“As a result of those relationships, we spent some time in Israel looking for what we call aligned technologies for Greenearth Energy to actually bring to Australia and commercialise,” Greenearth Energy managing director Mark Miller told EnergyNewsBulletin.

While in Israel, Greenearth negotiated with Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science for an exclusive research and licence agreement for a technology that has the ability to convert CO2 emissions into fuel.

The negotiations were wrapped up a year ago with Greenearth then forming a subsidiary, NewCO2Fuels, to help fund the development of the technology from the laboratory into the field.

The technology has now been proven in a laboratory and involves a new method of using concentrated solar energy for the dissociation of CO2 to carbon monoxide and oxygen.

The same system can also dissociate water to hydrogen and oxygen at the same time it dissociates the CO2.

The mixture of carbon dioxide and hydrogen (called syngas) can then be used as gaseous fuel in power plants or converted to liquid fuel such as methanol.

“We believe we’ve got a technology that can do two things – it can potentially allow states like Victoria to continue to use our vast brown coal resources while at the same time deliver potentially cleaner energy outcomes,” Miller said.

“This is a revolutionary technology that has the ability to be able to produce commercially viable fuel from CO2.

“It has the potential to be used in either existing power stations or new power stations as they are built or any other CO2 emitting industry, such as cement works.”

Miller went on to say NewCO2Fuels would move from a laboratory stage to a proof of concept stage by way of a field trial.

A pilot plant is currently being built for the pilot project which will soon begin in Israel.

If successful, NewCO2Fuels has plans to deploy subsequent demonstration plants around the world including Australia.

Miller said a demonstration plant could be up and running in Australia within the next few years.

While yet to be proven commercially on an industrial scale, Miller believes the technology is very efficient.

“Our aim is to deliver commercially viable fuels either in the form of synthetic gas or in the form of liquid fuel for transportation that would compete with other forms of liquid transportation fuel,” he said.

“So we solve two riddles – we can solve the CO2 emission problem while at the same time producing a commercially viable fuel stock.”