The last summary!

Hello,

I’m unhappy to tell you this will be the last English lesson summary of this semester.

So last time, we read an article from the Chemistry World written on February 2008. It was about a new reactor invented by researchers at a laboratory situated in New Mexico: they made a successful process to recycle carbon dioxide into petrol!

The idea is directly taken from the process designed to split water to form hydrogen. In fact it uses solar energy to split carbon dioxide to get carbon monoxide. And when these two processes are combined, you can get methanol or petrol.

The ultimate aim of the researchers is to have a series of solar-powered reactors, but a first prototype will be operational only in 3 or 5 years… And today the main problem is to speed up the reactions, making up a concrete and efficient device to market.

The very interesting way to understand this article is to keep in mind that carbon dioxide is the molecule which is responsible for global warming. So using it to synthesise liquid hydrocarbon will transform the devil polluting circle to an harmonious circle!

Of course we learnt a bit of vocabulary about it: the word “endeavour” that means effort, “worthwhile” that means something is useful to be done, and the verb “to belch” that tells us something is thrown away (obviously, in the article, we talks about the carbon dioxide belched by cars!).

Thank you!