Question: How can zeolites be used to create fossil fuels? Will they be renewable?

Alexander Munnoch answered on 20 Jun 2013:

Thanks 11mccoa1 for the very good question!

Unfortunately, fossil fuels such as coal, crude and natural gas unfortunately aren’t renewable.
(unless we create alot more fossils over the next few hundred million years but even then they’ll only be useful a few hundred million years down the line).

and zeolite cannot create fossil fuels, just change them into more useful ones.

Zeolites can be used to reform non-useful fossil fuels into useful ones, for example – catalytic cracking. This process takes really heavy oils and tar-like fossil fuels (which are very common and almost useless) and breaks them down into more useful lighter oils and gases which can be used as fuels vehicles and smaller building blocks for other chemicals.

Renewable sources (such as biofuels and bioethanol – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biofuel) can also be reformed by zeolites into the same lighter oils and gases.

The zeolites can make the more useful lighter chemicals because of their special sieve-like structure

they only let small enough chemical through.

Basically, zeolites are used in the middle processes. They can change both renewable (biofuels) and non-renewable (fossil fuel) resources into more useful fuels and chemicals.

Hopefully this answers your question. The link will give you a bit more information than I can fit in here but if you have any questions about anything else please don’t hesitate to ask.