“Scientists at the University of Cambridge have developed a solar-powered reactor that captures carbon dioxide directly from the air and converts it into sustainable fuel using sunlight,” reports SciTechDaily:
This innovative reactor has the potential to produce fuel for cars and planes, as well as essential chemicals and pharmaceuticals. It could also provide a reliable energy source in remote or off-grid locations.
Unlike traditional carbon capture technologies, which require fossil fuel energy and involve transporting and storing CO2, this reactor eliminates those steps. Instead, it directly converts atmospheric CO2 into useful products using only sunlight.
While Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) has been promoted as a solution to the climate crisis—receiving $27 billion in UK government funding—it remains highly energy-intensive. Additionally, concerns persist over the long-term safety of storing pressurized CO2 deep underground….the pressurized CO2 is, at best, stored underground indefinitely, where it’s of no use to anyone.
“What if instead of pumping the carbon dioxide underground, we made something useful from it?” said Dr Sayan Kar. “CO2 is a harmful greenhouse gas, but it can also be turned into useful chemicals without contributing to global warming.”…
The team’s newest system takes CO2 directly from the air and converts it into syngas: a key intermediate in the production of many chemicals and pharmaceuticals…their approach, which does not require any transportation or storage, is much easier to scale up than earlier solar-powered devices. The device, a solar-powered flow reactor, uses specialized filters to grab CO2 from the air at night, like how a sponge soaks up water. When the sun comes out, the sunlight heats up the captured CO2, absorbing infrared radiation and a semiconductor powder absorbs the ultraviolet radiation to start a chemical reaction that converts the captured CO2 into solar syngas.
In other news, Turkey has doubled its solar power over the last 2.5 years.
Geothermal energy may expand significantly due to fracking techniques.
“New experiments in the deserts of Utah and Nevada show how advances in fracking—technology developed by the oil industry—can be repurposed to tap clean geothermal energy anywhere on Earth,” reports Wired. It may soon become possible to drill deep into the Earth to get lots of geothermal energy. That would reduce the need to rely on fossil fuels, wind, and solar power (which would be good, because fossil fuels lead to global warming, wind energy kills many birds, and solar farms generate lots of toxic waste. A Google-owned solar farm incinerates a thousand birds every year).
