This Invention Turns CO2 Into Fuel And Could Cause Oil Producers A Big Headache

SolarCity Corp SCTY, First Solar, Inc. FSLR and Tesla Motors Inc TSLA are not the only big disruptors in the energy world. Scientists at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) are also playing a big role.

Last week, the researchers announced they had created a technology that takes contaminating carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turns it into a synthetic burnable hydrocarbon fuel. The findings were published Friday in the academic journal "Science," and the patent has already been filed for approval.

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“Instead of producing energy in an unsustainable one-way route from fossil fuels to greenhouse gas, we can now reverse the process and recycle atmospheric carbon into fuel using sunlight,” said Amin Salehi-Khojin, an assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “The new solar cell is not photovoltaic — it’s photosynthetic.”

The idea behind these “artificial leaves” is that, instead of creating electricity and storing it in a battery, they will be able to create energy-dense fuel. Although this process is considerably more complex than the naturally-occurring electrolysis, the basics here are pretty much the same. The “leaves” use energy from the sun to catalyze a reaction, combining CO2 it with other obscure compounds to create a form of synthetic gas that can be used to power vehicles or further distilled into diesel.

However, all of this is still in a developmental phase, and the invention has yet to prove its cost-effectiveness.

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Disclosure: Javier Hasse holds no interest in any of the securities or entities mentioned above.