We're very good at turning hydrocarbons into CO2.  We're very bad at turning CO2 into hydrocarbons.  Of course, CO2 has a much lower energy state than hydrocarbons, so that makes perfect sense.  But what if we could do it.  First take the power out of the hydrocarbons, then put the power back in, then take it out, then put it in, indefinitely. 

I'll tell you, we'd prevent the buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere without having to completely restructure our society.  Now I'm not sayin' I wouldn't mind a bit of restructuring, but it certainly couldn't hurt to try to convert CO2 to hydrocarbons. 

And researchers at the University of Messina in Italy are trying.  Exposing CO2 to a platinum-paladium coated nanotubes and  the protons from water split by the sun in the presence of a titanium photocatylst can produce five and six carbon long hydrocarbons. These can then be efficiently converted into gasoline.

 

This is basically just a new kind of solar power that immediately stores the power extracted from the sun in a hydrocarbon chain, but it is an elegant, though complex, process.  It is, however, a slow process and only around 2% of the CO2 is converted to hydrocarbons, but the researchers believe that this number can be improved substantially by adding heat to the reaction (I assume, some renewable heat source, or just the heat left over at the power plant) and also by increasing the surface area of the nanocatylist. 

The process is certainly far to expensive to implement right now, but researchers are confident that a viable version could be ready to produce hydrocarbons industrially "within a decade."

Via New Scientist