This is about the apparent work of a Finnish researcher to come up with a scalable way to produce fuel from air such that it can be done locally. Think gas stations producing their own gas. Right now this would be relatively expensive because of energy cost but as those drop and the technology is improved, that cost can go down.
Stuff like this not surprising for anyone that has followed news around renewables lately and a very cool side effect of the fact that renewable energy prices have been dropping exponentially for quite some time now combined with the fact that the cost of lots interesting chemical processes are primarily driven by how much energy is required. As energy becomes cheaper, those chemical processes become more feasible and the demand for more energy causes people to invest in making that cheaper further. The same economic dynamic that is causing us to destroy our planet is also producing the solutions for saving it.
For example, producing clean water is a trivial process if you have cheap energy. This is why desalination plants are popping up in lots of places where clean water is scarce and they tend to be paired with wind/solar plants. You can also produce fuels out of water and the resulting fuels, whether it is hydrogen or hydrogen peroxide, are useful ways of storing energy.
Oil is a scarce resource that is hard to procure and therefore relatively expensive. If there's an energy intensive way to produce oil from CO2, that's great news because that means it's just a matter of time before the price of that energy drops enough to make that worthwhile.
Things like this can go from being too expensive to only slightly more expensive to being magnitudes cheaper in the near future.
What I love about this is that climate change can be countered with simple economics rather than idealism. Once we stop pumping new co2 in the atmosphere for cost reasons because we found a more cost effective way to just suck it from the atmosphere, nature will do it's thing and help us revert the effects of the past centuries. We don't actually need to actively clean up the atmosphere, our planet is fully capable of doing that by itself given enough time.
Also worth pointing out that oil is used for more than just fuel. So, stuff like this is relevant even if we switch to electric vehicles. We still need to produce plastics and other materials. All of that can in principle be done with co2 harvested straight from the air as well.
This is about the apparent work of a Finnish researcher to come up with a scalable way to produce fuel from air such that it can be done locally. Think gas stations producing their own gas. Right now this would be relatively expensive because of energy cost but as those drop and the technology is improved, that cost can go down.
Stuff like this not surprising for anyone that has followed news around renewables lately and a very cool side effect of the fact that renewable energy prices have been dropping exponentially for quite some time now combined with the fact that the cost of lots interesting chemical processes are primarily driven by how much energy is required. As energy becomes cheaper, those chemical processes become more feasible and the demand for more energy causes people to invest in making that cheaper further. The same economic dynamic that is causing us to destroy our planet is also producing the solutions for saving it.
For example, producing clean water is a trivial process if you have cheap energy. This is why desalination plants are popping up in lots of places where clean water is scarce and they tend to be paired with wind/solar plants. You can also produce fuels out of water and the resulting fuels, whether it is hydrogen or hydrogen peroxide, are useful ways of storing energy.
Oil is a scarce resource that is hard to procure and therefore relatively expensive. If there's an energy intensive way to produce oil from CO2, that's great news because that means it's just a matter of time before the price of that energy drops enough to make that worthwhile.
Things like this can go from being too expensive to only slightly more expensive to being magnitudes cheaper in the near future.
What I love about this is that climate change can be countered with simple economics rather than idealism. Once we stop pumping new co2 in the atmosphere for cost reasons because we found a more cost effective way to just suck it from the atmosphere, nature will do it's thing and help us revert the effects of the past centuries. We don't actually need to actively clean up the atmosphere, our planet is fully capable of doing that by itself given enough time.
Also worth pointing out that oil is used for more than just fuel. So, stuff like this is relevant even if we switch to electric vehicles. We still need to produce plastics and other materials. All of that can in principle be done with co2 harvested straight from the air as well.