• Question: can you harness co2 from the atmosphere and make it into carbon based products

    Asked by anon-254838 on 17 Jun 2020.
    • Photo: Julian Onions

      Julian Onions answered on 17 Jun 2020:

      Yes – easily, we have a lot of things that do that, and they are called plants and trees!
      They all take in CO2 and turn it into more complex carbon based structures – typically sugars and starches, but in some cases fuels such as ethanol.

      Doing it in other ways with machinery is possible, but needs quite a lot of energy input, which you could get from solar power or similar, but then you are essentially replicating the plant mechanism. Plants have about a 500 million year head start on us in terms of evolution and mechanisms!

    • Photo: Susan Cartwright

      Susan Cartwright answered on 17 Jun 2020:

      Yes, you can (plants do it all the time) but there is an energy cost: CO2 is more tightly bound than long-chain organic molecules and polymers (that’s why hydrocarbons burn to CO2, not vice versa). So if you are thinking of this as a way to reduce CO2 and alleviate global warming, you’d have to be very careful not to produce more CO2 in the process of consuming CO2!

    • Photo: Ricardo Duarte

      Ricardo Duarte answered on 17 Jun 2020:

      There is something called CO2 electrochemical reduction. This was the topic of my Master’s thesis where you use renewable energy to convert CO2 to fuel like methanol or other chemicals. If you emit CO2 when using the chemical produced, the whole process is CO2 neutral.

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