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Comment by twic | Hacker News Reader

As it says in the article:

"the artificial leaf delivers syngas, or synthesis gas, a mixture of hydrogen gas and carbon monoxide. Syngas can be burned directly, or converted into diesel or other hydrocarbon fuels."

Hydrogen and carbon dioxide are the feedstocks for the Fischer-Tropsch process, which produces conventional hydrocarbon fuel:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proces...

In other words, H2 and CO are exactly what you want!

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Probably also worth noting that syngas is the primary input for the Haber-Bosch method used to generate the ammonia feedstock for most of our synthetic fertilizers. If you just take the CO and pump it underground then you are actually producing fertilizer for agriculture using a carbon negative process.

> ... take the CO and pump it underground then you are actually producing fertilizer for agriculture

Interesting. How does the CO fertilize the plants?

I assume he meant carbon sequestration.

Yes, my prose was a bit less clear than I had intended. You can oxidize the CO and be carbon neutral or sequester it and be carbon negative.

The hydrogen is combined with atmospheric nitrogen to produce ammonia. Usually we source it from natural gas, so all our fertilizer is incredibly carbon intensive to make whereas this would at least be carbon neutral.

At the end, you'd just oxidize the CO back to CO2 before release, like a catalytic converter does, or use the CO as a chemical building block to produce hydrocarbons.

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