New research helps turn emissions back into gasoline

It is well known that the combustion of fuels such as gasoline and oil will release a large amount of greenhouse gas CO ₂ into the environment.

That's why people are trying to develop other renewable clean energy sources such as wind, solar . But what if people can reverse the process, turn CO ₂ back? back into liquid fuel?

That is a research direction done by scientists at the University of Texas. Published in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Sciences, the researchers presented how they use the environment of heat, pressure and sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water, into liquid-hydrocarbon fuels that can be used. like gasoline.

The exhaust gas can turn back into petroleum.

"We are the first to use both sunlight to synthesize liquid hydrocarbons. The process only takes place in a reactor with a single step from CO ₂ and water," said Brian Dennis, lead researcher. rescue said.

The cycle is named "neutral carbon fuel". What it means is that if we can recreate the entire amount of carbon dioxide released, the atmosphere will not have to suffer any more.

To demonstrate the cycle can work, the team used a reactor under 180-200 ^° C conditions. The pressure was adjusted in about 1 to 6 times the atmospheric pressure. Besides, they will also need a catalytic mixture of cobalt and titanium oxide.

The reaction process has actually transferred CO ₂ and water back into liquid and oxygen hydrocarbons. Even so, production in different conditions and producing some by-products.

The team presented the highest performance they achieved at about 13%. A performance that is not high and will cause doubts for many people. The reason comes from the fact that we have not yet evaluated the effectiveness and cost to build reaction conditions, including heat, pressure and catalyst energy.

However, there is an encouraging thing in that study that they consider using solar energy. This can reduce the cost of spinning CO2 in the cycle. A parabolic mirror is used by the team to focus heat and energy.

The team is from the University of Texas, USA.

It is clear that there will be a very long time if scientists want to persevere on the path of this research. Performance is the first thing that needs to be improved. In addition, titanium oxide catalyst is known to not work effectively across the entire solar spectrum.

In an era of increasing renewable energy technology, it will be difficult to convince us to support the study of producing more fuel. It is likely that this reverse process will not achieve economic efficiency. However, in the future, we will pay more attention to this work, if the research team publishes more convincing results.