Pilot project approved to get carbon-neutral fuel from air, water

Islamabad: The climate change ministry has approved a pilot project that would focus on making ‘synthetic gasoline’ through a mix of hydrogen and carbon dioxide to be extracted from air and water and used as a fuel for vehicles.

According to the details, a foreign scientist who heads the Earth Institute at Columbia University recently presented her proposal to the climate change ministry for a pilot project in Pakistan to make synthetic gasoline from air and water. The officials evaluated the proposal and came to know that a Harvard-affiliated Canadian company is also making a liquid fuel that is carbon neutral using the same technology that would be used for this pilot project.

The ministry has given ‘go-ahead’ for this pilot project that would be first of its kind in Pakistan and help further build its image as a leading country in the fight against negative impacts of the climate change. While sharing the details an official said the Columbia

University has invented a machine that captures carbon dioxide from the air.

“They will also use another machine to capture hydrogen from water. Then they will mix carbon dioxide and hydrogen and make synthetic gasoline,” he said. He said it will be kind of fuel that would not be extracted from the earth surface but the air.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has also underlined the need to go for alternative technologies because keeping global warming to less than 2 degrees C (the international target to avoid the most dangerous impacts) would require ‘negative emissions’—some way of taking lots of CO2 out of the atmosphere and storing it permanently. Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Climate Change Malik Amin Aslam has said that the pilot project can be an engineering breakthrough on two fronts: A potentially cost-effective way to take CO2 out of the atmosphere to fight climate change and a potentially cost-competitive way to make gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel that never add any additional CO2 to the atmosphere.