The discovery of this technique, which uses a metal catalyst and releases, rather than requires, energy has received a provisional patent from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

"The world currently runs on a carbon fuel economy," explains Christian Wallen, an author of the paper and a former postdoctoral researcher in the lab of UW–Madison chemist John Berry. "It's not a great economy because we burn hydrocarbons, which release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We don't have a way to close the loop for a true carbon cycle, where we could transform carbon dioxide back into a useful fuel."

To move toward the United Nations' goal for the world to become carbon-neutral by 2050, scientists must consider environmentally responsible ways to create energy from elements other than carbon, and the UW–Madison team is proposing a nitrogen energy economy based on interconversions of nitrogen and ammonia.