New CO2 Fixing Catalyst Turns It into Oxalate

[altenergygeek]

According to a recent news item, a new CO2 fixing catalyst could turn [URL="http://powerplantccs.com/blog/2010/03/new-co2-fixing-catalyst-turns-it-into-oxalate.html"]CO2 into an oxalate[/URL]. This is how the process reportedly works:

"A copper-based catalyst recently developed by Elisabeth Bouwman and co-workers at Leiden University in the Netherlands represents a vast improvement over previous atmospheric carbon-dioxide-fixing processes. Most of these are poisoned by oxygen, which means that you can’t just pump air into the reactor without removing the oxygen first. Bouwman’s catalyst, however, reacts with carbon dioxide but not oxygen, producing oxalate, which is a useful feedstock for the manufacture of methyl glycolate and other organic compounds."

You can get to know more about Oxalates from Wikipedia - [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxalate]Oxalate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/url] .

While it is too early to say whether methods such as these will succeed in the near to medium term, I feel that it is necessary to have multiple and diverse approaches in order to make CCS technically and economically viable.

What are your thoughts on ideas such as these?