Carbon dioxide or C02 is the great villain of modern times , a chemical compound that is on everyone’s lips and that calls into question the future of our descendants. Environmentalists, experts and politicians are trying by all means to reduce the emissions of this gas from the burning of fossil fuels, although there is also an alternative solution: capture it or “sequester it” (as they say in scientific jargon) and then recycle it as an energy source .
The basic idea is to imitate plants, capable of converting C02 into energetic sugars . To carry out this complex transformation, plants use enzymes as catalyst substances, that is, with the property of accelerating chemical reactions. Now, a group of researchers from the Argonne National Laboratory has presented their own C02 sequestration and recycling technique based on a metallic compound called tungsten-diselenido .
With this catalyst, scientists from the American center have managed to convert C02 into carbon monoxide, which, although it is also a greenhouse gas, can then easily be transformed into fuels such as methanol .
“Trees obtain energy from light, water and carbon dioxide to make their fuel. In our experiment, the ingredients are the same, although the product is different,” explained Larry Curtiss, one of the authors of the work. The objective is to build artificial leaves coated with tungsten-diselenide nanocopes that reproduce the chemical reactions of plant photosynthesis and that, from light, water and carbon dioxide, manufacture carbon monoxide. The study has been published by the journal Science .
