Greener days ahead for carbon fuels?

A discovery by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) shows that recycling carbon dioxide into valuable chemicals and fuels can be economical and efficient -- all through a single copper catalyst. When you take a piece of copper metal, it may feel smooth to the touch, but at the microscopic level, the surface is actually bumpy -- and these bumps are what scientists call "active sites," said Joel Ager, a researcher at JCAP who led the study. Ager is a staff scientist in Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division and an adjunct professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at UC Berkeley.Ever since the 1980s, when copper's talent for converting carbon into various useful products was discovered, it was always assumed that its active sites weren't product-specific -- in other words, you could use copper as a catalyst for making ethanol, ethylene, propanol, or some other carbon-based chemical, but you would have to go through a lot of steps to separate unwanted, residual chemicals formed during the intermediate stages of a chemical reaction before arriving at your final destination -- the chemical end-product.