In the category of things that sound so good they have to be checked out more thoroughly (so stay tuned) is this news out of Los Alamos National Laboratory:

Scientists there say they have developed a way to produce truly carbon-neutral fuel and useful organic chemicals at large scale using water and carbon dioxide removed from the air as raw materials. There are plenty of schemes brewing to capture carbon dioxide, both directly from the atmosphere and from the stacks of power plants. All of them, for the moment, are costly or hard to envision at the billion-tons-a-year scale that would be needed to blunt the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere coming mainly from fuel burning.



UPDATE: 2/13, 5 p.m.: This plan has a minor hurdle, too; the electricity for driving the chemical processes, according to a white paper describing the overarching concept, would come from nuclear power. The proposal says it’d be worth it to have a payoff of steady, secure streams of methanol and gasoline with no carbon added to the atmosphere (and a price for gasoline at the pump of perhaps $4.60 a gallon — comparable to petroleum-based fuels as oil becomes harder to find).

At least one process for using CO2 to make fuel, developed by a team led by George A. Olah, a Nobel laureate at the University of Southern California, bears some resemblance to the fuel-generating part of the Los Alamos proposal.

One selling point with Los Alamos’s “Green Freedom” concept, and similar ones, is that reusing the carbon atoms in the captured CO2 molecules as a fuel ingredient avoids the need to find huge repositories for the greenhouse gas. The lab’s researchers, led by F. Jeffrey Martin, say their system could process vast volumes of air using existing giant structures like the cooling towers at nuclear power plants. No need to chop down rain forests or compete with food crops to grow carbon-grabbing fuel crops like corn or switchgrass.

Roger A. Pielke Jr., a political scientist and blogger at the University of Colorado, has written for several years about the air-capture idea (and about why it hasn’t gotten equal billing with options like biofuels).

Details on the Los Alamos approach will come next week when Dr. Martin gives a presentation at a government and industry meeting, Alternative Energy Now, in Lake Buena Vista, Fla. The conference, held at a resort for military personnel, is sponsored mainly by the U.S. Air Force.

The Defense Department has been aggressively studying ways to provide secure sources of the vast amounts of fuel necessary to wage war even as oil dwindles and without the potential climate impact of turning coal into liquids. My colleague Ken Chang, who has written on other concepts for capturing CO2 from the air, is checking this one out.

As described in a news release by Mr. Martin, it sounds like a possible candidate for Richard Branson’s $25 million carbon-capturing prize:

“Our concept enhances U.S. energy and material security by reducing dependence on imported oil. Initial system and economic analyses indicate that the prices of Green Freedom commodities would be either comparable to the current market or competitive with those of other carbon-neutral, alternative technologies currently being considered.”

The release added: “The concept’s viability has been reviewed and verified by both industrial and semi-independent Los Alamos National Laboratory technical reviews. The next phase will demonstrate the new electrochemical process to prove the ability of the system to both capture carbon dioxide and pull it back out of solution. An industrial partnership consortium will be formed to commercialize the Green Freedom concept.”

Other researchers, at Columbia University, have conceived of similar systems that would use solar-thermal plants to drive the process.

There are many experts who doubt that nuclear plants — whether directly generating electricity or, in this case, making fuel — can play a significant role providing abundant energy in a carbon-constrained world, mainly because it takes so long to finance and build the structures. There are several articles touching on the nuclear question in our ongoing Energy Challenge series. Just go to www.nytimes.com/energychallenge and scroll your way down the long list.