Is there any type of technology that can use pollutants from the air as an alternative fuel?
Well not as they are but the pollutants can be chemically reformed into fuels. At Sandia Labs, they heated iron cobalt oxide discs to 2600 degrees fahrenheit causing the oxides to give off their oxygen atoms, the discs rotate away from the heat source cooling to 2000 degrees fahrenheit at which point they are exposed to H2O and CO2, the oxides pull an oxygen atom out of each molecule leaving H which quickly bound with other H to form H2 and pulling an oxygen atom from CO2 leaving CO (they would actually produce the H2 and CO in separate reactors in order to ensure that it is H2 and CO they are getting. They call this their CR5 reactor. The beauty of this is that H2 and CO are the basic building blocks for synthesizing linear hydrocarbons hence it’s possible to synthesize methane, methanol, gasoline and diesel from the mixture. The reactions are called Fischer Tropsch reactions and are exothermic so energy does not have to be added, indeed heat must be removed in order to synthesize the
