Turning Greenhouse Gases Into Clean Air and Energy Simultaneously — Professor Discovers A Way

A chemistry professor and his team of students at the University of Central Florida found a way to turn greenhouse gases into clean air -- and produce energy simultaneously, UCF announced Monday.

Assistant Professor Fernando Uribe-Romo and his group found out how to do both by triggering the process of photosynthesis in the synthetic material metal-organic frameworks, which breaks down carbon dioxide into harmless organic materials.

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The findings are good news since the technology can be used to decrease greenhouse gases associated with climate change and produce clean energy at the same time.

Scientists around the world have been trying to find a way to do this, but have had trouble getting visible light to initiate the chemical transformation. Researchers have previously experimented with various materials, but the ones that can actually take in visible light are rare and expensive, such as platinum, rhenium and iridium. However, Uribe-Romo used titanium for his research and added organic molecules that behave like “light-harvesting antennae.”

UCF released a video of Uribe-Romo explaining the process:

Uribe-Romo and his team used a blue LED photoreactor for their experiment, which looks similar to a tanning bed. The chemical reaction changed carbon dioxide into two reduced forms of carbon, formate and formamides, which are both types of solar fuel, while also cleaning the air.

But the researchers’ work doesn’t end there, Uribe-Romo said.

“The goal is to continue to fine-tune the approach so we can create greater amounts of reduced carbon so it is more efficient,” he said.

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Uribe-Romo added that with the findings, humans would be able to set up “stations that capture large amounts of CO2,” for example at places near a power plant or other locations that emit high levels of greenhouse gases.

“The gas would be sucked into the station, go through the process and recycle the greenhouse gases while producing energy that would be put back into the power plant,” he said.

The technology might even be used by homeowners, possibly as rooftop shingles that can clean neighborhoods and produce energy to power homes simultaneously (which would definitely be a competition to Tesla’s solar roof tiles).

“That would take new technology and infrastructure to happen,” Uribe-Romo said. “But it may be possible.”

Matt Logan, a UCF student pursuing his doctorate in chemistry; undergraduate student Jeremy Adamson, majoring in biomedical sciences, and Kenneth Hanson and his team at Florida State University also helped with the research.

The findings were published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A.