Researchers claim they have a way to make alcohol out of
thin air & the technique might even save the world in the bargain, not just
our rent money.
Now before you start organizing your weekend around this
bubbly fantasy, the alcohol we are talking about here is more than just the
stuff in your drink, & the thin air it is made from is actually heavy –
clogged with heat-trapping pollutants that are wrecking Earth's atmosphere.
Confused? Okay, let us backtrack a little, before we get
onto the exciting new discoveries made by PhD student Ming Ma from the Delft
University of Technology in the Netherlands.
While this research sounds like a great way to get tipsy
sans tipping – & hypothetically it could be – it is actually all about
repurposing the dangerous levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) that are
sending global temperatures into places they really oughtn't be going.
Short of just figuring out ways to reduce our carbon
emissions before climate change gets even more volatile & threatening, one
of the things scientists around the world are currently busy researching is
what's called carbon capture.
Like the name suggests, this process involves various
technologies for extracting carbon emissions from things like coal-fired power
plants before they have a chance to drift away & escape into the
atmosphere.
One of the ways of doing this is what's known as carbon
capture & storage (CCS), in which treated atmospheric carbon can be pumped
underground where over time it fuses into solid rock.
But an emerging alternative to carbon sequestration called
carbon capture & utilization (CCU) may prove to be a lot more useful to
humanity than just channeling our emissions into the ground.
Instead, CCU seeks to repurpose carbon dioxide into other
chemicals that we can use, like baking soda, or alternative fuel sources.
This is where that enjoy-in-moderation atmospheric alcohol
comes in.
What Ming Ma has done is come up a new method for
controlling a process called electroreduction, which is used in CCU to turn CO2
into other kinds of molecules.
Ma's PhD thesis, which is being defended this week – one of
the stages in receiving the academic qualification – describes at the nanoscale
level how different metals used during electroreduction can be used to produce
different chemical results.
One instance is copper nanowires, which can produce
hydrocarbons from CO2, while nano-porous silver can produce CO.
By changing these metals, & altering the lengths of the
nanowires used for electroreduction, Ma found that the electric potential in
the reaction can be tuned, meaning it's possible to make any carbon-based
product we want.
Of course, we should not get too excited yet, because Ma's
PhD – & the peer-reviewing of his paper – is obviously still a work in
progress, but the research suggests there could soon be new ways to manipulate
CCU to produce all kinds of chemicals.
Those products could include ethanol (C2H5OH) – the kind of
alcohol we consume in alcoholic beverages – plus other forms such as methanol, &
other molecules too, such as formic acid (HCOOH), which could help power fuel
cells in the future.
The next step for Ma & fellow researchers – other than
Ma getting certified, that is – is to figure out ways to improve the
selectivity of the molecules produced during electroreduction, as well as
looking into how to scale up the process, so it could one day help CCU efforts
in the real world.
There is a long way to go before we get there, perhaps, but
in light of all the good this research promises – CO2 mitigation, fuel cell
production, not to mention carbon-neutral booze, people! – how could we not be
down with this?
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