CO2 Could be Green Fuel

Carbon dioxide could soon be ready for a PR makeover. With a bit of clever chemistry, the gas could become a feedstock for alternative fuels or find a role in cooling freezers rather than warming the atmosphere.

Carbon capture and storage schemes propose to snatch CO₂ from industrial chimneys and bury it in ocean basins or geological formations. But having gone to the trouble of capturing the gas, squirrelling it away underground is a wasted opportunity, says Dermot O'Hare at the University of Oxford. He thinks converting CO₂ into methanol for use as fuel is a smarter move.

But that's easier said than done. "One of the difficulties chemists have is doing anything with CO₂," O'Hare says. The trouble is that the molecule is so stable, it's hard to find chemicals reactive enough to target CO₂ but specific enough to ignore other components of the atmosphere such as carbon monoxide and oxygen.

Now O'Hare and Andrew Ashley, also at Oxford, have demonstrated how to do it at the relatively low temperature of 160 °C and at standard pressure. All it takes is a bit of frustration.