Water, air… clean fuels

Over 40 billion tons of CO₂ are emitted every year due to human activities. What can we do with this waste?

In Nature, plants capture CO₂ and transform it into plant material (biomass) thanks to solar energy. It’s photosynthesis.

At the Institut de Chimie Moléculaire et des Matériaux (Orsay), the scientific team called « artificial photosynthesis » is inspired by this natural phenomenon in order to transform CO₂, not into biomass but into clean fuels such as methanol or methane. This team comes to SOLEIL, at the ROCK beamline, to find out what are the best catalysts of the chemical transformation of CO_2, that is to say the compounds that will achieve this artificial photosynthesis quickly and efficiently.