Carbon in the atmosphere is a major driver of climate change. Now researchers from McGill University have designed a new catalyst for converting carbon dioxide (CO2) into methane – a cleaner source of energy – using tiny bits of copper called nanoclusters. While the traditional method of producing methane from fossil fuels introduces more CO2 into the atmosphere, the new process, electrocatalysis, does not. “On sunny days you can use solar power, or when it’s a windy day you can use that wind to produce renewable electricity, but as soon as you produce that electricity you need to use it,” says Mahdi Salehi, Ph.D. candidate at the Electrocatalysis Lab at McGill University. “But in our case, we can use that renewable but intermittent electricity to store the energy in chemicals like methane.”
By using copper nanoclusters, says Salehi, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere can be transformed into methane and once the methane is used, any carbon dioxide released can be captured and “recycled” back into methane. This would create a closed “carbon loop” that does not emit new carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The research, published recently in the journal Applied Catalysis B: Environment and Energy, was enabled by the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan (USask). The team plans to continue refining their catalyst to make it more efficient and investigate its large-scale, industrial applications. Their hope is that their findings will open new avenues for producing clean, sustainable energy.
This could be useful for making synthetic aviation fuel at scale. Need methane + hydrogen + lot of energy.
Copper is abundant compared to the other rare earth catalysts, thus reducing cost.
This makes more sense than the other response. But…
(I have a pilot licence for light aircraft)
The reality is that engines for aviation suck. They’re loud, they’re inefficient and expensive to operate.
You also need very high octane fuel on any real planes.
They also rely on oxygen and require a lot of maintenance. Most light aircraft can’t take off at higher altitudes for that reason (you need turboprops)
You also have to contend with balancing fuel tanks and blocked fuel air vents and a lot of hardware like magnetos.
Startup checks are also a pain.
Also, even bad electric motors tend to be highly responsive and high torque and can be used to regenerate power during descent
it’s fairly common for the startup checks to fail because there is excess oil you need to burn off fouling the spark plugs (but you can simply increase the power).
Because the tanks are so big too, water can condense inside, so you need to check the fuel for contamination constantly
I think a lot of pilots are looking forward to moving away from avgas. The only advantage currently for fuel is energy density by weight and refueling time. But there is no reason they couldn’t battery swap in the future or improve batteries