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Scientists in Canada have devised a new way to tackle the two gases most commonly implicated in climate change: carbon dioxide and methane. Using a touch of sunlight, their process converts both gases into methanol, which can be used for fuel, manufacturing, wastewater treatment, and more.
In a paper for Nature Communications, researchers at McGill University in Quebec write that their sun-powered catalyst is inspired by photosynthesis, or the process through which plants convert sunlight into useful material. When photons from sunlight interact with the particles that make up a plant’s most vital components, they trigger a chemical reaction that, in the end, results in “food” for the plant.
The researchers’ process works similarly. The catalyst is a mixture of gold, palladium, and gallium nitride nanoparticles, which, when exposed to sunlight, initiates a chemical reaction. In the presence of carbon dioxide and methane, the photoexcited catalyst pulls an oxygen molecule from the carbon dioxide and attaches it to a methane molecule. The resulting substance is “green” methanol, or methanol produced from renewable materials and processes. Carbon monoxide is the byproduct of the reaction.
Credit: Chris LeBoutillier/Unsplash
Methanol is a versatile substance for transportation, manufacturing, and public resource maintenance. On the transportation front, liquid can be used as a fuel or fuel additive for cars and boats with internal combustion engines or to produce energy for battery-powered vehicles. In manufacturing, methanol can be used to produce formaldehyde—an ingredient found in a wide range of products, from glues and lacquers to pesticides and medical disinfectants—or acetic acid, which in turn is used to make plastics. Wastewater treatment plants also use methanol to denitrify water that would otherwise harbor large amounts of algae. Carbon monoxide, the catalyst’s byproduct, can meanwhile be used to produce synthetic fuels, polymers, and more.
“Imagine a world where the exhaust from your car or emissions from a factory could be transformed, with the help of sunlight, into clean fuel for vehicles, the building blocks for everyday plastics, and energy stored in batteries,” Hui Su, a postdoctoral fellow and one of the study’s first authors, said. “That’s precisely the kind of transformation this new chemical process enables.”
Su and her colleagues write that they demonstrated the scalability of their method by “recycling the catalyst multiple times” in a batch reactor. Still, it’s unclear whether the team plans to iterate on their work or attempt to scale it straight away.