For those interested in the more technical aspects of the current science focused on climate change and a sustainable future, I present my latest publication in the Journal of the American Chemical Society:
Silvia, J. S. and Cummins, C. C. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2010. “Ligand-based Reduction of CO2 to CO Mediated by an Anionic Niobium Nitride Complex”
Three-step process for CO2 to CO conversion
To summarize briefly, the paper outlines our new contribution to the field of CO2 chemistry. Our motivation for this work is to find new ways for converting CO2 into a useful commodity rather than view it as an environmentally harmful by-product. The hard about CO2 chemistry, and why it poses a real problem once it is released into the atmosphere, is that the molecule is incredibly stable and therefore very happy to being floating around freely as a gas. This means that if you want to use CO2 productively, you have to be very clever to coax it to do what you want. Our approach was to trap the CO2 using another molecule (here a molecule built around an atom of niobium, Nb), and then transform it into something we wanted. CO, a.k.a. carbon monoxide, is a useful product because it is much more reactive than CO2 and can be used as either a fuel source or as a building block for more complex compounds such as plastics.
The important part of this paper is that we present a completely new paradigm for making use of CO2. Such research is vital because if we are to solve the problem associated with producing CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels, the fundamental aspects of transforming this incredibly stable molecule will need to be understood in as great of detail of possible.