In the midst of all the rotten horrible news

So much rough news out there that it's a relief to see a ray of hope.  In this case, the ray of hope is improved catalysis of the conversion of CO2 to syngas (which is a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, not something you'd like to breathe, but potentially a good feedstock to make things like burnable hydrocarbons, aka gasoline, diesel fuel).

Now, if we could just figure out a way to economically pull it out of the atmosphere, we'd really have something.

New catalyst converts carbon dioxide to fuel  (not exactly true, but I'll let it slide)

"With this catalyst, we can directly reduce carbon dioxide to syngas without the need for a secondary, expensive gasification process," he* said. In other chemical-reduction systems, the only reaction product is carbon monoxide. The new catalyst produces syngas, a mixture of carbon monoxide plus hydrogen."

* Mohammad Asadi, UIC graduate student and co-first author on the paper.

Still, if it has to be captured from stack emissions, at least it takes another step to get into the atmosphere.