Experiments show that CO2 can be turned into coal

Scientists have been studying a way to turn CO2 into coal, and we can say that these studies, even at an early stage, are already being analyzed for large-scale implementation. Researchers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University in Australia use liquid metal and electricity to do this magic, if we can call it that. Dissolved CO2 eventually turns into solid carbon flakes. It can also be used in combination with new machines that suck CO2 from the atmosphere.

The trend is increasingly that our energy landscape is shaping green and sustainable sources, says Torben Daeneke, Professor at RMIT University and one of the authors of the new study. With that in mind, we will have to study how to clean the atmosphere and CO2 removal is the main one, as this would stabilize our climate. Unfortunately, many environmental activists are skeptical of their reluctance to look at these studies and seem unaware that UN climate models assume this kind of “negative emissions” technology is a necessity. The big challenge of this study is dealing with gaseous CO2, because storing it is not easy, so it is very important to develop negative emission technologies, since we need to ensure a stable future climate.

Considering that CO2 can also be captured in an industrial plant or directly from the atmosphere, the way to store it would be to compress it liquid and then inject it underground. This way challenges economics and engineering as there is a risk that liquid CO2 will leak over time. Daeneke points out that we can't be sure it will be there forever.

Already turning CO2 into solid, it can be stored easily and safely. Regrettably, however, past processes required temperatures so high that they were unviable industrially. As we know, we cannot circumvent the laws of physics and to the letter, we need to exert similar amounts of energy that they put into creating coal when burned and then CO2 to be created.

If we were to think of a high school experiment to simplify the explanation, students typically use electricity through wires to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, while researchers switch wires to a liquid metal designed to split CO2 into carbon and oxygen. Torben Daeneke is excited and underscores its importance, thinking of further enhancing and scaling up the study by designing prototype devices and reactors to do this more efficiently.