We love it here when someone shows us a truth we’ve missed. One that was staring us in the face all along. And Professor Erwin Reisner of Cambridge University is just such a man.
We all know that burning fossil fuels is starting to kill us. We all know we’ve got to look for new technologies-fusion, solar, wind, that sort of thing. And we all know how difficult it will be for certain industries, especially transport, to make that transition. Because nothing is quite like breaking carbon bonds to release the sudden bursts of energy you need to push a planeload of people from Paris to New York. What if there were a way to make combustible fuel, at least enough for say aviation and shipping, without producing vast tonnes of CO2 as a by product?
Well, the Professor and his team appear to have done just that, according to Robin McKie of the Observer[1]. By using materials called perovskites [2], they hope to create huge floating leaves, a bit like those giant water-lilies you see in Kew Gardens, which will convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into precursors of combustible fuels. We won’t spoil Robin’s article-it’s a great read, and he once replied to one of our fan letters! But get this killer quote:
……..”we use sunlight to power these transformations,” said Reisner. “And the chemicals that we make this way have already been used to manufacture feedstocks, though it is fuel – like diesel or petrol – that we really want to target. One goal would be to make green sustainable kerosene for the aviation market”.
It’s clean. it’s green and it’s already been tried. Obviously we would like to know about things such as safety, scalability, toxicity and the resilience of the systems in a strong coastal storm. But never say we spend all our time here gloomily preaching doom, like some latter-day Salvian. For here is real hope.
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perovskite_solar_cell
#clean energy #perovskites #global warming #cliamte change #aviation #shipping #transport
Learning, Science and Society 