Penn State Recycles CO2

October 11, 2009

High-Rate Solar Photocatalytic Conversion of CO2 and Water Vapor to Hydrocarbon Fuels - Nano Letters (ACS Publications)

We have documented that very real technologies exist which would allow us to efficiently capture the Carbon Dioxide co-product of our coal-use industries, and recycle it into useful materials. Our US Department of Defense, as you by now know, holds, through defense contractor proxies, several patents on processes that would extract CO2 from the environment and convert it into liquid fuels for Navy ships.

Some of our US National Laboratories, such as Sandia, are engaged in developing similar processes, and propose that energy for the conversion of Carbon Dioxide could be extracted from the environment, thus mimicking the photosynthetic processes of green plants..

A few of our universities are engaged in similar developments, as the enclosed, very recent, article, from Penn State University, will attest.

The excerpt:

"High-Rate Solar Photocatalytic Conversion of CO2 and Water Vapor to Hydrocarbon Fuels

Oomman K. Varghese, Maggie Paulose, Thomas J. LaTempa and Craig A. Grimes

[Unable to display image]Department of Electrical Engineering, Materials Research Institute, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802

Nano Lett., 2009, 9 (2), pp 731–737

DOI: 10.1021/nl803258p

Publication Date (Web): January 27, 2009

Efficient solar conversion of carbon dioxide and water vapor to methane and other hydrocarbons is achieved using nitrogen-doped titania nanotube arrays, with a wall thickness low enough to facilitate effective carrier transfer to the adsorbing species, surface-loaded with nanodimensional islands of cocatalysts platinum and/or copper. All experiments are conducted in outdoor sunlight at University Park, PA. Intermediate reaction products, hydrogen and carbon monoxide, are also detected with their relative concentrations underlying hydrocarbon production rates and dependent upon the nature of the cocatalysts on the nanotube array surface. Using outdoor global AM 1.5 sunlight, 100 mW/cm2, a hydrocarbon production rate of 111 ppm cm−2 h−1, or ≈160 μL/(g h), is obtained when the nanotube array samples are loaded with both Cu and Pt nanoparticles. This rate of CO2 to hydrocarbon production obtained under outdoor sunlight is at least 20 times higher than previous published reports, which were conducted under laboratory conditions using UV illumination."

So, using sunlight only, Penn State was able to achieve "efficient ... conversion of carbon dioxide and water vapor to methane and other hydrocarbons".

And, using environmental energy, "sunlight", they were able to achieve hydrocarbon production, from CO2 and water vapor, that was "at least 20 times higher than ...under laboratory conditions".

So, our simple green plants got it right several billion years ago. Too bad it's taken all our craniums this long to figure it out.

In any case, this Penn State research, Sandia National Laboratory's work, Sabatier's Nobel Prize achievement, and the USDOD patents are not, as we will document in future dispatches, the only evidence that Carbon Dioxide, as arises from our use of coal, is a valuable raw material resource, which our coal-use industries, by lucky happenstance, create as a by-product. We can convert Carbon Dioxide in "efficient" ways into "methane and other hydrocarbons".

Those "other hydrocarbons" do include, as we will further document in even more submissions, liquid fuels.