Carbon neutral gas burning cars?

Articles — By forcechange on February 21, 2008 2:30 am

This could be the future if two scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory are correct. They have recently expanded on a previously suggested technology whereby regular air would be taken and blown across a chemical mixture of potassium carbonate which would then absorb the CO2 from the air. The harvested CO2 would then be put through a series of chemical reactions which would ultimately turn it into fuel that could then be used to power car or jet engines. This gasoline would basically be the same as that derived from drilled oil.

However, unlike the current method of drilling for oil, with this new method, all of a car’s emissions would be directly offset by the CO2 that was harvested in its creation, thereby making the fuel truly carbon neutral.

Unfortunately, as the New York Times notes, this technology is still in the purely theoretical stage and even once pursued would still require an enormous amount of energy just to power this harvesting and conversion process. Therefore, in order to not completely destroy any carbon savings gained, the process would have to be powered by a alternative energy method, such as wind, solar or nuclear.

It seems clear to us that while this technology may someday be adopted, the current state of alternative power plants is probably the biggest barrier in the near future. Wind and solar are still not self-sufficient to the point where they can be counted on for truly widespread production, and nuclear, of course, comes with its own set of potential environmental nightmares.

While we are skeptical of solutions that have a lot of hype, without proven real world results, this proposal still sounds intriguing at the very least.

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