The aviation industry has been looking for ways to reduce its global carbon footprint for the past decade, such as purchasing so-called carbon offsets—like tree-planting projects or wind farms—to make up for the carbon dioxide spewed out by high-flying jets. At the same time, airports in San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles, along with a dozen in Europe, are fueling planes with greener alternative fuels to help reach carbon-reduction goals.
Now a team at Oxford University in the United Kingdom has come up with an experimental process that might be able to turn carbon dioxide—a greenhouse gas emitted by all gas-burning engines—into jet fuel. If successful, the process, which uses an iron-based chemical reaction, could result in “net zero” emissions from airplanes.
The experiment, reported today in the journal Nature Communications, was conducted in a laboratory and still needs to be replicated at a larger scale. But the chemical engineers who designed and performed the process are hopeful that it could be a climate game-changer.
“Climate change is accelerating, and we have huge carbon dioxide emissions,” says Tiancun Xiao, a senior research fellow at Oxford’s Department of Chemistry and an author on the paper. “The infrastructure of hydrocarbon fuels is already there. This process could help relieve climate change and use the current carbon infrastructure for sustainable development.”
When fossil fuels like oil or natural gas burn, their hydrocarbons are turned into carbon dioxide, and water and energy are released. This experiment reverses the process to turn carbon dioxide back into a fuel using something called the organic combustion method (OCM). By adding heat (350 degrees Celsius, which is 662 degrees Fahrenheit) to citric acid, hydrogen, and a catalyst made of iron, manganese, and potassium to the carbon dioxide, the team was able to produce liquid fuel that would work in a jet engine. The experiment was done in a stainless-steel reactor and only produced a few grams of the substance.
In the lab, the carbon dioxide came from a canister. But the idea for adapting the concept for the real world would be to capture large amounts of the greenhouse gas from either a factory or directly from the air in order to remove it from the environment. Carbon dioxide is the most common of the planet-warming greenhouse gases, and it is produced by factories, cars, and wood burning, including forest fires and slash-and-burn agriculture. Keeping it out of the atmosphere might help reduce global warming, although the world’s carbon emissions have been rising for the past few decades and are on a path to warm the planet by 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.
READ more: https://www.wired.com/story/could-carbon-dioxide-be-turned-into-jet-fuel/