This is scientific American 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

Air conditioning and fans account for a full 10% of the world's electricity usage.

Or to put it another way,

It's a lot of air that you pump around.

Roland Dittmeyer, a chemical engineer at the Carl's Ru Institute of Technology in Germany.

Another thing that takes a lot of pumping air around, he says, carbon capture.

Because the concentration of the CO2 in air is evidently quite low.

Even though it's enough to cause climate change, it's only 400 parts per million.

So he says, why not retrofit air conditioners

with modules that capture carbon?

Several companies already make materials

that strip carbon dioxide from the air, you'd then need to convert that

captured CO2 into hydrocarbons. That's an energy intensive process, but

Ditmeyer's vision is that we'd use clean carbon-free renewable energy to power that step.

Do this on a large enough scale, and you could produce significant amounts of this synthetic

renewable oil.

Dittmeyer and his colleagues calculated that if you outfitted the AC system of the Fair Tower, a large skyscraper in Frankfurt, with these carbon capture devices, the buildings' units alone could produce an estimated 15,000 barrels of synthetic oil a year. The full write-up in the journal Nature Communications

is called Crowd Oil, not Crude Oil. And if the idea gets traction, it could transform the

devices that cool our homes and offices

into machines that help cool the planet or at least stop warming it up while

chilling us down.

Thanks for listening for Scientific American 60 Second Science. I'm Christopher

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