Even if Republicans are in a denial induced by petroleum money, we know that the climate crisis is upon us. The major culprit is the carbon dioxide, CO2, put into the atmosphere every year by the gigaton. The best way to deal with the problem is to find energy sources that put no CO2 in the atmosphere at all, but while it’s getting late in the day, modern civilization is still critically dependent on CO2 producing fossil fuels. Further, there are some technologies that do not readily avail themselves to conversion to direct electrical power—airliners and cargo ships, for example.
Maybe there’s some way of removing all that excess CO2 from the atmosphere, and even a way to use it. Sequestration has been proposed, where CO2 is captured and stored underground, presumably at high pressure. This proposal is just not sustainable. We just can’t store the gas underground indefinitely while our way of life just keeps producing more.
There is another idea, though, a bit more crazy and creative than just sequestering the gas. What if it were possible to convert CO2 into a form that would make possible its conversion into other carbon-containing substances, either as a fuel or a feedstock for industrial chemistry? Yes, the resultant substance might just get burned again, but the CO2 produced would not be new CO2. If such cycling between atmospheric CO2 and industrial chemical substances could become practical and profitable, that cycling could substantially reduce new CO2 entering the atmosphere, and play an important role in getting to net zero.
Research on how to convert CO2 into something chemically useful has been proceeding for some years now. The problem with CO2 is that it’s just about the most stable carbon compound that exists. Getting stable compounds to react is very hard to do. Such compounds are happy where they are, and so it’s hard to get them to change into something else.
Nonetheless, if you lean on CO2 hard enough, and under the right conditions, it will react. An obvious way to transform CO2 into a useful reactive substance is to remove an oxygen atom and make it carbon monoxide, CO. I know what you’re thinking: Carbon monoxide is poisonous! Why would you ever do such a thing intentionally? Well, you’d do it because it’s a whole lot easier get CO to react than CO2. Using CO as a starting material, you can make a whole raft of useful substances, such as alcohols, ketones and esters.
Until quite recently, effort toward the goal of converting CO2 to CO have not been terribly successful. What was sought was a catalyst that would lower the energy barrier between these two compounds. Catalysts that have been tried require too much input power, give low yields, and often produce elemental graphite as a byproduct, poisoning the catalyst in the process.
A new catalyst has been discovered that does not appear to have the disadvantages of catalysts tried in the past. Researchers at Stanford University and the Technical University of Denmark have determined that using cerium oxide as the catalyst for this electrically induced reaction provides higher yields while leaving no graphite byproduct. Cerium is probably an element you’ve never encountered before. Cerium, with symbol Ce and atomic number 58, is found toward the left side of the lanthanide or rare-earth elements (that first row of elements that is usually placed underneath the rest of the periodic table. It’s a metal, and like all metals, it is most likely to combine with a nonmetal (such as oxygen) to form an ionic compound (such as cerium oxide).
So that boring-looking powder in the photo above may make a substantial contribution to reducing CO2 in the atmosphere.
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