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New plant which converts exhaust emissions into oil

SHANGHAI- A new test facility just outside Shanghai, China can convert exhaust emissions into oil, which could lead to the potential of converting the masses of toxic gasses emitted by power stations, garbage dumps, and steel mills into something actually useful.

“We have pieced the system together into an integrated system, where you put gas in one end and get a liquid fuel out of the other end,” one of the team, Gregory Stephanopoulos from MIT, told The Guardian.

The test plant has successfully completed a trial run, and now a demonstration plant, 20 times the size, is being built to test the scalability of the process.

“It is one thing to do it on a scale of 1-2 litres in the lab, but a different story to move up 1,000 litres and then 20,000 litres in the demonstration plant,” says Stephanopoulos.

By using bacteria to convert hydrogen, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide gas into acetic acid, and then adding genetically engineered yeast, the plant can produce oil capable of being used as fuel.

“Energy-dense liquids are vital to transport but are currently derived from oil, a fossil fuel, and transport produces about a quarter of the global carbon emissions driving climate change,” Damian Carrington explains at The Guardian.

“Biofuels have been seen as possible replacement, but current biofuels compete with food production and have been blamed for driving up food prices.”

Other plants, like the planned waste-to-energy plant in China, are experimenting with burning waste to produce energy, but these plants are being criticized as being expensive and bad for the environment.

The research has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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