Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Lying is pretty effective, along with negative advertising.  Most ads are how bad the other guy is.  I tend to agree the other guy is bad, but I think most of them are bad.

There is simple math in this field that gets denied by deniers who think magical things will somehow change something that is obvious and immutable.

We have to do SOMETHING!

research team led by scientists from Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and Northern Illinois University has discovered a new electrocatalyst that can consistently convert carbon dioxide and water into ethanol with very high energy efficiency and low cost.

Because carbon dioxide is a stable molecule, transforming it into a different molecule is normally energy intensive and costly.

But the new process can electrochemically convert the carbon dioxide emitted from industrial processes—such as fossil fuel or alcohol fermentation plants—into a valuable commodity at reasonable cost. Ethanol is an ingredient in nearly all U.S. gasoline and is widely used as an intermediate product in the chemical, pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries.

“The process resulting from our catalyst would contribute to the circular carbon economy, which entails the reuse of carbon dioxide,” said Di-Jia Liu, senior chemist in Argonne’s Chemical Sciences and Engineering division and a UChicago CASE scientist in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago.

The findings were published recently in the journal Nature Energy.

The team’s catalyst consists of atomically dispersed copper on a carbon-powder support. By an electrochemical reaction, this catalyst breaks down carbon dioxide and water molecules and selectively reassembles the broken molecules into ethanol under an external electric field.


https://news.uchicago.edu/story/new-catalyst-can-make-ethanol-out-carbon-dioxide

I'd guess it's far too early to have any more than guesses on those very good questions.  In my experience, the reportage of such developments can at times be rosey.

Indeed, converting CO2 to some hydrocarbon is subject to a lot of research, but it is energetically "uphill".  Plants do it remarkably well, I always wonder how these articial systems compare with just having more plant in the same volume of space.  The key is to take plants once fully grown and "entomb" them so they don't rot.

A tree basically is composed of water, CO2, combined with sunlight and time (and some minors).  They are quite amazing, and some trees like eucalyptus grow very rapidly in the right climate.

I like trees and have wondered if it would make sense to plant more trees along Interstate highways on the rights of way far enough from traffic to be no hazard.  Of course, that could make it hard to see the billboards.

The key thing with trees is what happens after they die.  If they just rot, or get burned, all the stored CO2 is unstored.

You need to make say paper towels with them and put them in landfills.

If we could desalinate salt water "cheaply", we could grow trees in the Sahara.  That likely would impact weather a bit, possibly a lot.  Or in the outback.

Anyway, I lean to thinking that is a more attractive was to decarbonize our air.

research team led by scientists from Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and Northern Illinois University has discovered a new electrocatalyst that can consistently convert carbon dioxide and water into ethanol with very high energy efficiency and low cost.

Because carbon dioxide is a stable molecule, transforming it into a different molecule is normally energy intensive and costly.

But the new process can electrochemically convert the carbon dioxide emitted from industrial processes—such as fossil fuel or alcohol fermentation plants—into a valuable commodity at reasonable cost.

Who are you? - what have you done with Fearless?