Herein we introduce the work of Professor James Economy, and his research group, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
The title of the link might be a little misleading, as it seems to focus attention on fuel cells as the end use of recycled Carbon Dioxide. As it happens, they are but one possibility.
Some excerpts:
"The underlying goal behind UIUC CO2 Sequestration and Utilization Project is to capture CO2 in an efficient manner from the effluent of a power plant and convert it into a useful fuel source using the power plant's own waste heat.
Our unique approach employs microelectrochemical cells which utilize the waste heat of the power plant to reduce the energy of conversion. The captured Carbon Dioxide from the waste stream is first converted to formic acid which could be further converted to methanol for utilization in a fuel cell or storage and retail in the commercial markets."
We have previously cited references attesting to the potential for converting CO2 into formic acid, which, according to some of those other sources, can itself be used in fuel cell applications. It can also, as noted by the intriguingly and appropriately-named Dr. Economy, be converted into the versatile liquid fuel, and gasoline and plastics synthesis raw material, Methanol.
The good doctor lives up to his name by indicating something that should be, or should have been, obvious to everyone whose driven past a coal-fired power plant - all of us, in other words: Those plants make a lot of "waste" heat; that's why they have cooling towers. So, why not make use of that extra thermal energy by employing it to capture the emitted Carbon Dioxide, and to drive it's catalysis into formic acid and then into Methanol liquid fuel?
Is that something that just makes too much sense, or is it too obvious to have been thought of by those of us raised in coal country, who have spent lifetimes driving by coal plant cooling towers with huge plumes of wasted energy billowing out of them?
We can, in other words, use waste products, i.e. CO2, and otherwise wasted energy arising from our coal use to manufacture liquid fuel.
Doesn't that make one heck of a lot more sense than trying, through Cap & Trade and sequestration schemes, to bury a potentially-valuable raw material and tax the producers of it out of existence?