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The reaction that would give us clean fossil fuels forever

Crack natural gas into its constituent atoms and you can burn it without producing CO2 – giving us green energy without all the pain of renewables

By Jon Cartwright

5 October 2016

chemical flask

Jack Hudson

SCARRED landscapes, billowing smoke, seabirds writhing in liquorice gloop: there’s no denying fossil fuels have an image problem. That’s before we even start to factor in the grave risk continuing to burn them poses to Earth’s climate. But what’s the alternative? Nuclear is expensive, renewables are unreliable, and we are a long way from making batteries that could power our fuel-hungry lifestyles. Realistically, we are going to be reliant on fossil fuels for a while yet.

What we need is a way to exploit them without emitting any planet-warming carbon dioxide. Alberto Abánades thinks he has the answer. He isn’t a PR man for the fossil fuel industry, and nor does he have anything to do with various schemes to capture and bury carbon emissions after the event. He and his research team think they have cracked the problem using chemistry alone. By simply changing the way we liberate the energy trapped inside natural gas molecules, we can have all the benefits of fossil fuels – and none of the guilt. Too good to be true?

It’s easy to see why we love fossil fuels. For a start, they are cheap and abundant. Discoveries of new resources and extraction techniques such as fracking mean reports of “peak oil” always seem exaggerated. They are reliable, too – you can shovel coal or pipe gas into a power station when the sky is cloudy or the wind’s not blowing. And they can be portable – simply fill a car tank with petrol and you are good to go.

“It’s easy to see why we love fossil fuels – they’re cheap, abundant and reliable“…

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