A new one-two punch takes the very greenhouse gas warming our planet and transforms it into a simple fuel.

A team of materials scientists led by Shan Gao at the Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences in Hefei, China, have just developed a new material that transforms carbon dioxide gas into a simple, clean-burning fuel called formate. Using a process called electroreduction, their work requires nothing more than a modest amount of electric current. The new material is a four-atom thick sandwich of cobalt metal and cobalt-oxygen molecules. It's outlined today in the journal Nature.

"This represents a fundamental scientific breakthrough," says Karthish Manthiram, a chemical engineer at the California Institute of Technology who studies CO2 electroreduction but was not involved in the development of the new material. "Certainly it will be a years-long process before this is worked into a successful, commercial device. But at this stage of development, by all conceivable metrics, this reaction looks very positive."

"It's very rare and difficult to find a material that satisfies all three."

For decades, Manthiram says, scientists have worked on various materials that electrically catalyze CO2 into various fuels. But those materials have all run into the same problems, problem that keep them from making it out of the lab.

"One barrier has been something we call 'overpotential'—how much extra energy you need to drive this process" he says. "Basically you want to keep that wasted energy as low as possible. [But] as you bring that overpotential down, you'd find that the rate at which you turn CO2 into formate gets slower and slower." By contrast, Manthiram says, the new material has low overpotential but a high rate of formate proudction, all while remaining stable. "It's very rare and difficult to find a material that satisfies all three of those constraints," he says.

On the molecular scale, here's a simple version of how the new material works: When pulsed with electric current, the material interacts with CO2 molecules running through it. Bascially, a hydrogen atom (which has one electron and one proton) gets attached to the carbon atom of the CO2 molecule. When that happens, an extra electron is flung into one of the oxygen atoms in the carbon dioxide. With that, the CO2 becomes CHOO−, or formate.

"We need fundamental breakthroughs of just this sort."

Gao and the team found they could quickly produce a steady stream of formate by keeping their material "about 10 milliamperes per square centimeter over 40 hours, with approximately 90 percent formate selectivity at an overpotential of only 0.24 volts," they write in their Nature paper. To Manthiram, that makes the material "the best we've seen" by far, he says.

Now it's up to Gao's team and other material scientists to develop ways to fit the new material into commercial devices, which could cleanly reuse CO2 collected from existing power plants that is often simply squirreled away in empty oil wells. "But I'm very optimistic," Manthiram says. "Just five or ten years, ago [scientists in this field] assumed it might even be impossible to convert CO2 into formate with such a high rate and low overpotential," he says."We need fundamental breakthroughs of just this sort if were going to earnestly tackle problems as big as global warming."

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