Carbon Dioxide Turned Into Methanol

The brains at the Singapore-based Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN) have stumbled upon the most startling discovery – they managed to turn a common greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, into methanol, one of the more popular forms of biofuel most often used in industrial feedstock and for clean-burning. This is made possible thanks to the presence of “organocatalysts”, where carbon dioxide is activated in a mild and non-toxic process, resulting in methanol which is much more useful. It would be interesting to see how much further this research is able to go and whether we can help reduce emissions by turning the abundance of carbon dioxide in the environment to be used as biofuel.