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The aviation industry has been looking for ways to reduce its global carbon footprint for the past decade, such as purchasing so-called carbon offsets like tree-planting projects or wind farms to make up for the carbon dioxide spewed out by high-flying jets. At the same time, airports in San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles, along with a dozen in Europe, are fueling planes with greener alternative fuels to help reach carbon-reduction goals.
Now a team at Oxford University in the United Kingdom has come up with an experimental process that might be able to turn carbon dioxide a greenhouse gas emitted by all gas-burning engines into jet fuel. If successful, the process, which uses an iron-based chemical reaction, could result in “net zero” emissions from airplanes.