California Recycles CO2

In a new approach, researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have genetically modified a cyanobacterium to consume carbon dioxide and produce the liquid fuel isobutanol, which holds great potential as a gasoline alternative. The reaction is powered directly by energy from sunlight, through photosynthesis.

This new method has two advantages for the long-term, global-scale goal of achieving a cleaner and greener energy economy, the researchers say. First, it recycles carbon dioxide, reducing greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the burning of fossil fuels. Second, it uses solar energy to convert the carbon dioxide into a liquid fuel that can be used in the existing energy structure, including in most automobiles.

While other alternatives to gasoline include deriving biofuels from plants or from algae, both of these processes require several intermediate steps before refinement into usable fuels.

Using the cyanobacterium Synechoccus elongatus, researchers ... engineer(ed) a strain that intakes carbon dioxide and sunlight and produces isobutyraldehyde gas (which is) easily be stripped from the system.

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First of all, the gas can be readily converted into the liquid alcohol, isobutanol, which, like methanol, can  itself be used as a liquid fuel, or, again like methanol, be further converted into gasoline. Some web references indicate, we submit without citation, that commercial gasoline, which is a blend of hydrocarbons, typically contains a lot of petroleum-based isobutanol, in any case.

Second, unlike ethanol, isobutanol, without or without converting or blending into gasoline, "can be used in the existing energy structure, including in most automobiles". Not to mention the fact that the production of ethanol, from food crops and agricultural wastes, generates a lot of CO2 in the initial fermentation required by the process.

Third, we can make this useful liquid fuel, and make it directly "next to existing power plants that emit carbon dioxide".

Carbon Dioxide is a resource, and a renewable one; a valuable co-product of our coal-use industries.

We should set our sights, like these UCLA researchers, on figuring out how to use it more profitably, rather than on how to, at great and unrecoverable expense, stuff it all down leaky geologic storage rat holes.