In a potential breakthrough for fuel, plastic, adhesive and solvent, scientists believe they have come up with a clean and low-cost way to convert carbon dioxide to methanol.

According to Stanford University news release, an international team of researchers may have a new way to produce a key ingredient for plastics, adhesives and solvents. Methanol could also act as an intriguing alternative for fuel.

"Methanol is processed in huge factories at very high pressures using hydrogen, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide from natural gas," study lead author Felix Studt, a staff scientist at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, said in the release. "We are looking for materials than can make methanol from clean sources, such as sunshine, under low-pressure conditions, while generating low amounts of carbon monoxide."

Published in the journal Nature Chemistry, the study identifies a nickel-gallium catalyst that can make methanol out of hydrogen and carbon dioxide without the additional products. Using this method, the scientists hope to design a large-scale production manufacturing process that can produce methanol cleanly and cheaply.

"Imagine if you could synthesize methanol using hydrogen from renewable sources, such as water split by sunlight, and carbon dioxide captured from power plants and other industrial smokestacks," study co-author Jens Norskov, a Stanford professor of chemical engineering, said in the release. "Eventually we would also like to make higher alcohols, such as ethanol and propanol, which, unlike methanol, can be directly added to gasoline today."

The traditional catalyst for producing methanol consists of copper, zinc and aluminum. In a methanol plant, synthesis gas (syngas), which is made up of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and hydrogen, is created from water and natural gas. Using the catalyst, syngas is converted into methanol.

In a given year, the world produces about 65 million metric tons of methanol and the new catalyst promises to cut out a large portion of the pollutant byproducts created by the traditional catalyst.

"We spent a lot of time studying methanol synthesis and the industrial process," Studt said. "It took us about three years to figure out how the process works and to identify the active sites on the copper-zinc-aluminum catalyst that synthesize methanol."