter of 3.5 nanometers as well as a surface area and optical absorption strength capable of efficiently collecting and using the near-infrared, visible and ultraviolet wavelengths of light produced by the sun.

When combined with a potent chemical reduction agent that efficiently and selectively converted CO2 gas to carbon monoxide, the nanocrystals effectively generated an energy-rich fuel without producing any harmful emissions as a side-effect of the reaction. In short, the reducing power of nanostructured hydrides provided a potentially viable way of using sunlight to convert CO2 into fuel. The goal now, the authors said, is to find a way to boost the production of said fuel.

If their method proves to be sustainably successful, it could be very good news for the planet, as the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reports that carbon dioxide represented 81% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the States in 2014. Since the bulk of that CO2 is attributed to the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas, Ozin’s work has the potential to significantly reduce the impact of climate change.

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Image credit: Thinkstock

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