Carbon-Neutral Gas Is Coming That Cleans Our Air

EVs are pretty widely accepted as the newer, greener path of the automobile. Sometimes, they're pitched as a solution to climate change that we can all buy at a dealership. But somehaven't given up on conventional motors yet. Porsche is perhaps the best example. The brand has been exploring synthetic, carbon-neutral fuels for a while now, and being able to run ourPorsche 911on green fuel sounds like a win-win to us.

But it appears that another company might have figured out how to do it better. The firm claims that it can produce a carbon-neutral fuel that'll also clean the air around us. It sounds like a magic cure-all for personal vehicle emissions, but the technology is solid.

The company's name, by the way, is Carbon Engineering. The Canada-based company has been working on this since 2015 and says it is currently establishing plants that will capture the C02 needed for this process at a rate of a million tons per year. That will then be used to produce methanol, one of a few candidates for an alternative fuel. Most importantly, and not dissimilar to保时捷的合成燃料, Carbon Engineering says the approach is a "drop-in replacement" with our existing infrastructure.

That means we'd need very little effort to adaptboth vehicles and distribution networksto use this greener fuel. Here's how it works: After C02 is extracted from the air by one of the company's Direct Air Capture plants, clean electricity is used to electrolyzer water, which splits it into hydrogen and oxygen. Then, the C02 and hydrogen are reacted, producing hydrocarbons that can be converted into drop-in compatible gas, diesel, and importantly, jet fuel.