New method produces electricity from carbon dioxide

In a breakthrough, scientists claim to have developed a new method for producing electricity from carbon dioxide emitted from power plants and other industrial activities.
The method for producing electricity from CO2 could be the start of a classic trash-to-treasure story for the troublesome greenhouse gas, scientists said.
The method uses CO2 from electric power plant and other smokestacks as the raw material for making electricity.
Bert Hamelers and colleagues explain that electric power-generating stations worldwide release about 12 billion tons of CO2 annually from combustion of coal, oil and natural gas.
Home and commercial heating produces another 11 billion tons. Smokestack gas from a typical coal-fired plant contains about 10 per cent CO2, which not only goes to waste, but is a key contributor to global warming. Hamelers' team sought a way to change that trash into a treasure.

They describe technology that would react the CO2 with water or other liquids and, with further processing, produce a flow of electrons that make up electric current.

It could produce about 1,570 billion kilowatts of additional electricity annually if used to harvest CO2 from power plants, industry and residences, researchers said.
That's about 400 times the annual electrical output of the Hoover Dam in the US, they said.
Like that dam and other hydroelectric power facilities, that massive additional amount of electricity would be produced without adding more CO2 to the atmosphere, Hamelers said.
The finding was described in an article in The American Chemical Society (ACS) journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters.