r/science • u/Wagamaga • Aug 06 '20

Chemistry Turning carbon dioxide into liquid fuel. Scientists have discovered a new electrocatalyst that converts carbon dioxide (CO2) and water into ethanol with very high energy efficiency, high selectivity for the desired final product and low cost.

https://www.anl.gov/article/turning-carbon-dioxide-into-liquid-fuel
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u/dosedatwer Aug 06 '20

I work in the power industry, the goal is energy storage, not sources. There's SO much more energy from the sun that we could capture than we could possibly use at the moment. The issue is when the sun doesn't shine (or the wind doesn't blow, which ultimately comes from temperature differences resultant from the sun) we don't have much renewable power. Creating a liquid storage resource efficiently from renewable energy to replace oil is an absolute Holy Grail of energy research.

To really hammer home how much storage is worth more than the power itself, a lot of oil wells "flare" associated gas, which means they just burn it. So much so that the amount you can use this process is limited by law. The reason they do this is because transporting natural gas is way more difficult than transporting oil and the NG isn't worth anywhere near as much, so remote wells don't build anything to transport NG.

But another point of this is carbon capture technology. We can stem the tide of climate change temporarily while we work towards alternative fuels if we could capture the carbon in the atmosphere.

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u/mrnoonan81 Aug 06 '20

I was responding to someone inquiring about using this to remove carbon from the atmosphere.

Energy storage is, of course, very valuable and the more efficiently we can store/recover it, the better.