Carbon capture and storage or reuse is gaining traction amid intensifying efforts to curb the effect of climate change on the planet. Now, a Swiss-Norwegian team of researchers has gone a bold step further: they are proposing using CO2 as fuel in the production of methanol, to be used as an energy source instead of fossil fuel derivatives. In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, the team details their idea as follows: “We propose a combination of largely existing technologies to use solar energy to recycle atmospheric CO2 into a liquid fuel. Our concept is clusters of marine-based floating islands, on which photovoltaic cells convert sunlight into electrical energy to produce H2 and to extract CO2 from seawater, where it is in equilibrium with the atmosphere. These gases are then reacted to form the energy carrier methanol, which is […]