A new breach could help reduce air travel’s carbon footprint, with the goal of bringing jets emissions to net zero. A team of researchers from Oxford University succeeded in converting carbon dioxide (CO2) into jet fuel, but so far the experiment has been conducted at a very small scale. As concerns about climate change continue to rise during the day, scientists have been looking at converting CO2 to sustainable synthetic hydrocarbons fuels for transportation purposes for a few years now. To date, this reverse engineering has not been tested in the laboratory but could be a game changer when introduced at a larger scale – making air travel carbon neutral.
The team of researchers has found a way to use low-cost iron catalysts to convert CO2 into the atmosphere (or directly from factory emissions) into synthetic jet fuel. The scientists first prepare the Fe-Mn-K (iron-manganese-potassium) catalyst by the organic combustion method (OCM). This catalyst then exhibits the conversion of CO2 through hydrogenation to hydrocarbons in the jet jet fuel range of 38.2 percent and a low carbon monoxide yield of 5.6 percent. The inversion will also produce other by-products that are important raw materials for the petrochemical industry and are currently only available from fossil crude oil.
In this way, the carbon dioxide extracted from air is used to turn it and again into jet fuel when it is burned on the fly. As a result, the overall impact of this process is carbon-neutral fuel.
To date, this process remains within the walls of the laboratory. There are challenges that need to be overcome before this can be done as an efficient way of producing air fuel. One of the barriers involves carbon capture – the process of capturing carbon from the atmosphere. CO2 activity is also a challenge. Another problem is that hydrocarbon synthesis through CO2 hydrogenation usually favors the formation of a short chain, rather than the desirable long chain required for air fuel synthesis.
This new process represents an important social breakthrough that highlights CO2 recycling and resource conservation as an important, important part of greenhouse gas management and sustainable development. This catalytic process is set to be the key to achieving zero-carbon emissions from the aviation industry soon – that is, so that we become a fully equipped society to run on electric planes that eco friendly.
Speaking to Wired, one of the paper’s authors, Tiancun Xiao of the Oxford Department of Chemistry, said, “Climate change is accelerating, and we have high carbon dioxide emissions. Hydrocarbon fuel infrastructure is already in place. This process could help reduce climate change and utilize existing carbon infrastructure for sustainable development. ”
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