Scientists Create Jet Fuel From Carbon Dioxide In A New Eco-Friendly Way
University of Oxford scientists have developed a new catalyst for turning carbon dioxide into jet fuel. The new catalyst is formed using inexpensive materials like iron and potassium and is being touted as a large improvement over the existing catalysts used for carbon-conversion. The researchers tested this new catalyst on carbon dioxide in a small reaction chamber. The chamber was set to 300¡ã Celsius and pressurized to around 10 times the air p...Read More
The advent of electric vehicles and stricter emission checks has managed to reduce the carbon footprint of land-based vehicles like cars, buses and trucks over time.
Airplanes, however, have largely been their older selves in this evolution and still contribute majorly towards the cumulative emissions from vehicles.
(Representative Image: Unsplash)
A new idea now reverses this process, by turning carbon dioxide into jet fuel. Mentioned in a new research published in the journal Nature Communications is a catalyst that can complete this conversion in a single step. With this, the scientists aim to bring down the overall carbon footprint of aerial vehicles.
Developed by Tiancun Xiao, a chemist at the University of Oxford, and colleagues, the new catalyst is formed using inexpensive materials like iron and potassium and is being touted as a large improvement over the existing catalysts used for carbon-conversion.
¡°We prepare the Fe-Mn-K catalyst by the so-called Organic Combustion Method,¡± the study explains. While materials like cobalt are used for a multi-step, tedious conversion, the new catalyst does this in simple chemical reactions. These include -
Hydrogenation of CO2: CO2+3H2??(CH2)?+2H2O (¦¤H0298=?125kJmol?1);
The RWGS reaction: CO2+H2?CO+H2O (¦¤H0298=+41kJmol?1),
and The FTS reaction: CO+2H2??(CH2)?+H2O (¦¤H0298=?166kJmol?1)
The researchers tested this new catalyst on carbon dioxide in a small reaction chamber. The chamber was set to 300¡ã Celsius and pressurized to around 10 times the air pressure at sea level. In these conditions, the catalyst took 20 hours to produce new chemical products by converting 38 percent of the carbon dioxide in the chamber.
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The study explains that within the chamber, the catalyst helps separate the carbon from CO2 molecules and links it up with Hydrogen. In doing so, it makes the hydrocarbon molecules that make up jet fuel. The Oxygen atoms from the CO2 also join up with Hydrogen atoms and form water molecules.
Scientists say that about 48 percent of the products of the reaction in the chamber were found to be jet fuel hydrocarbons. Other by-products included other petrochemicals including ethylene and propylene, which can also be used to make plastics.
