Scientist Discover How to Convert CO₂ into Powder That Can Be Stored for Decades

By John Fialka & E&E News

CLIMATEWIRE | A team of scientists from Massachusetts has developed a process to convert one of the world’s most threatening planet-warming emissions — carbon dioxide — into a powdery, harmless fuel that could be converted into clean electricity.

The breakthrough follows an almost centurylong effort to turn CO2 into a cheap, clean fuel. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology exposed CO2 to catalysts and then electrolysis that turns the gas into a powder called sodium formate, which can be safely stored for decades.

“I think we have a big break here,” said Ju Li, an MIT professor leading the research team. “I could leave 10 tons of this stuff to my granddaughter for 50 years."

Researchers have previously turned CO2 into fuels that required too much energy to make, or were difficult to store long term.

The MIT process gets closer to an ambitious dream: turning captured CO2 into a feedstock for clean fuel that replaces conventional batteries and stores electricity for months or years. That could fill gaps in the nation’s power grids as they transition from fossil fuels to intermittent solar and wind energy.

But the effort has been an uphill battle. A 2018 study called CO2 a “notoriously inert molecule;" two years later, another paper declared the invisible gas as “far more pernicious” to work with than researchers had thought.

The MIT team traces its breakthrough to November 2022. That’s when Li, who started his career as an undergraduate at China’s University of Science and Technology, went to a conference of the school’s alumni in Boston.

The 48-year-old Li met Dawei Xi, a young doctoral student in engineering at nearby Harvard University. Xi, now 27, was skeptical of the conversion efficiency of captured CO2, predicting that the team’s efforts would make a fuel that was too acidic.

“We were arguing on basic electrochemistry,” Li recalled. “He provided much valuable guidance on how to do this.”

Xi eventually joined the research team, and Li introduced him to Zhen Zhang, one of his graduate students. Xi explained that his hunch was that the MIT process would became ”acidity imbalanced,” making the product useless after a short period of time.

Within a month, the pair had identified the problem and worked out what later proved in the MIT laboratory to be a highly efficient way to convert captured CO2.

The resulting powder closely resembles a commercial product that has been safely used for years to melt ice on highways and airports. It has been stored for 2,000 hours in tanks without a hint of corrosion, Li said.

Li’s team has also designed a refrigerator-sized fuel cell that uses a liquefied version of the stored power. That could produce electricity for homes, he said, and “nothing goes into the atmosphere.”

“Think of it as artificial wood,” Li said.

Li said he is beginning discussions with commercial companies interested in the MIT process that emerged. Li’s team is also exploring ways heavy industries might use it to meet company CO2 emission reduction goals.

So what happens next?

“There is this valley of death,” Li noted, using a term scientists often use to describe the difficult process of scaling up a laboratory solution into a commercial product.

“We will need space and money," he said, "and that’s not easy to do in a university.”

Last month, Li’s team published a study in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science outlining their efficient process for converting CO2 into fuel.

“Several improvements account for the greatly improved efficiency of this process,” said Zhang, the study’s lead author. That, he said, improves the prospect of CO2 utilization for long-term energy storage.

A fuel derived from CO2, Li said, could be more promising than hydrogen and methanol for power generation. Methanol is a “toxic substance” and its leakage could cause a “health hazard," Li said, while hydrogen gas can leak from pipes and tanks, “precluding” the possibility of long-term storage.

Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2023. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.

• Tesla’s Cybertruck had a viral moment last week after it needed a rescue on a snowy hill.
• The US forest service has put out a press release saying it could be a learning experience.
• It invited Tesla executives to "sit down at the table with us and develop an educational experience for new Cybertruck owners."

Tesla’s Cybertruck had a viral moment when it needed a rescue on a snowy hill from a Ford pickup.

Ford CEO Jim Farley took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to clarify that the video of the Cybertruck’s off-roading troubles wasn’t a promotional stunt for his company.

The U.S. Forest Service, on the other hand, shared a press release on Thursday saying the viral video could be a learning experience.

Responding to the viral video, Stanislaus National Forest supervisor Jason Kuiken invited Tesla executives to "sit down at the table with us and develop an educational experience for new Cybertruck owners."

"We feel confident that had the driver of the Cybertruck had a better understanding of the topographical feature indicated on our maps, practiced Leave No Trace principles, and generally been more prepared, this whole incident could have been not only avoided, but also provided much-needed education to many new off-road users," said Kuiken.

"Ha! Nobody knows how to throw shade better than the Forest Service," one user commented on Facebook.

This isn’t the first time that Tesla’s off-road troubles have gone viral. In November, a video of a Cybertruck struggling to climb a dirt hill garnered over 8 million views.

In response, Ford CEO Jim Farley produced his own off-road demo of the Ford F-150 Lightning making its way up a very similar hill of dirt to shade the rival carmaker.

Representatives for Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, sent outside regular business hours.

As Hurricane Larry curved north in the Atlantic in 2021, sparing the eastern seaboard of the United States, a special instrument was waiting for it on the coast of Newfoundland. Because hurricanes feed on warm ocean water, scientists wondered whether such a storm could pick up microplastics from the sea surface and deposit them when it made landfall. Larry was literally a perfect storm: Because it hadn’t touched land before reaching the island, anything it dropped would have been scavenged from the water or air, as opposed to, say, a highly populated city, where you’d expect to find lots of microplastics.

As Larry passed over Newfoundland, the instrument gobbled up what fell from the sky. That included rain, of course, but also gobs of microplastics, defined as bits smaller than 5 millimeters, or about the width of a pencil eraser. At its peak, Larry was depositing over 100,000 microplastics per square meter of land per day, the researchers found in a recent paper published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment. Add hurricanes, then, to the growing list of ways that tiny plastic particles are not only infiltrating every corner of the environment, but readily moving between land, sea, and air.

As humanity churns out exponentially more plastic in general, so does the environment get contaminated with exponentially more microplastics. The predominant thinking used to be that microplastics would flush into the ocean and stay there: Washing synthetic clothing like polyester, for instance, releases millions of microfibers per load of laundry, which then flow out to sea in wastewater. But recent research has found that the seas are in fact burping the particles into the atmosphere to blow back onto land, both when waves break and when bubbles rise to the surface, flinging microplastics into sea breezes.

The instrument in a clearing on Newfoundland was quite simple: a glass cylinder, holding a little bit of ultrapure water, securely attached to the ground with wooden stakes. Every six hours before, during, and after the hurricane, the researchers would come and empty out the water, which would have collected any particles falling—both with and without rain—on Newfoundland. “It’s just a place that experiences a lot of extreme weather events,” says Earth scientist Anna Ryan of Dalhousie University, lead author of the paper. “Also, it’s fairly remote, and it’s got a pretty low population density. So you don’t have a bunch of nearby sources of microplastics.”

The team found that even before and after Larry, tens of thousands of microplastics fell per square meter of land per day. But when the hurricane hit, that figure spiked up to 113,000. “We found a lot of microplastics deposited during the peak of the hurricane,” says Ryan, “but also, overall deposition was relatively high compared to previous studies.” These studies were done during normal conditions, but in more remote locations, she says.

The researchers also used a technique known as back trajectory modeling—basically simulating where the air that arrived at the instrument had been previously. That confirmed that Larry had picked up the microplastics at sea, lofted them into the air, and dumped them on Newfoundland. Indeed, previous research has estimated that somewhere between 12 and 21 million metric tons of microplastic swirl in just the top 200 meters of the Atlantic, and that was a significant underestimate because it didn’t count microfibers. The Newfoundland study notes that Larry happened to pass over the garbage patch of the North Atlantic Gyre, where currents accumulate floating plastic.

There’s little to no evidence suggesting that “your devices are listening to you,” but that hasn’t stopped people from believing big tech is monitoring every word you say. Now, a marketing subsidiary of Cox Media Group is throwing fuel on the fire with claims that it can deploy “active listening” through your smartphone, smart TV, and other devices to target ads for its clients.

First reported by 404 Media, Cox Media Group Local Solutions plastered the theory on its website as an advertising strategy. “With Active Listening, CMG can now use voice data to target your advertising to the EXACT people you are looking for,” the company wrote.

CMG has since redirected the “Active Listening” page of its website, but you can find it on the internet archive, and it’s still listed as a strategy. The marketing company asks you to “imagine” what it would do for your business if you could target clients using specific phrases in their day-to-day conversations. “The AC is on it’s last leg!” the company uses as an example. The marketing company seems to be promoting a conspiracy theory, and privacy nightmare, that your phone’s microphone is recording everything you say and selling it to advertisers. CMG Local Solutions provides very few details on how they do this, and its claims are dubious, to say the least.

Cox Media Group and its marketing subsidiary did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.

Past research has shown very little evidence that your phone’s microphone is listening to you. There is much more conclusive evidence that the combination of your search queries, social media usage, and cookies is more than enough for advertisers to track your data and understand your life. However, CMG Local Solutions seems to be making ad deals with “active listening” as a product.

So is this legal? CMG Local Solution’s website says “YES- it is totally legal for phones and devices to listen to you. That’s because consumers usually give consent when accepting terms and conditions of software updates or app downloads.” However, the marketing company provides very few details about how the data is truly gathered or who is giving it to them, and these claims cannot be verified. Apple also lets users know if their microphone or screen is being actively recorded with a small icon on your screen, so you’d likely know if your iPhone was monitoring ambient audio.

The marketing company says they create an audience with voice data and retarget ads to users via streaming, social media, YouTube, and Google search. CMG Local Solutions says it has partnered with Google for 12 years, and lists other partners like Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon. These partners and the Federal Communications Commission did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.