While there's significant discussions around CO2 to fuels and chemicals, of recent interest has been efforts for converting CO2 to sugar.
Why bother? Aren't plants doing it all around us, at little cost?
The CO2 to sugar conversion through the bio-mechanism that the plants use is well understood, but what about CO2 conversion to sugars without using microbes, mainly using thermochemical or electrochemical routes?
Such a pathway - especially the electrochemical pathway - could be useful for space travellers as they can now make sugars from CO2 and feed these to microbes for production of food, fuel and plastics.
A recent competition in this context by NASA brought about interesting efforts by three US companies that had come up with abiotic ways to make sugars from CO2 - appears to be quite a pioneering effort based on the report here - http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=58052 & https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/centennial_challenges/75K-awarded-in-competition-to-convert-carbon-dioxide-into-sugar.html
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