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With respect to environmental resources, atmospheric carbon is the cornerstone of crime. And as in comics, every time we think we have the means to lock it for good, it escapes us.
We need something cheap. Scalable. Something that can hope to extract enough carbon from the atmosphere to really make a difference. Well, a new technique of Australian scientists might be what we were looking for.
Researchers at RMIT University in Melbourne have developed a technology that converts carbon dioxide into essentially pure soot particles.
Restoring the carbon cycle to greenhouse gases and finding a way to bring them back to the ground was a dream for scientists since we discovered the threat of global warming.
We have developed a long list of ways to sequester carbon, from the growth and burial of biomass to the pumping of gas in underground reservoirs to accelerate the chemical reactions that can transform CO2 into a less volatile material. .
Some are cheap, but relatively slow. Others just do not offer enough incentive to big polluters for them to pay attention to it, or risk releasing carbon much too easily.
The end result is that we really should not expect negative emissions to solve our carbon crisis.
Nevertheless, progress has been made in recent years, which makes us optimistic that we could move closer to an environmental solution.
The new technique developed in Australia is not only relatively fast, it does not require huge pressures (or complex chemical reactions) to turn carbon dioxide into a solid form that can be locked up again. .
The trick concerns cerium nanoparticles, which plays a vital role in an electrochemical reaction that involves extracting oxygen from carbon dioxide under low voltage.
The suspension of the nanoparticles in the form of a liquid metal alloy prevents the accumulation of solidified carbon on the cerium, thus improving the efficiency of the process.
Better still, the use of the metal gallium as a solvent means that the whole process can proceed at room temperature, given the remarkably low melting point of the element.
"Until now, CO2 had only been converted to a solid at extremely high temperatures, which made it unsustainable at the industrial level," says RMIT's physicist chemist Torben. Daeneke.
"By using liquid metals as a catalyst, we have shown that it is possible to reconvert the gas to carbon at room temperature, in an efficient and scalable process."
It is this evolution that risks lowering emissions. But there is another result that could also give this process an advantage over other similar methods; its product is not necessarily intended for the ground.
"One of the benefits of the process is that carbon can hold an electrical charge and become a supercapacitor so it could be used as a component in future vehicles," said lead author and engineer Dorna Esrafilzadeh. .
"The process also produces synthetic fuel as a by-product, which could also have industrial applications."
Carbon-based products such as graphene could revolutionize the future of electronics, not only as a supercapacitor, but also as a superconductor.
Even if only a fraction of the hype is achieved, a carbon-based materials industry could be worth a lot of dollars in the future.
It quickly becomes clear that economic incentives pose as many problems to solve our environmental problems as any technological challenge.
Whether it's extracting plastic from our oceans or carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the path to success must be paved with gold.
"Although it is necessary to continue the research, it is a crucial first step to ensure solid carbon storage," Daeneke said.
This research was published in Nature Communications.
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