A new one-two punch takes the very greenhouse gas warming our planet and transforms it into a simple fuel.
A team of materials scientists led by Shan Gao at the Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences in Hefei, China, have just developed a new material that transforms carbon dioxide gas into a simple, clean-burning fuel called formate. Using a process called electroreduction, their work requires nothing more than a modest amount of electric current. The new material is a four-atom thick sandwich of cobalt metal and cobalt-oxygen molecules. It's outlined today in the journal Nature.
"This represents a fundamental scientific breakthrough," says Karthish Manthiram, a chemical engineer at the California Institute of Technology who studies CO2 electroreduction but was not involved in the development of the new material. "Certainly it will be a years-long process before this is worked into a successful, commercial device. But at this stage of development, by all conceivable metrics, this reaction looks very positive."
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