{"id":182549,"date":"2026-10-20T07:20:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-20T05:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/?p=182549"},"modified":"2026-10-14T10:57:13","modified_gmt":"2026-10-14T08:57:13","slug":"machine-learning-maps-10000-reactions-to-reveal-how-copper-turns-co2-into-fuel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/machine-learning-maps-10000-reactions-to-reveal-how-copper-turns-co2-into-fuel\/","title":{"rendered":"Machine Learning Maps 10,000 Reactions to Reveal How Copper Turns CO2 into Fuel"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n

One of the most tantalizing promises in modern chemistry is the idea that carbon dioxide, the waste gas driving climate change, could be recycled into methanol and other fuels on an industrial scale. The catch has always been complexity. When CO2 meets hydrogen on the surface of a catalyst, thousands of individual bond-breaking and bond-forming events unfold in parallel, and no experimental technique can watch them all in real time. For decades, computational chemists have tried to fill that gap with quantum-mechanical simulations, but the cost of calculating every possible reaction has forced them to study only a handful of plausible steps at a time. Now, researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru have shown what happens when that restriction is lifted, and their findings overturn a long-standing assumption about how hydrogen behaves on a catalyst surface.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Machine Learning Maps 10,000 reactions to Reveal How Copper Turns CO2<\/sub> Into Fuel \u00a9 IISC<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

The team, led by Ananth Govind Rajan, Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at IISc, constructed a data-driven computational framework that maps nearly 10,000 elementary chemical reactions involved in converting CO2 into fuels and chemicals over a copper catalyst. The study, published in Nature Communications<\/a><\/em>, demonstrates that a small, hand-picked reaction network can lead a model spectacularly astray, while a comprehensive, machine-learning-accelerated network brings predictions into line with laboratory reality. The work offers a template that could extend well beyond CO2 hydrogenation to other catalytic processes central to a sustainable energy economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The scale of the problem is easy to underestimate. In CO2 hydrogenation, CO2 reacts with hydrogen over a catalyst to yield products such as methanol and carbon monoxide, but each product emerges from a tangled web of intermediates adsorbed on the metal surface. Traditional mechanistic modelling relies on chemical intuition to select perhaps a few dozen likely reactions, because modeling even one reaction with methods such as density functional theory demands enormous computational resources. That intuition, the IISc researchers argued, carries a hidden risk: the network might quietly omit the one step that actually controls the outcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the most tantalizing promises in modern chemistry is the idea that carbon dioxide, the waste gas driving climate change, could be recycled into methanol and other fuels on an industrial scale. The catch has always been complexity. When CO2 meets hydrogen on the surface of a catalyst, thousands of individual bond-breaking and bond-forming […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":182564,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","nova_meta_subtitle":"Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) found out how hydrogen behaves on a catalyst surface","footnotes":""},"categories":[5571],"tags":[6843,5714,15152,12330,10416,10630,10743],"supplier":[1303,20663],"class_list":["post-182549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-co2-based","tag-biochemicals","tag-biofuels","tag-catalyst","tag-ccu","tag-circulareconomy","tag-hydrogen","tag-useco2","supplier-indian-institute-of-science","supplier-nature-communications"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182549"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182549\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":182608,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182549\/revisions\/182608"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/182564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182549"},{"taxonomy":"supplier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/supplier?post=182549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}