Soon,pull fuel for your car out of thin air!

Joel Rosenthal is working to power your car with the air you breathe.

Powering your car with the air you breathe may sound supernatural,but Joel Rosenthal,a chemist at the University of Delaware,is actually working to transform carbon dioxide (CO2),a greenhouse gas in the atmosphere,into gas for your car and clean-energy future fuels.

Such a feat could help reduce the rising CO2 levels implicated in global warming and also offer a new method of renewable energy production.

Rosenthal and his team are designing electrocatalysts from metals such as nickel and palladium that will freely give away electrons when they react with carbon dioxide,thus chemically reducing this greenhouse gas into energy-rich carbon monoxide or methanol.

Besides its use in making plastics,solvents,carpet and other products,methanol fuels race cars in the United States and currently is being researched as a hydrogen carrier for fuel cell vehicles.

Carbon monoxide is an important precursor to liquid hydrocarbons in the energy arena,in addition to its applications as an industrial chemical for producing plastics to detergents to the acetic acid used in food preservation,drug manufacturing and other fields.

The catalytic reduction of carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide is an important transformation that would allow for the mitigation of atmospheric CO2 levels,while producing an energy-rich substrate that forms a basis for fuels production, Rosenthal says.

The chemistry were doing is energetically uphillits an energy-storing process rather than a downhill,energy-liberating process.

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And our goal is to make liquid fuel renewably from wind and solar sources,not from typical fossil fuel bases, he added.