This looks interesting enough, but it really won't scale, as it relies on complex molecular assemblages with an iridium center, and iridium is quite rare as far as elements go. The paper is paywalled but the linked supplemental information shows the structures (pdf), Fig 8 is probably the most informative:
Practically, separating the hydrogen production from water step from the carbon dioxide reduction step is the more plausible route to industrially significant production. Fundamentally I'm pretty sure making what's called 'synthesis gas' (H2 + CO) and feeding that into the well-known Fischer-Tropsch process is the route to long hydrocarbons (i.e. jet fuel) starting with atmospheric CO2 and water, the challenge there is making the CO from the CO2 efficiently.
Alternatively, hydrogen and CO2 can be directly reacted over a cobalt catalyst, producing smaller hydrocarbons like methane and perhaps up to five-carbon molecules at present:
"Cobalt Catalysts Enable Selective Hydrogenation of CO2 toward Diverse Products: Recent Progress and Perspective (2021)"
Trying to do it all in one go is scientifically interesting, but not very practical. Even plants break it down into the light reactions (splitting water while generating ATP and NADPH, energy-carrying coupler molecules) and dark reactions (capturing the CO2 and incorporating it into a bisphosphorylated sugar prior to feeding it into the reductive reactions that utilize the products of the light reactions).
It's also not too surprising that plants are not super-efficient at this process, they're under broad evolutionary pressure for a wide variety of processes, such as taking up water and nutrients, reproducing, etc. that don't necessarily revolve around fixing as much carbon as fast as they possibly can. It similar to industrial nitrogen fixation in that manner (of course, atmospheric N2 is 80% of the atmosphere while CO2 is only, what is it now, 420 parts per million).
https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs419...
Practically, separating the hydrogen production from water step from the carbon dioxide reduction step is the more plausible route to industrially significant production. Fundamentally I'm pretty sure making what's called 'synthesis gas' (H2 + CO) and feeding that into the well-known Fischer-Tropsch process is the route to long hydrocarbons (i.e. jet fuel) starting with atmospheric CO2 and water, the challenge there is making the CO from the CO2 efficiently.
Alternatively, hydrogen and CO2 can be directly reacted over a cobalt catalyst, producing smaller hydrocarbons like methane and perhaps up to five-carbon molecules at present:
"Cobalt Catalysts Enable Selective Hydrogenation of CO2 toward Diverse Products: Recent Progress and Perspective (2021)"
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c03043
Trying to do it all in one go is scientifically interesting, but not very practical. Even plants break it down into the light reactions (splitting water while generating ATP and NADPH, energy-carrying coupler molecules) and dark reactions (capturing the CO2 and incorporating it into a bisphosphorylated sugar prior to feeding it into the reductive reactions that utilize the products of the light reactions).
It's also not too surprising that plants are not super-efficient at this process, they're under broad evolutionary pressure for a wide variety of processes, such as taking up water and nutrients, reproducing, etc. that don't necessarily revolve around fixing as much carbon as fast as they possibly can. It similar to industrial nitrogen fixation in that manner (of course, atmospheric N2 is 80% of the atmosphere while CO2 is only, what is it now, 420 parts per million).