When it comes to carbon capture and storage, researchers have been getting creative by turning carbon dioxide into everything from carbon monoxide (CO) for the use in industrial processes to oxalic acid for processing rare earth elements. Now, it seems they are going back to its source, turning it into solid coal.

In a world-first breakthrough, a research team led by RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia developed a technique that can convert CO₂ back into particles of carbon, decreasing pollution by removing greenhouse gases from our environment.

The solution offers a more viable approach than many of today’s carbon capture and storage systems that compress CO₂ into a liquid form with the aim of injecting it underground. These approaches have many technical and safety issues and are also very costly.