- The Guild of Scientific Troubadours - https://guildofscientifictroubadours.com -

Making Oil Out of Thin Air.

That’s what they’re doing at Los Alamos National Laboratory, according to the New York Times. Zap CO2 and H2O from the atmosphere with electricity and the air itself becomes petroleum [1]:

This plan has a minor hurdle, too; the electricity for driving the chemical processes, according to a white paper describing the overarching concept, would come from nuclear power. The proposal says it’d be worth it to have a payoff of steady, secure streams of methanol and gasoline with no carbon added to the atmosphere (and a price for gasoline at the pump of perhaps $4.60 a gallon — comparable to petroleum-based fuels as oil becomes harder to find).

I suppose a benefit is that it’s removing greenhouse gases, too – by turning them back into fuel.