This is a very poor article. The very first sentence is already wrong: "It could lead to net zero emissions for air travel."<p>No, it can't. Aviation has a variety of emission sources, which include not only CO2, but also others like nitrous oxides and water vapour, which creates contrains and impacts cloud formation. There's huge uncertainty how large these effects are, but they're significant.<p>It's not particularly surprising that you can turn CO2 into jet fuel. The issue is: It's not a complete fix for aviation's climate problem and the efficiency is extremely low. The amount of electricity needed is enormous.<p>Worthy read (title is about hydrogen, but it also covers e-fuels quite a bit): <a href="https://www.cleansky.eu/news/hydrogen-powered-aviation-preparing-for-take-off" rel="nofollow">https://www.cleansky.eu/news/hydrogen-powered-aviation-prepa...</a><p>Key takeaways: Aviation CO2 emissions are 2%, but overall emissions are somewhere between 3 and 7%. And using E-Fuels to power future aviation (with current growth projections) requires more electricity than all the electricity that is genreated today.
I don't believe carbon emissions will be "solved" by global altruism or even government regulation. This is something that will have a technological solution.<p>Carbon sequestration from the atmosphere is not a hard problem and turning atmospheric carbon into fuel is not a hard problem. It just makes no sense to burn fossil fuels to do it. This is a net energy loss although there's still a market for turning inconvenient energy sources into convenient ones.<p>But as soon as the energy source is cheaper than fossil fuels, the equation completely changes.<p>This, to me, is the ultimate promise of renewables.<p>It may well be the promise of fusion too but I'm not yet convinced fusion will ever be commercially viable. I'm least convinced about Tokamak reactors. New designs may prevail. Fusion is attractive because of the abundance of the fuel but the problems of containment (eg turbulence), alpha particle embrittlement and neutron embrittlement remain... huge. Stars contain all this with gravity.
The US navy have been investigating this for a while, e.g. <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17632-how-to-turn-seawater-into-jet-fuel/" rel="nofollow">https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17632-how-to-turn-sea...</a> (2009)<p>The advantages are obvious - a nuclear carrier could make fuel for its aircraft and potentially its escorts too. Wonder how this is getting along.
<i>The team heated a mix of citric acid, hydrogen and an iron-manganese-potassium catalyst to turn CO2 into a liquid fuel capable of powering jet aircraft. ... The lab method only produced a few grams of fuel</i><p>Wasn't this on HN a few days ago?
Link to the article in question: <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-20214-z" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-20214-z</a><p>They call it 'renewable' yet use Iron as a catalyst. I'm not a chemist - how is that renewable?
>"Wired reports that Oxford University scientists have successfully turned CO2 into jet fuel, raising the possibility of conventionally-powered aircraft with net zero emissions.<p>The technique effectively<p><i>reverses the process of burning fuel</i><p>by relying on the organic combustion method. The team heated a mix of citric acid, hydrogen and an iron-manganese-potassium catalyst to turn CO2 into a liquid fuel capable of powering jet aircraft.<p>The approach is inexpensive, uncomplicated and uses commonplace materials. It’s cheaper than processes used to turn hydrogen and water into fuel."
Synthetic biology can do it better. Fix CO2 by growing sugar cane, turn sugar into jet fuel with genetically engineered yeast.<p><a href="https://www.total.com/media/news/press-releases/total-and-amyris-renewable-jet-fuel-ready-use-commercial-aviation" rel="nofollow">https://www.total.com/media/news/press-releases/total-and-am...</a><p>Still not commercially viable, but much closer to it than the linked process.
Half off-topic: Opening the link is blocked by my addblocker, since it redirects to <a href="https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=3_cc-session_ea8903f1-0158-4ba4-a4c4-3e2f7a220596" rel="nofollow">https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=3_...</a><p>Bad link I guess.
Archived copy without GDPR nag screen:<p><a href="https://archive.today/h0bYu" rel="nofollow">https://archive.today/h0bYu</a>
This headline is fake news. As the nature link says, there is already alot of past work for decades in this technology.<p>The reasearch paper only studied existing catalysts and measured their efficiency.<p>> In this investigation, we report the preparation of iron-based catalysts using the Organic Combustion Method (OCM) and determined their catalytic performance