"In the hydrogen economy, automobiles would be powered by the simplest element on the periodic table, leveraging the element's abundance. But as the Hindenburg disaster demonstrated, hydrogen is the also most difficult element to compress into a safe, usable form. Why not instead synthesize a hydrocarbon-based fuel, such as methanol or even gasoline?"
"Sandia National Laboratories is building such a fuel synthesizer in a bid to create renewable synthetic fuel by combining the CO2 with water."
It "harnesses sunlight to reverse the process of combustion."
""Rather than make hydrogen to use in fuel cells, we think it might make more sense to make a synthetic fuel that is already compatible with our existing [gasoline engine] infrastructure," said Rich Diver, inventor of the Counter Rotating Ring Receiver Reactor Recuperator (CR5). "Others are working on ways to make liquid synthetic fuels from natural gas, but we are going back a step further and looking at ways of thermochemically making the precursors for synthetic fuel using solar energy, carbon dioxide and water.""
"Planet cleaner"
Unbelievable as it sounds, Diver claims that his solar-powered reactor could help clean up the planet by making internal combustion a reversible process. His team calls the project Sunshine to Petrol (S2P) and the envisioned synthesized product Liquid Solar Fuel."
"Combining hydrogen and carbon monoxide (extracted via solar power from Carbon Dioxide) gives you a fuel which you can use similarly to natural gas; and using a few chemical processing steps, you can make methanol and other liquid fuels that you can burn in engines designed for gasoline ..."
Thus, full use of our coal resources, to generate electricity and to synthesize liquid fuels and useful organic chemicals, would generate valuable raw materials, such as Carbon Dioxide, which we can then use to make even more liquid fuel and more organic chemical industry feedstocks.