The climate problems facing the earth should be known to everyone is very serious, and for a long time, human changes to the climate have not stopped, and the emission of pollutants is still intensifying. Of course, the more atmospheric warmers are emitted, the warming of the planet will certainly increase.
No, from the carbon dioxide emission data in 2021, we can see that human emissions of greenhouse gases have not changed at all, and coupled with the climate chain effect, the earth itself released some greenhouse gases, which warmed the earth even more.
According to statistics, in 2021, the average concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere reached 414 parts per million, and the concentration of methane also reached a record level, of which the "fire" brought about by the climate chain effect - the emission of carbon dioxide substances, was as high as 1.85 billion tons, which was much higher than 2020, and the value in 2020 was 1.75 billion tons. Therefore, the warming of the earth is still happening, and the climate problems facing the earth are already a "double" effect.
In this case, perhaps the first idea is to reduce greenhouse gases to change the climate. But in the scientific community, scientists are also trying to find ways to make "rational" use of carbon dioxide, hoping to fully convert carbon dioxide substances, which is not, the news about "the efficiency of converting carbon dioxide into gasoline with new catalysts" has once again aroused heated discussion.
Because this is a major breakthrough in the conversion of carbon dioxide to gasoline, it must be a good thing if it can be converted on a large scale. Both in terms of economic effects and in terms of efficiency in mitigating global warming, there may be a prominent contribution.
So is this time really true? Many people may question, can carbon dioxide really be converted into gasoline? Yes, there have long been these studies in the field of chemistry, such as converting waste carbon dioxide and a large amount of hydrogen into chains of ethane, propane, and butane, which can be used by humans. However, the efficiency of conversion is not strong, and it cannot reach a certain scale, so many people may not understand it.
No, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a new note, and researchers have invented a new catalyst that can improve the efficiency of carbon dioxide into gasoline. What is the substance and how is it done? Can it really stop warming the planet?
This new catalyst is a substance due to the composition of the element ruthenium, a rare transition metal belonging to the platinum group. Of course, here we can understand the situation of the lower ruthenium.
In fact, ruthenium is not very much on our earth, and the content in the earth's crust is only one billionth, which is one of the rarest metals, but this substance has congenital stability and strong corrosion resistance, so it is still widely used in chemistry.
The melting point of the substance is 2310 °C, when making catalysts, even if it has strong exothermic properties, it can still perform very stable, and it has resistance to various acids, including aqua regia, and also has resistance to hydrofluoric acid and phosphoric acid. It is used in high-frequency induction heating furnace argon protection smelting, production of thick film resistance slurry, etc.
In 2016, Nobel laureate in chemistry George Euler's team first announced that a catalyst based on metal ruthenium would be used to convert carbon dioxide captured in the air directly into methanol fuel, with a conversion rate of up to 79%. This is also a major scene that drives the carbon dioxide transition.
And this time, it is equivalent to a new way of evolving the catalyst for the element ruthenium, this catalyst in the process of change, coated with a thin layer of plastic, it can also do like any catalyst, to achieve efficient conversion, this new catalyst, accelerate the chemical reaction process, and, will not be exhausted in the process, which also shows that there is a situation of reuse.
At the same time, it also has the advantage of being cheaper than other high-quality catalysts such as palladium and platinum, so it has become a research direction for scientists.
And, under the same conditions, the new catalyst produces butane that is 1,000 times the longest hydrocarbon that can be produced by a standard catalyst at maximum pressure. See? The efficiency increased by 1,000 times, which is a breakthrough in the ability of the new catalyst to produce gasoline from the reaction. In the course of the experiment, the team only needed to do one thing, and that was that it only needed more pressure to produce all the long-chain hydrocarbons used in gasoline.
Of course, in order to perform this process more efficiently, the team is also envisioning a "carbon neutral cycle" in which dioxide is collected, converted into fuel and burned again, and the resulting carbon dioxide restarts the cycle.
So, it's equivalent to a "multiple-cycle system", which is very good. Of course, once this kind of research is promoted on a large scale, in the future we will be able to achieve the alleviation of "global warming" and let the warming of the earth be suspended, which is a completely beneficial thing for the whole world.
However, there is also a problem here, we actually mentioned above, the element ruthenium of the carrier of this catalyst is one of the rarest metals, and if it is to be used on a large scale in the world to change our climate, this possibility is still relatively low for the time being, unless it has the ability to generate the element on a large scale, which can be achieved.
Therefore, from the perspective of catalyst alone, we are still expecting a stronger technology. Although the efficiency of this catalyst is improved a lot, the catalyst elements required can be said to be more difficult.