Led by Surya Prakash and George Olah of the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, the work is intended to stabilize the carbon dioxide amount in the atmosphere using renewable energy to transform the greenhouse gas into its useful fuel.

Methanol is used as clean-burning fuel for internal combustion engines and for fuel cells. It is also used as a raw material to produce many petrochemical products.

The USC Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute director and chemistry professor Prakash said: "We need to learn to manage carbon. That is the future."

The process involves bubbling of air through an aqueous solution of pentaethylenehexamine, adding a catalyst to support hydrogen in latching onto the CO2 under pressure. The solution is then heated converting 79% of the CO2 into methanol.

Prakash said that the resulting methanol, which is mixed with water, can be easily distilled.

The team intends to further advance the technology, which is supported by USC Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute, and scale up for industrial use.

Prakash added: "Of course it won’t compete with oil today, at around $30 per barrel.

"But right now we burn fossilized sunshine. We will run out of oil and gas, but the sun will be there for another five billion years. So we need to be better at taking advantage of it as a resource."