At the University of Toronto a multidisciplinary solar fuels team was founded in 2012 and has been investigating a portfolio of nanostructured materials that are active for the gas-phase photo-reduction of carbon dioxide to solar fuels like carbon monoxide, methane or methanol.
The focus of the team’s research on a gas-phase process is predicated upon their collected belief that the development of a global scale process capable of handling hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide annually, which would represent the largest chemical factory ever on earth, for a host of practical and economical reasons is unlikely to work in aqueous solution