Making CO2 Useful

Carbon dioxide is often referred to as a waste gas as a by product of breathing. It is also associated with rising temperature levels globally and also has negative connotations as the by product of fossil fuel burning. In short, while plants may need carbon dioxide to make food, we humans are not very fond of it per se.

On the other hand if it is reduced to carbon monoxide it is seen as a building block for a number of other chemical components including renewable fuel. Imagine if you could take the CO2 and remove one oxygen molecule and make it CO with the least bit of effort, you could be sitting on a very useful process indeed.

The department of engineering at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is working on a science project which incorporates molecules of porphyrin CO2 catalysts into a crystal of covalent organic frameworks that absorb carbon dioxide and even reduces it to carbon monoxide.

Christopher Chang, a chemist with Berkeley Lab’s Chemical Sciences Division said that “To date, such porous materials have mainly been used for carbon capture and separation, but in showing they can also be used for carbon dioxide catalysis, our results open up a huge range of potential applications in catalysis and energy.” What specific science projects this will be used in, only time can tell.