“Nanotube Tech Transforms CO2 Into Fuel”
This seems brilliant to me. I don’t understand why this is not getting more news. It seems like it should be viable, but I don’t know all the details. Sounds like a great idea though.
Nanotube Tech Transforms CO2 Into Fuel:
Powered by sunlight, titanium oxide nanotubes can turn carbon dioxide into methane, which can be harnessed as an energy source
It goes on to point out that,
One big advantage of methane over other hydrocarbons like hydrogen gas is that an infrastructure already exists for methane… “It’s a clean and sustainable cycle as long as you have sun and water.”
I dig it. The abstract can be found here: High-Rate Solar Photocatalytic Conversion of CO2 and Water Vapor to Hydrocarbon Fuels (if you have ACS Journal access you can read the full thing) via the journal, Nano Letters.
The only thing I see as a drawback is just the business of building it to a scale worth bothering with. Nanotubes are measured in microns (various divisors of the width of a hair - usually lots of zeroes involved.)
To create enough of them to produce anything like a significant fuel source would be almost impossible. It’s easy to do in the lab when all you want to produce is a candle flame for a few minutes. But when you want billions of cubic feet of the stuff, that’s another matter.