Solar-powered chemistry can be used to turn carbon dioxide, water into fuels  

According to an International study it is proved that solar-powered synthesis gas could reprocess carbon dioxide into fuels and useful chemicals.

They have found that if we can generate syngas from carbon dioxide using solar energy, then we can use it to recycle and develop methanol and other chemicals and fuels. As a result of which overall CO2 emissions can be reduced.

Syngas mainly gets derived from heavy oils with the help of electricity and it is mainly composed of hydrogen and carbon monoxide with a little methane. The toxic chemicals are often mixed to make the process more efficient.

To create a process that uses only solar energy, the research group overcame the difficulty of splitting carbon dioxide molecules, which are among the most stable in the universe. For this, they peppered a forest of semiconductor nanowires with nanoparticles.

Those nanoparticles, made of gold coated with chromium oxide, attracted the carbon dioxide molecules and bent them, weakening the bonds between the carbon and oxygen.

The gallium nitride nanowires used the light energy to free electrons and the positively charged spaces they leave behind, known as holes. The holes split water molecules, separating the protons (hydrogen) from the oxygen. Then, at the metal catalysts, the electrons split the carbon dioxide, producing carbon monoxide and sometimes drawing in the free hydrogen to make methane. Processes are under development to separate the oxygen from the other gases.

The technology developed by these researchers sheds light on how to build distributed syngas production from air, water and sunlight.

By changing the ratio of gold to chromium oxide in the nanoparticles, the research team was able to control the relative amounts of hydrogen and carbon monoxide produced in the reaction. This is important because the ratio of hydrogen to carbon monoxide affects how easy it is to produce a type of fuel or chemical.

The research found a surprising is the synergy between gold and chromium oxide to make the CO2 reduction to syngas efficient and tunable, which was not possible with a single metal catalyst. This has opened up many exciting opportunities that were not previously considered.

The tunable syngas setup uses standard industrial manufacturing processes, and is scalable.

The next objective of the research team is to increase the efficiency of the device, which currently stands at 0.89%. When 10% of the light energy is converted to chemical energy, the technology could be adopted for renewable energy, similar to solar cells.