Bigger and better

The team is now working to improve reliability while building a bigger reactor with 28 rotating rings. That will enable it to process more CO₂ and water, says James Miller, a combustion chemist at Sandia.

Once the reactor is producing a steady stream of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, the gases can be converted into a synthetic liquid fuel using a technique such as the Fischer-Tropsch process developed in Germany in the 1920s. In this process the two gases are heated in the presence of an iron-based catalyst to produce hydrocarbon fuels.

Initially, the team plan to use CO₂ captured from power-plant exhaust flues to produce their synthetic fuel.

Ultimately, however, they hope to use CO₂ extracted directly from the air, although they are not developing their own carbon-capture technique to do so. "That is a huge challenge in itself, and we opted to focus on one hard problem at a time," says Miller.