By Christopher Cassidy, Science Editor
An environmentalist’s dream. An oil executive’s nightmare. If it doesn’t end up saving the world, it will at least put off its destruction for a good while. This sounds like a fantasy: a solar-powered way to turn carbon dioxide into fuel. And interestingly enough, particle physics and quantum science have nothing to do with it. Just simple chemistry. A large disk (maybe 6 feet wide) focuses sunlight into a 2-inch hole. Inside the hole, there is a set of rotating cobalt ferrite disks. As they are heated, some of their electrons are excited beyond the containment of the nucleus, and the disks lose an electron. When these charged disks contact carbon dioxide, they steal an electron from the carbon dioxide and the carbon dioxide molecules lose the covalent charge strength, and the CO2 loses an oxygen atom. The resulting carbon monoxide can be sold as an important industrial chemical or converted into fuel. Another project has used nano-tubes of titanium dioxide and solar UV radiation to turn a mixture of carbon dioxide and water vapor into methane and propane.
