Airplanes produce a lot of CO2 and greenhouse gases. This is a huge problem that is contributing to global warming, which is an important issue as the ice caps continue to melt.
Air travel constitutes 12% of travel-related CO2, but a new discovery can prevent this becoming any worse. A new catalyst has been developed that can turn CO2 into jet fuel. This achievement was documented in Nature Communications on December 22nd 2020.
The catalyst developed is a cheap , mostly powder catalyst composed of constituents such as iron. It converts CO2 into jet fuel in a single step. It works by splitting molecules of CO2 into carbon and oxygen atoms in a chamber full of hydrogen. The catalyst helps the free carbon combine with the hydrogen in the chamber- hydrocarbon is jet fuel. The leftover oxygen combines with the hydrogen to form water.
This catalyst was tested by Tiancun Xiao, a chemist at the University of Oxford. He and his team successfully used the catalyst to make jet fuel over 20 hours at 300 degrees and an air pressure of 10 times the air pressure at sea level. After the 20 hours, a third of the molecules made were jet fuel. The rest could be used to make plastics.
This is a vital step as it could provide alternatives for using up CO2 in the future to protect our environment. Hopefully it is as useful as it seems to make air travel much more environmentally friendly. CO2 from cars and other sources could also be used to make jet fuel for plane travel.