Emission fuel

Santa Barbara, California-based Carbon Sciences has developed what it claims is a breakthrough technology that can recycle carbon dioxide (CO₂) into petrol, providing a viable alternative to carbon sequestration.

Some of the known approaches for CO₂ to fuel recycling include direct photolysis, which uses intense light energy to break off the oxygen atoms in CO₂, and chemically reacting carbon dioxide gas with hydrogen gas (H₂) to create methane or methanol.

Both of these conventional engineering approaches, at least according to Carbon Sciences, require immense energy due to high-pressure and high-temperature chemical processes and are therefore high in cost.

The Carbon Sciences process, on the other hand, can recycle large quantities of CO₂ into gaseous and liquid fuels using a proprietary multi-step biocatalytic process. Instead of using expensive inorganic catalysts, such as zinc, gold or zeolite in traditional high-energy catalytic chemical processes, its process uses inexpensive, renewable biomolecules to catalyse the chemical reactions that are required to transform CO₂ and water (H₂O) into fuel molecules.