Scientists accidentally found an efficient way to turn CO2 into ethanol.

In the modern society that we are living in, we depend mainly on fossil fuel to generate energy, getting electricity or powering cars. After using fossil fuel for decades, we realized that fossil fuel combustion releases CO2 to the atmosphere, which intensifies the greenhouse effect, causing the global temperature to rise. The rise of temperature can cause many problems, such as the rise of sea level, the meltdown of the glacier, biodiversity loss. The other problem of fossil fuel is that it is not renewable. Once you burn the fossil fuel, it can no longer be used again. What is left are CO2 and other wastes. However, many people believe that we can figure out how to use those wastes and CO2 that are generated by the fossil fuel combustion in the future as the technology becomes more advanced.

Recently, a group of scientists found an efficient way to convert CO2 into ethanol. How they found this CO2 converting process was an accident. When they were researching one type of catalyst, they accidentally found that it can capture CO2 and convert it into ethanol when it is conducted by electricity. This catalyst can concentrate the electricity and create a strong electric field. The efficiency of the conversion is high, about 65%. Therefore, this technology is definitely applicable. After seeing this news, many people may think that we can take CO2 from the atmosphere, slowing down or even stopping the global warming. However, there's a crucial information that lots of people don't pay attention to. "This process requires electricity." When we are talking about how this technology can benefit our society and environment, we must ask where does the electricity that drives this process comes from. Is it from burning fossil fuel? Or is it from renewable energy? Even the electricity comes from the renewable energy, we still can't use this process to reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere, unless we can build a converting station in the sky or somehow capture and transport CO2 from atmosphere to the ground. Neither of them sounds possible considering the technology we have now. Then you may ask- "How is this converting process going to help us?" Although this technology can't reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere, it can still be beneficial in some ways. For example, we can use this converting process to convert the CO2 that is released by the power plants into ethanol. In this way, we can use the fossil fuel at least twice because we convert the waste that is produced by fossil fuel combustion into something useful, the ethanol. We can use that ethanol as the fuel of cars, or we can store it, reducing the release of CO2 into the atmosphere. This new technology can definitely help us in the future. I hope it can be used on a large scale in the near future.