Solar-powered device captures carbon dioxide from air to make sustainable fuel

Problem solved! There are several technologies out there to recycle atmospheric CO2. Here is another one.

"Researchers have developed a reactor that pulls carbon dioxide directly from the air and converts it into sustainable fuel, using sunlight as the power source.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, say their solar-powered reactor could be used to make fuel to power cars and planes, or the many chemical and pharmaceutical products we rely on. It could also be used to generate fuel in remote or off-grid locations. ..."

From the abstract:

"Direct air capture is an emerging technology to decrease atmospheric CO2 levels, but it is currently costly and the long-term consequences of CO2 storage are uncertain. An alternative approach is to utilize atmospheric CO2 on-site to produce value-added renewable fuels, but current CO2 utilization technologies predominantly require a concentrated CO2 feed or high temperature.

Here we report a gas-phase dual-bed direct air carbon capture and utilization flow reactor that produces syngas (CO + H2) through on-site utilization of air-captured CO2 using light without requiring high temperature or pressure.

The reactor consists of a bed of solid silica-amine adsorbent to capture aerobic CO2 and produce CO2-free air; concentrated light is used to release the captured CO2 and convert it to syngas over a bed of a silica/alumina-titania-cobalt bis(terpyridine) molecular–semiconductor photocatalyst. We use the oxidation of depolymerized poly(ethylene terephthalate) plastics as the counter-reaction.

We envision this technology to operate in a diurnal fashion where CO2 is captured during night-time and converted to syngas under concentrated sunlight during the day."

Solar-powered device captures carbon dioxide from air to make sustainable fuel

Solar-powered device captures carbon dioxide from air to make sustainable fuel (original news release) "Researchers have developed a reactor that pulls carbon dioxide directly from the air and converts it into sustainable fuel, using sunlight as the power source."

Direct air capture of CO2 for solar fuel production in flow (open access)

Fig. 1 DACCU through a dual-bed flow reactor consisting of DAC and CO2U units.