In a new twist for waste-to-fuel technology, a research team, led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory in collaboration with Northern Illinois University, has discovered a new electrocatalyst that converts carbon dioxide (CO2) and water into ethanol with very high energy efficiency, high selectivity for the desired final product and low cost. The report on the discovery, first made in an NIU laboratory and studied in detail at Argonne.
The method, published in Nature Energy, uses a copper-based catalyst to transform carbon dioxide into ethanol, which is used in almost all U.S. gasoline. “The process resulting from our catalyst would contribute to the circular carbon economy, which entails the reuse of carbon dioxide,” study coauthor and Argonne senior chemist Di-Jia Liu explained. The tech involves a new combination of copper and carbon arranged into nano spikes on a silicon surface. The nanotechnology allows the reactions to be very precise, with very few contaminants.
Catalysts speed up chemical reactions and form the backbone of many industrial processes. For example, they are essential in transforming heavy oil into gasoline or jet fuel. Today, catalysts are involved in over 80% of all manufactured products.
Ethanol is a particularly desirable commodity because it is an ingredient in nearly all US gasoline and is widely used as an intermediate product in the chemical, pharmaceutical, and cosmetics industries. This process has several advantages when compared to other methods of converting CO2 into fuel. The reaction uses common materials like copper and carbon, and it converts the CO2 into ethanol, which is already widely used as a fuel. This also means that this conversion process could be used as temporary energy storage during a lull in renewable energy generation, smoothing out fluctuations in a renewable energy grid.
