Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have recently created a way to convert carbon dioxide into fuel by mimicking plants. This can decrease the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere whilst also producing clean energy.
According to assistant professor Amin Salehi-Khojin, the artificial leaf recycles the carbon dioxide to produce fuel. Another aspect that they used from plants is that the leaves are solar powered, which makes these leaves almost the same as real leaves. The only major difference between these artificial leaves and real leaves besides one being man-made and the other being organic is the fuel that is produced. Real leaves convert CO2 into sugar whilst the artificial leaves convert the CO2 into hydrocarbons like gasoline.
These leaves could propel solar energy years ahead of what it currently is. It does not produce any harmful waste product while also eliminating CO2 from the atmosphere. This could potentially be scaled further to the size of solar farms to eliminate large quantities of carbon dioxide. Salehi-Khojin believes that this could potentially be possible within 5 years.