Can Clean Energy Be Made From CO2?

What if we could take all that carbon dioxide that we have too much of and turn it into a clean energy source? Sound far-fetched? Well, it isn’t really. After all, plants do it every day. That is much of the rationale behind biofuels. Let the plants store the solar energy as sugars, starches, etc., which we then convert into things that our machinery can use (e.g. ethanol, bio-diesel).

But handling all that biomass is heavy, unwieldy and messy. What if we could skip all that and just create a fuel from CO2, using sunlight to power the process, but without relying on biological processes?

That is the idea behind Liquid Light, a company that “develops electrocatalytic technology to make major chemicals from low-cost, globally abundant carbon dioxide (CO₂).  The company has over 100 patents for producing chemicals including ethylene glycol, propylene, isopropanol, methyl-methacrylate and acetic acid using carbon dioxide as a feedstock in a low-energy conversion process. The process takes in CO2, combines it with another medium which could be water, natural gas or smokestack effluents, and, using any type of energy source, produces these various chemicals.

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RP Siegel, author and inventor, shines a powerful light on numerous environmental and technological topics. He has been published in business and technical journals and has written three books. His third, co-authored with Roger Saillant, is Vapor Trails, an eco-thriller that is being adapted for the big screen. RP is a professional engineer – and a prolific inventor, with 50 patents, numerous awards, and several commercial products. He is president of Rain Mountain LLC and is an active environmental advocate in his hometown of Rochester, N.Y. In addition to Justmeans, he writes for Triple Pundit, ThomasNet News, and Energy Viewpoints, occasionally contributing to Mechanical Engineering, Strategy + Business, and Huffington Post. You can follow RP on Twitter, @RPSiegel.