Chemical additive slashes carbon emissions when creating synthetic fuels

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By Robert F. Service, Science. 

Excerpt: Despite the growing adoption of solar power and other renewables, fossil fuels still rule our energy world. That makes steps to make them cleaner all the more vital. Chemists report today in Science the discovery of an additive that sharply cuts carbon emissions from an industrial process that can convert coal, natural gas, or agricultural biomass to liquid fuels such as diesel or gasoline. ...Fischer-Tropsch process ...was used by Germany in the 1930s to fuel the Nazi war machine and by South Africa during apartheid to produce fuels from the nation’s abundant coal reserves. Although relatively expensive, the approach is still used today to satisfy strategic fuel security needs or in places with abundant feedstocks such as coal or natural gas. The chemistry is highly polluting, however. ...one-third of all the carbon contained in syngas ends up as CO2 vented into the atmosphere. ...Ding Ma, a chemist at Peking University...and his colleagues added trace amounts of compounds called halomethanes to their syngas mixture...the amount of carbon in the syngas that ends up as CO2 dropped from roughly one-third to less than 1%.... The additive not only makes the process cleaner, but more efficient. By ensuring that nearly all of the syngas carbon is converted to hydrocarbons, “it reduces the cost of production of liquid fuels,” Saeys says.... 

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