Scientists Turn CO2 'Back Into Coal' In Breakthrough Experiment (independent.co.uk) 222
"Scientists have managed to turn CO2 from a gas back into solid 'coal'," reports The Independent, "in a breakthrough which could potentially help remove the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere."
Long-time Slashdot reader bbsguru shared their report:
The research team led by RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, developed a new technique using a liquid metal electrolysis method which efficiently converts CO2 from a gas into solid particles of carbon. Published in the journal Nature Communications, the authors say their technology offers an alternative pathway for "safely and permanently" removing CO2 from the atmosphere....
RMIT researcher Dr Torben Daeneke said: "While we can't literally turn back time, turning carbon dioxide back into coal and burying it back in the ground is a bit like rewinding the emissions clock...." Lead author, Dr Dorna Esrafilzadeh said the carbon produced by the technique could also be used as an electrode.
"A side benefit of the process is that the carbon can hold electrical charge, becoming a supercapacitor, so it could potentially be used as a component in future vehicles," she said. "The process also produces synthetic fuel as a by-product, which could also have industrial applications."
More coverage from Fast Company, Science magazine, and the CBC.
RMIT researcher Dr Torben Daeneke said: "While we can't literally turn back time, turning carbon dioxide back into coal and burying it back in the ground is a bit like rewinding the emissions clock...." Lead author, Dr Dorna Esrafilzadeh said the carbon produced by the technique could also be used as an electrode.
"A side benefit of the process is that the carbon can hold electrical charge, becoming a supercapacitor, so it could potentially be used as a component in future vehicles," she said. "The process also produces synthetic fuel as a by-product, which could also have industrial applications."
More coverage from Fast Company, Science magazine, and the CBC.
I wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder if it needs energy to do this, an amount of energy greater then the energy produced by burning it in the first place?
If so, why not just use that energy instead? Cut out the middle man.
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See also Hydrogen production.
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these are all forms of batteries with various efficiency and convenience. One of the issues with hydrogen is that its not a very efficient battery, and its expensive to transport and store.
Its *possible* that carbon is better, but I doubt it.
Re:I wonder...why not synthesize coal instead of h (Score:2)
Doesn't achieve the same end, because the fine particles don't return from the atmosphere+surface to the depths of the Earth. Not easier to 'handle and export' because it needs bins and load/unload instead of flowing in pipes. 'The grid' is in continuous re-tooling, either way. Burning H2 makes
Re: I wonder... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Make Nazi Germany Great Again! (Score:2)
This is why you can't get a date.
Re: I wonder... (Score:3)
Because just using the energy doesn't remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
Re: I wonder... (Score:5, Funny)
If I could turn back coal
If I could find a way
I'd take back the gas that hurt you
And you'd stay
If I could reach the stars
I'd give them CO2
Re: I wonder... (Score:4, Insightful)
Because just using the energy doesn't remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
Turning CO2 into coal requires more energy than we got by creating the CO2 in the first place. This makes little sense as long as we are still burning coal.
You don't need to reduce CO2 to carbon to sequester it. The CO2 can be compressed and injected into shale formations for a tenth of the energy. You can even make it cash-positive by using it for enhanced oilfield recovery [wikipedia.org].
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It's claimed this process requires a "trickle" of electricity. I don't think that's an SI unit so who knows really but it seems this hinges on how much power it uses. If it's a lot, then yeah better to just use renewable power to displace coal. But if it is very little, it could be worthwhile, especially if it produces other useful byproducts. It sounds like something worth researching, as we'll most likely need lots of different solutions working together.
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We don't need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. We just need to stop putting CO2 into the atmosphere.
This process has one possible use: as an energy store to be used with intermittent energy sources, such as wind and solar.
When the intermittent sources are producing more energy than is required for immediate demand, convert some CO2 into a fuel that can later be used when the wind and solar energy sources are producing less than required.
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We don't need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. We just need to stop putting CO2 into the atmosphere.
Nope, we passed that point a while ago.
Even if we stop adding CO2 completely we are still in a feedback loop where increasing temperatures means that the oceans won't be able to hold as much CO2 and will keep emitting it.
We need to both stop emitting CO2 and start removing excess CO2 from the atmosphere.
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We don't need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. We just need to stop putting CO2 into the atmosphere.
I'm not sure everyone agrees with this. Some assert we need to bring carbon dioxide levels down to pre-industrial levels and do it quickly. That requires us to actively scrub greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere and oceans.
If we just stop emitting, the planet will do it all by itself, more or less. It just may take a long time and cause lots of human hardship in the interim. The question is whether speeding up the process is worth the (as of yet unknown both ways) costs.
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The full effect of the excess CO2 already in the atmosphere won't be felt for at least 40 years [theconversation.com].
And that's the "good" news - from the article:
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I've already got that technology. It's called Trees
Can't run my car on trees.
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Sure you can, it's called a bridge
Re: I wonder... (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually you can. You burn the trees without oxygen (or very little) and route the resulting gases into your engine.
Really need a truck rather then a car though in Germany during the war, there were even motorcycles equipped to burn wood gas. It's also fairly efficient (need about 1.5 times the fuel compared to gasoline) and clean burning.
Wiki has an article worth reading, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:I wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, obviously the coal-CO2-coal cycle creates entropy, and thus is less efficient than just leaving the coal as coal and creating energy through some other method.
Perhaps there are places/times (like Iceland with its abundant hydropower, or wind-powered places when there is an excess of wind) where electricity is extremely cheap, and you could turn CO2-coal then, to make up for CO2 emissions at times when electricity is expensive. But this sounds like the world's least efficient kind of battery.
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Perhaps there are places/times ...
Or a re-growing forest in North America or Farmer Bob (or Farmer Chin or Farmer Raj) growing crops.
So here's my silly idea. There's gotta be something wrong with it, probably the economics. Grow a forest and cut it down. Convert the wood to charcoal, which drives off wood gas (I think that's methane and wood alcohols). Use the wood gas fuel for whatever you want, bury the charcoal. Net-net, you're removing carbon from the atmosphere using sunlight.
Here's my other silly idea. Grow corn, switchgrass, or whate
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Some places pump water into a power generation reservoir in times of power surplus. This is no different.
I have yet to see any hard efficiency numbers to determine which one is worse.
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The energy density in carbon chains is far higher than water stored on high ground.
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The energy density of carbon chains dwarfs all others (except for nuclear).
The use here is obvious, even if inefficient: it can be used as a carbon neutral way to store, transport, and retrieve usable energy much more cheaply than other means.
Re:I wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course it requires a lot of energy. Converting CO2 back to Carbon and Oxygen would only be sensible if you had excess power (no demand and no way to store it). It's unlikely there would ever be enough extra energy available to sequester a significant amount of Carbon, but if there's no better use for the free energy...
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Solar and wind both lead to a lot of excess capacity at certain times of day.
The problem is making the process pay for itself, because otherwise no company will bother just to save their grandkids' money/lives.
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Re:I wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: I wonder... (Score:2)
It would perfectly, until the revolution.
Not everyone believes in your particular cause of the day, and eventually, they'll get sick of being milked at the barrel of a gun to pay your secular Indulgences.
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Kinda strange that the US does not have emission trading, from what I read? I thought this idea was brought up by the Americans when the Kyoto protocol was negotiated.
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Given the ever-rising urgency of doing exactly this: converting CO2 back to carbon and oxygen, it MAY soon be the best use for a lot of energy.
Re:I wonder... (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder if it needs energy to do this
Of course. But that problem has been solved [pics.me.me]
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Hey that's a great idea! Why didn't I come up with that?
Re: I wonder... (Score:2)
Oh, haven't you heard? We're going to harvest the methane coming from Citrus Caligula's mouth...
OAC/Palin -- constant source of humor (Score:2)
Sheesh, the obsession with OAC is growing day by day. I thought you were going to show a solar panel.
Just like the obsession with Palin. Both are a constant source of humor. Like most people on the two political extremes that substitute wishful imaginary thinking for science and engineering.
Yes, it requires energy (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if it needs energy to do this, an amount of energy greater then the energy produced by burning it in the first place?
If so, why not just use that energy instead? Cut out the middle man.
I read through the paper when the article appeared in the firehose.
Yes, this method uses electrochemical decomposition to change CO2 into various forms of carbon. It essentially undoes the action of burning, and for that you have to replace the energy you got out when the carbon was originally burned.
CO2 is very stable and difficult to decompose - typical methods are inefficient. There are metal catalysts such as Cerium that bring the efficiency up nearer to the Faraday limit, but they tend to get oxidized during the process.
The paper talks about dissolving Cerium metal nanoparticles in molten Gallium at largely room temperature and using that as one electrode in electrochemical deposition against CO2 dissolved in dimethylformamide. The by products are carbon "chunks" that float on the surface of the mixture, and the Cerium is not oxidized because the liquid Gallium is an oxygen-free environment.
So to remove CO2 from the atmosphere you would need an awful lot of energy - the equivalent of all the energy we got from burning the CO2 in the first place. Possibly frickin' huge tracts of solar panels in an area that gets a lot of sun and little human use (Sahara desert, Utah salt flats, or similar) could capture CO2 in an automated process.
(For scale: A square of solar panels 20 miles on a side, working automated for about 100 years would be in the ball-park for reducing CO2 levels to pre-industrialized levels. With a lot of unknowns in the estimate.)
An unrelated question: Can anyone point me to a reference that tells how soluble Nitrogen is in dimethylformamide? I wanted to compare this to the solubility of CO2, and couldn't find that info anywhere.
Please post if you either a) have that information, or b) have a link that has it.
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Re: I wonder... (Score:2, Insightful)
The sun does shine and wind does blow 24/7 on our fine spheroid. Just not at every precise location all the time. The trick is to capture the energy and move it to load centers. Amazingly, this trick was solved on June 3, 1899 in Portland, Oregon with an invention called an Electric Transmission Line.
Can use excess power generation for this ... (Score:3)
I wonder if it needs energy to do this, an amount of energy greater then the energy produced by burning it in the first place?
If so, why not just use that energy instead? Cut out the middle man.
Use any excess generation capacity from renewables and nuclear. Yes nuclear, the power source that has killed fewer people than coal, oil, etc.
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Well, if it takes *less* energy to do this than it does to burn the coal, I've got a perpetual motion machine design I've got to get working on.
Even assuming that this is a relatively energy efficient process (i.e., that it doesn't use too much more energy than burning the coal released), doing this on a geoengineering scale is going to be much more costly than saving the equivalent carbon emission through conservation and efficiency. You'd need several thousand nuclear power plants to offset the emissio
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I wonder if it needs energy to do this, an amount of energy greater then the energy produced by burning it in the first place? If so, why not just use that energy instead? Cut out the middle man.
Because that doesn't make coal jobs relevant again.
Re: I wonder... (Score:2)
Carbon storage. Even if you remove the carbon from the atmosphere it has to go somewhere. Turn the old coal mines into coal vaults, and you solve that problem at least partially.
Re:I wonder... (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless the efficiency is too low and the economics don't support it. Then we would be better off building battery banks and displacing future CO2 production with renewables. Existing CO2 can be removed from the atmosphere pretty quickly by photosynthesis.
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Photosynthesis does not remove CO2 from the atmosphere, unless the total amount of biomass increases. Or, alternatively, you take the biomass, turn it into charcoal (which is no longer biomass) and then, for example, bury it, or dump it at sea. The advantage with a chemical process for doing this rather than growing trees is that the chemical process is likely not to take up much land.
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Existing CO2 can be removed from the atmosphere pretty quickly by photosynthesis.
Sure, pretty quickly to a geologist. I've heard various numbers for CO2 to return to preindustrial levels if we totally stopped today producing more through burning etc. The shortest numbers are on the order of a thousand years and most are higher.
Equally important for natural CO2 sequestration is weathering, mostly silicate weathering, which involves a natural feedback mechanism. CO2 increases, temperature goes up, rainfall increases, more weathering.
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The shortest numbers are on the order of a thousand years and most are higher.
Less than that. The data from Mauna Kea [noaa.gov] showing seasonal CO2 fluctuations suggests that the levels respond with time constants on the order of months or even weeks if the production vs absorption rates can be changed. The 'thousands of years' figures are just used to panic the scientific illiterates.
Re:I wonder... (Score:5, Informative)
So trees grow leaves and then drop them and they rot, simplified version. For sequestration, the CO2 needs to be permanently removed, not tied up short term.
Here in BC, the forests are currently releasing about 3 times the CO2 as people, rather then sequestering it. https://www.nationalobserver.c... [nationalobserver.com]
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So trees grow leaves
They also grow branches and trunks. Which fall down and rot more slowly. Or we could maximize trees' carbon sequestration and cut them down for lumber before they rot.
But in the final analysis, trees don't mater much. Phytoplankton sequester comparable amounts of CO2 to all terrestrial plants. They either get eaten or die and drop into the anaerobic depths of the sea.
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We would need to return cleared land to forest for this to work.
Of course. Let the trees grow to maturity. Clear cut the land, removing carbon in the form of cellulose. Then replant the cleared land and start the cycle over.
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Was there a measurable change when China shuttered their factories for the 2008 Beijing Olympics?
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Existing CO2 can be removed from the atmosphere pretty quickly by photosynthesis.
Yes, and the primary CO2 sinks (aka trees) get paid in sunshine and water, and don't make any noise. There's just one problem: we're killing them faster than they can grow back. [nationalgeographic.com]
From the article linked above: "If tropical deforestation were a country, according to the World Resources Institute, it would rank third in carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions, behind China and the U.S."
Re:I wonder... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, but then you raise the oxygen levels, and everybody spontaneously combusts!
The amount we are capable of changing the atmosphere composition is surprisingly small. The current makeup of the atmosphere is:
.4%
Nitrogen: 79%
Oxygen: 21%
Water vapor:
Carbon dioxide: 0.04%
Look how little CO2 there is in the atmosphere. After 200 years of pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, burning as much coal and oil as we can find, the change is smaller than a rounding error in the overall composition of the atmosphere. If we did the same thing with oxygen for decades, trying to put as much oxygen into the atmosphere as we can, after decades we'd still have 21% Oxygen in the atmosphere.
Humanity's capability to change the atmospheric composition is remarkably small (remember that when people talk about geoengineering Mars). The only reason Global Warming is even a thing is because CO2 has an outsized effect on a certain important part of the light spectrum.
Re:I wonder... (Score:4, Informative)
Re: I wonder... (Score:3)
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"Water Vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, which is why it is addressed here first. However, changes in its concentration is also considered to be a result of climate feedbacks related to the warming of the atmosphere rather than a direct result of industrialization. The feedback loop in which water is involved is critically important to projecting future climate change, but as yet is still fairly poorly measured and understood."
Kind of pathetic that with 40 years of research on global warming, we haven't made much progress in understanding this.
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I thought the idea with terraforming Mars is that we could nuke the polar caps and release a lot of CO2. We have to be much more careful with Earth; besides, nukes can't suck CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Re: I wonder... (Score:2)
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Not with that attitude it won't.
It's just a pity Venus' rotational period is so low, since it would otherwise be quite a nice target for terraforming.
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Big batteries
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I'm waiting for the announcement... (Score:2)
...of who funded this research and how many lobbyists they have.
Re: I'm waiting for the announcement... (Score:4, Informative)
You needn't wait. Look in the acknowledgments section.
https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
Supercap (Score:2)
I don't think vehicles are the best application for this proposed supercap, as i doubt it has the same power density as lipo.
But if this "coal" offer a really good power storage per dollar, you could make huge supercaps to help up with solar/wind.
Bury it in the ground ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody's going to bury coal. If we can make coal from CO2, we're going to burn it.
You wanna bet these processes exist only (Score:2)
for tax breaks?
http://content.time.com/time/m... [time.com]
not new, but better (Score:5, Informative)
Converting CO2 into a usable or sequestered state is not a new process. It requires a very large amount of energy, but is essentially 100 year old technology. To suggest it "doesn't work" is incorrect, it "works" perfectly fine and has for decades. The basic chemistry goes back before the 20th century, and biology has obviously done this for a very long time. The problem is that none of this is economical. Economical carbon dioxide reduction would be a huge step toward stabilizing the climate and would make fossil fuels obsolete. This would be true even for high energy density needs like rocket and aviation fuel. (This is a bit of a fantasy, because "economical" is a very hard thing to pin down.)
So far, attempts to lower the cost have failed, and the part that needs the most help is the initial reduction of CO2. There are a lot of approaches to this, including engineering the enzyme RuBisCO (the main way biology reduces CO2), and looking for better chemical catalysts. The big deal with the paper here is demonstration of a better chemical catalyst.
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It's hundreds of millions of years old technology. Let a tree grow, chop it down, bury it (and plant a new tree to replace it). Congrats, you've just sequestered carbon pulled out of the atmosphere.
The only reason to convert it into coal first would be to prevent bio-degradation. But there are probably other less energy-intensive ways to accompli
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Trees are very inefficient at converting sunlight to carbon. Also, burying the tree whole means your extracting nutrients from the soil, so you would need to compensate that with fertilizer.
It would be much more efficient to reduce amount of coal mined, and replace it with energy source that generates less carbon.
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Trees are very inefficient at converting sunlight to carbon.
Since the tree is using free energy, it's still a mostly free process. I don't think it matters much that in theory, you could have grown 10 trees with that much energy and a more efficient process.
That being said, bright sparks are busy trying to figure out ways to make photosynthesis more efficient. I can't wait to see the GND vs. anti-GMO factions battle that one out.
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Obligatory (Score:2)
https://dilbert.com/strip/2019... [dilbert.com]
Why convert it? (Score:2)
This has bipartisan potential (Score:5, Funny)
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"That sounds great guys, and when we burn it again we can just make more, right?"
"Uh, actually, Obama wanted to burn it, but we can do better than that Mr. President, we can - uh - turn it into special bricks - special underground bricks - that we can build an underground wall to stop the Mexicans building tunnels into the US."
Round peg meets round hole. (Score:2)
This is a great solution to "what do we do with captured carbon". Sure, you can inject a ton of CO2 into the ground... but can you do that for a thousand tons.. how about a million, a billion, a trillion? What this does is turn CO2 into something that can easily be stored without the need for special equipment. You could literally just flood depleted coal mines with the stuff and leave it.
The other thing this does is allow us to put a definitive cost on capturing and sequestering CO2. The sane response
Re:Round peg meets round hole. (Score:4, Interesting)
You could literally just flood depleted coal mines with the stuff and leave it.
. . . and what's even more . . . we can hire unemployed coal miners to bury it!
Clearly a win-win on all fronts!
"I used to be a coal miner . . . now I am a coal bury-er!"
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And when everyone is taxed for their CO2 output, coal will be completely non-viable option for energy generation. Check the last line of my post which addresses this.
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You could literally just flood depleted coal mines with the stuff and leave it.
Right, a free source of energy that greedy people are just supposed to "leave".
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Right, a free source of energy that greedy people are just supposed to "leave".
Reading is fundamental.
"B-b-b-but other countries pollute too!" but knowing the monetary cost of the damage they are doing will allow all countries to tax imports based on their originating country. As such, they will either end up paying for the pollution and/or lose to competing environmentally friendly nations.
If you don't understand why this concept would prevent such actions then I don't think anyone can help you.
Just like all the "miracle batteries" (Score:2)
I.e. almost never pans out due to cost, scalability and other problems. I do think this is a serious form of scientific misconduct: Misleading the public about what something can actually realistically be expected to do.
no "breakthrough" (Score:2)
another energy intensive way to break CO2... whoop die do, that's been done in various ways for over a century. This is not a solution to anything. A doable way to keep internal combustion and reduce CO2 emissions is to go to biofuel. Also to seed the ocean to make more plankton, nature does the CO2 to calcium carbonate very well.
Out of thin air (Score:2)
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No. You need fairly thick air.
Is the reaction reversible? (Score:2)
Can it efficiently turn coal directly into electricity and CO2? That would acrually be more useful.
Worthless (Score:2)
But take it one step further and create a diamond from that lump of coal you just created and you just made yourself a gazillionaire.
Carbon Black (Score:2)
The best use of this technology might be lower cost carbon-black dye.
Coal isn't carbon. It's hydrocarbon. (Score:2)
The normal stoichiometric equation for hydrocarbon combustion is:
CxHy + (x + y/4)O2 --> xCO2 + (y/2)H20.
As you see, you get a significant energy contribution by oxidizing the hydrogen. Graphite can be made to burn, but only with considerable preheating; it does not burn energetically.
Nuclear power at Yucca mountain (Score:3)
Put a number of nuclear plants in the Nevada desert, right by Yucca mountain, where waste in theory can be stored for a long time. Manufacturer coal, and ship it where needed, while extracting CO2 from the air. Unlike most nuclear plants, where you want near the end user to reduce transmission delay, this would resolve several issues surrounding nuclear power, including the NIMBY problem.
Trump administration now confused (Score:3)
Scientists Turn CO2 'Back Into Coal'
Trump's new National Security climate council head William Happer [wikipedia.org] has long said increased CO2 is "good for humans and the planet" [bloomberg.com] and would like to have more CO2 *but* Trump's new EPA head Andrew Wheeler [wikipedia.org] is a former coal lobbyist and would like to have more coal.
Too much bandwidth, too little real news. (Score:3)
When I was a kid, we had three major TV networks in the U.S. with well respected news services, radio, and news magazines like Time and Newsweek. Technical geeky stuff was in professional or industry journals that you could read at the library if you were so inclined. Now, we have personal and network technologies that allow anyone to be their own self appointed news outlet. For a moment, discount the fraud and fake news, hostile state actors and propaganda, and any other self serving self interest group that abuses the internet for stupid or evil purposes. Instead, just think about those channels or outlets that aspire to be honest outlets for legitimate even if trivial news. There are so many that the capacity exceeds supply. Radio, TV, print news, and internet blogs cannot permit "dead air", so you go to press with whatever nonsense you can muster up on a slow news day.
The consequence is that non-technical non-professional general interest sites for public consumption are "reporting" on anything they can get their hands on, with what seems to be juvenile "uncooked" editorial oversight. Stories like this one would never have made it to public reporting in the past. The chemistry that the authors did is wonderful (follow the second link in the post), and it adds to a body of knowledge, but so what? For anyone interested in an "efficient" catalysis of CO2 -> C + O2, they know where to look up this kind of research. But the reason it got reported on (the first link) is solely because CO2 and the environment are hot topics, not because of the inherent value or game changing nature of that research.
As evidenced by the posts so far, everyone here on Slashdot immediately recognized that this would be untenable for large scale CO2 sequestration - it uses too much energy, spending two bucks to make one so to speak. This chemistry could be useful for instance in some sort of closed circuit biological respiratory gas system, such as on space stations or on the moon where abundant sunlight could power the process on more modest scales. However, the public media reporting implies that here is a potential solution to global warming and greenhouse gas effects. It is foolish reporting. It provides scant (none) of technical information for people who know enough to ask. It does not use it as a jump off point for insightful discussions about realistic versus pie-in-the-sky versus miss-the-mark technologies. It just gives public notice of a paper they found in a technical journal, the reporting written at a 3rd grade level with a comprehension level below that. It is a sorry excuse for legitimate reporting, it assumes that the readership is dumb, it betrays that the reporters and editors (if we dare call them that) are even dumber, and that writing infantile gibberish is a form of prostitution to make money by selling ads no matter how bad the report or the product advertised.
The researchers' paper is good, and they do not make arrogant or preposterous claims, focusing mainly on the chemistry and potential use of the generated carbon to be used as capacitors. To me, it seems to serve no purpose or bring any value to society for The Independent to write about this in a context other than what the researchers intended. Reporting on STEM subjects ought to respect the material, the spirit of knowledge and academia, the intellect of the scientists, and especially the intellect of the public that wants to read about it, rather than turning out drivel of no more scholarly or literary value than a kindergarten Valentine's card.
I wonder even more (Score:2)
Yea yea I know. Ferns and moss. But a guy's gotta dream a little.
Mutter, der Mann mit dem Koks ist da... (Score:2)
Man nehme eine einfache Rezeptur
Und aus Koks wird wieder Kohle
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Let's hope it will be "almost none" of this stuff that works in the real world pr we are really, really screwed. I do think these grand claims are scientific misconduct though, because it is essentially lies by misdirection. Not acceptable. I think this should get their funding cancelled and, if repeated, their PhDs removed for grossly damaging the reputation of their field.
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You're insane. A synthetic way to store energy in carbon bonds that uses CO2 is the holy grail of battery technology. There is quite literally no other (useful) storage medium with higher energy density, other than nuclear or antimatter.
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You did not read the story. They _cannot_ store energy like a battery. They can just make coal. This is also not really the great breakthrough the story claims. For liquid hydrocarbons, this already works and prototype installations are running.
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and of course the energy requirements for electrolysis are fearsome compared to yield. Splitting water in industrial quantities wastes half the energy (ignore the tabletop beaker experiments that sometimes lose only 30%, can't do it at big scale)
The retardation that ignores basic thermodynamics always kicks in hard when people want to believe investor hyping.
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Why are we trying to stop it?
We aren't.
People are just talking about it, but at the same time, rate of CO2 production is only increasing.