Put this in the category of “yippee” and “glad there are smart people”…
Sandia National Labs, looking for ways to make hydrogen, instead found a way to make gasoline from CO2 and sunshine:
uses the sun’s energy to convert water and carbon dioxide into the molecular building blocks that make up transportation fuels. The "Sunshine to Petrol" system could ultimately prove a practical way to recycle CO₂ from power and industrial plants into gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, assuming the process can become at least twice as efficient as natural photosynthesis.
A simple way to look at it is that it puts the stuff that burned in your car back together again.
I don’t see this becoming economical for mass replacement of drilling for oil. It could be useful for making fuel where you can’t pipe it – like for powering a generator in a remote location.
Alas, it is 15-20 years away from market. But cool, none the less.
Original Sandia announcement here.
November 24th, 2009 at 9:03 pm
Why wait? Get rid of the gas that caused past global temperature rises.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjoY_cSmQ70
November 25th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
Any reaction that reverses an exothermic reaction like burning gasoline with air requires even more energy. Sorry about the ugly facts of thermodynamics. I don’t know how much more because I don’t know the efficiency of the exact reaction from the vague description in the article. Sunlight as the energy source for the reaction cannot deliver much fuel, think of what mass of leaves a tree can grow in a spring month with twelve hours of sunlight a day. The one good news for those who believe that CO2 must not be released is that this expensive machine will at least consume CO2. One further caveat: gadgets that use sunshine and water to produce something usually can only do so where there isn’t much water.
November 28th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Hence the reason they mention the requirement to be at least twice as efficient as photosynthesis, I presume. As with most forms of solar collection it is going to suffer from one critical weakness: clouds.