The greenhouse gas carbon dioxide may be causing global warming, but new research shows the emission of the gas contains potential to be a vast source of untapped energy, according to NBC News.
The new process was published in the American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters.
Researchers findings show there are possibilities to harvest energy from the wind by using a combination of chemistry and mechanics that would generate electricity from the carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.
The process won't destroy the greenhouse gas, but rather pull more energy than other waste gases.
"The energy is there," Bert Hamelers, a program director at Wetsus, the Center of Excellence for Sustainable Water Technology in the Netherlands, who led the research, told NBC News. "Only you need a turbine to get it."
Hamelers and his colleagues attempted to get energy from carbon dioxide by mixing water or another liquid solution with combustion gas that contained high levels of the greenhouse gas, like what is likely to be found near a power planet
"These liquids are pumped between specialized membranes to produce an electric current. The current comes from the concentration gradient between the combustion gas and air," Hamelers told NBC News. "Other teams are working on a similar mixing approach to exploit the chemical differences between seawater and freshwater. But until now, no one has tried to mix a combustion gas with air."
Hamelers reiterated that the process he and his team came up with does not get rid of the carbon dioxide.
"You use the energy that is now wasted. You bring it in and get the extra energy out, but you cannot sequester it," Hamelers said.
Carbon dioxide released from power plants, as well as other activities, can potentially produce 1,570 billion kilowatt hours, or the "equivalent of about 400 times the annual electrical output of the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River between Nevada and Arizona, "according to NBC News.
"For the proof-of-concept, the researchers used a well-known technique to bubble the gas and air through the liquid solution. That process uses more energy than the energy it produces, "but there are alternatives like membrane-based processes that use less energy," Hamelers said. "The objective for us was to show that, yes, there is this source of energy and, yes, you can harvest it...Of course you need a lot more technological development before this is a system that can be practiced."
