"Sunshine to Petrol" Promises Fuel From CO2

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratory have produced a prototype of a machine that could prove very important in coming years: It converts carbon dioxide to a gasoline equivalent.

They’re calling the system Sunshine to Petrol, because the idea is to power it with solar energy. Inside the machine, iron oxide is heated up in a way that allows it to “steal” an oxygen atom from CO2; the resulting carbon monoxide is mixed with hydrogen, which is produced from water injected into the system, to create a fuel. MIT’s Technology Review has more details.

The reason such a system is desirable should be immediately apparent — if carbon capture technology is mandated for some businesses in the future, there will be a great deal of CO2 to use. Currently, the idea is compress the CO2 then bury it underground, at a significant cost. It would also provide a new way to reduce our oil dependence.

Sunshine to Petrol is in fact just an incremental step on a technology I wrote about a year ago, in which a company called Sundrop Fuels, using technology licensed from Sandia, was working on a solar dish that would produce hydrogen.

Each of these systems tends to have some hidden benefits that can make them more attractive. Sundrop was hoping to also produce electricity and purify water, which would give it an extra product in drought-prone areas. The hydrogen production wouldn’t necessarily have to be economical, because it could use the excess energy the solar dishes produced during the hottest parts of the day.

That same idea was advanced by researchers I spoke with who want to use excess energy from wind turbines to capture CO2 and convert it to fuel. Wind turbines, because of their variability, often produce spikes of energy that currently go to waste.

These advantages aside, it will take a few years for the folks at Sandia to prove their system’s viability. But since underground carbon sequestration is also still in the research stages, now is the right time to put someeffort into Sunshine to Petrol.