Researchers accidentally turn carbon dioxide into ethanol

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/slct.201601169/fu...

Graceful, responsive design this is not.

These discussions are complicated because the energy is conserved, so you can't gain or loose energy anyway. But if you must consider also entropy that is more abstract and difficult to explain.

For example, if you buy energy from the electricity provider you can use all of it to do something useful, let's say raising an elevator. If you convert the electricity to ethanol and then burn it and then convert the heat back to electricity, then you will get less electricity after all the conversions and the elevator can't be raised as high as in the direct case. The difference is "lost" as heat that can't be used for something useful.

If you imagine a smart method to use the heat, then it will break the entropy conditions and after many calculations you will discover that it will not work.

Also, I don't think that you can use this to store the atmospheric CO2, as the other comment suggest. The problem is that after converting the CO2 to ethanol you must store it somewhere. (Burning it doesn't solve the problem.) You need some gigantic tanks to store it, or you can dig a gigantic hole and burry all the ethanol. But today people is extracting oil from the soil, so you only have reduced a slightly part of the carbon that is released. It's more efficient to not extract the oil than extract the oil, burn it to produce electricity, convert it to ethanol and the burry the ethanol.

If that's true then you'd need a heat source, possibly waste heat from other activities, to keep the reaction cooking.

Although this is still pretty cool if it could capture atmospheric carbon.