News Digest

Car parts and batteries plucked out of air polluted with greenhouse gas

It is possible to make something valuable out of thin – or at least heavily polluted - air after all, it seems. Sounds unlikely? It is and it has been promised before but scientists in the U.S. claim they have found a way to use carbon dioxide particles in the air and turn them into carbon nanofibres, an expensive material used in products such as batteries and car components. Their solar-powered system runs just a few volts of electricity through a vat full of a hot, molten salt; CO2 is absorbed and the nanofibres gradually assemble at one of the electrodes. It currently produces 10g in an hour and costs just $1,000 to produce one tonne of nanofibre, worth about 25 times as much. Although it has only been done on a small scale in the lab, researcher Prof Stuart Licht, of George Washington University, insisted: “It scales up very easily - the entire process is quite low energy.“

There aren’t any catches; there’s a necessity to work together, to test this on a larger scale, to apply some societal resources to do that

Researcher Prof Stuart Licht

Prof Licht unveiled his research at the autumn meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston. His efforts impressed guests at the gathering but sceptics remain doubtful it will be possible to pull it off on an industrial scale. Dr Paul Fennell, a chemical engineer and clean energy researcher at Imperial College London, said: "If they can make carbon nanofibres, that is a laudable aim and they’re a worthwhile product to have. But if your idea is to take CO2 out of the atmosphere and produce so many carbon nanofibres that you make a difference to climate change - I’d be extremely surprised if you could do that.”