Since 70 percent of the global demand for energy is met by burning fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas, it’s not surprising that we’re pumping enormous amounts of climate-warning carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — an astonishing 35.8 billion tons (32.5 billion metric tons) in 2017, according to the International Energy Agency.
But even with clean energy sources such as wind and solar power increasing rapidly across the planet, we’re probably still going to be using fossil fuels as well for the foreseeable future. That’s why many are looking to carbon capture technology for power plants as a way to reduce emissions. The Petra Nova power plant near Houston, currently the world’s biggest post-combustion carbon capture facility, kept more than 1 million tons (907,000 metric tons) of carbon from going into the atmosphere in the first nine months after it went online in January 2017.
Using the Carbon We Capture
But that leads to another question. What do we do with all that carbon dioxide? Storing it underground is one option. But in an article published on March 29, 2018 in the scientific journal Joule, a group of Canadian and U.S. scientists describe an even more intriguing solution. Captured CO2 could be converted into other molecules to create fuels to store energy generated by wind turbines or solar panels, as well as to supply raw materials to make plastic and other products.
“Consider this as a form of artificial photosynthesis,” Phil De Luna, a doctoral candidate in Materials Science Engineering at the University of Toronto and one of the article’s authors, explains. “Plants take CO2 and sunlight and water and make sugars and other things they need to live. We’re taking energy and CO2 and converting it into things we can use.”
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